Friday, August 20, 2004

Phenomenology, Tracking, Information Theory, etc.
(You'll be glad to know that westerners have recently acquired from an Indonesian village a 50-ft python. 580 lbs or something. the only worthwhile news to be read is generally to be seen at www.forteantimes.com; it's always reassuring to me to be reminded of the tenebrous parameters of even just the physical world, to be reminded that there are 50-ft pythons crawling in the dark, green ancient places of the world).

Sunday, January 11, 2004; ALWAYS being edited. There is a rabbi here [at Aish, '04] who sailed around the world for 8 years or so-by himself. Before that he did crab fishing in the North Sea out of Alaska or Scotland, don't remember. He describes very well the tenebrous nature of the individual by literally embodying it; at midnight *riding* the frigid Fathomless Depths churning beneath you (screw smarmy "existential" metaphors of Abyss; MAELSTROM exists), as the rain pummells your sleep-starved body - from all sides, sliding enormous crab cages off the back of the boat into the sea in the middle of a storm; his buddys foot gets caught in a line that will tow him with it some hundreds of feet underwater (he was freed before it towed him down, btw). I personally imagine runes, Alchemical symbols made of animals or the Aleph Bet flashing to mind as the lightning and thunder meet "the Man", on (the) Sea, on (his) Vessel, "The Artifact"...lightning and thunder, of course, joining when the storm is over the [archetypal] observer, who for a moment "stands" on the most unstable of "ground". The rabbi also visited lots of strange places like Java, Polynesia, etc, and has lots of bizarre connections to make to discussions in Gemara (the Talmud,sort of). I want to go to yeshiva in Yesha (YEhuda and ShAmron; in English, Judea & Sumeria; in "CNN", the "West Bank"), where there is more desert to speak of, and Israeli Bedouin trackers who can teach you to track a grain of sand across the sky. I've been reading Loren Eiseley, can you tell? There's alot of fascinating triangulation in the process of tracking, of following the route of the land to sources of water, the route of pressed soil or overturned leaves, scents in the air to an Elk. I feel like talking about hunting, or maybe letting someone else with the proper voice speak;

HUNTING PHENOMENOLOGY"

Hunting in my experience - and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land - is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something "means" and to be concerned only that it "is". And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships - fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven's distant voice - become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern - which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and smells - takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration." [pp.199-200]

Barry Lopez. "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a
Northern Landscape".

I see some continuity to Information, Intelligence Analysis and tracking. What you perceive to be your prey is part of greater wholes; what you perceive (consider) to even be Perceived/perceivable being the first; if you perceive your prey to be "deer" and yourself to be "man", yet have very narrow conceptions of either, you won't catch anything. Deer’s smell and sense and think and remember; you have a sent and make noise and make mistakes and have habits that animals perceive.

[I digress - would you believe. Recall C.S. Lewis, Plantinga and others on *where* one begins to admit possibilities of miracles, etc. If your very view of perceptions/insights/thoughts (your very view of what ideas are or what “good thinking” is, for ex.), is that they come from minds which are bound by bodies, which are bound by rules of matter, how do you avoid an epistemic circularity; referring back to what you are trying to dis/prove? If you dissallow certain potentialities in your mind, they are filtered out at such an essential level that by your Sophmore year in college, OF COURSE you are a pretentious atheist; that's precisely what The System you came to college to rail against/support wants you to be. OR a "blind faith" dis/believer, or a "facts and faith" "Design Argument" dis/believer, or Dawkins lapdog.]

…"Information" and the means by which it is stored make for ecosystems of a sort (blah blah blah, nothing really new here), were greater rules and contexts apply, without necessarily sharing the same principles, meanings and relationships . (from here on is lots of bits from R. Matis Weinberg in a piece called "Nexus" in the Exodus volume of his "Frameworks" series; the parts that make sense are his, the ones that don't are mine. He is more on emergence, I am more on
the different roles a nested level can have). This is something like the principle of "nesting", wherein one system (or set of "spheres" of worlds, in a cosmological/spiritual sense), is contained in another like a Matriyushka doll (one of those wooden dolls that are inside each other), but not connected or even visible one to/from another in any sort of apparent commonly-bound dimension; it’s also like being at the confluence of several dimensions (remember The Maxx on MTV?). try think it also in the setting of a personage; like, oh, Bertrand Russell (one organic system with its rules) who is the author (authorship is another neural-conceptual system with its socio-cultural-technic rules) of a philosophy (etc) of Ethics (etc) - and by that system of ethics was himself a moral idiot. this isn't a very good example, sorry. anyways, there is a term in Kabbalah that would sort of apply to this process, Hishtalshalut. It means "linkages", circles within circles, etc, it is all over Kabbalistic literature, and specifically from Derech Hashem (a seminal systematic exposition of basic kabbalistic principles available in English, Feldheim), "bound one to another as links of a chain". Levels nesting levels, where something greater than any one level emerges from
all of them, but excedes the descriptive capacity of all of them even. But also each level can be intersecting another anciliar dimension, or have a meaning and significance in another dimension(I think of the SCA; someone can be "King of the Middle Kingdom", have vassals, knights, conduct court, etc, and work as a mail man the rest of the week, or of Kaiser Sosay ("Normal" from the movie "Usual Suspects").

From Saturday, February 28, 2004; still being edited
I see a ramble coming in Memorium to the decease blog, this one regarding the concept of "information", waying and measuring the intellectual aspects of non-Jewish cultures and societies, organization and representation of knowledge, defining between information/s, wisdom/s and knowledge/knowings (based in part in "cult of information" by Roczak), as well as the means to them (the modes of knowing, coming to wisdom [or something that was previously another category, like friendship comes to love, knowledge coming to wisdom; yes I've had my heart broken..]), the different consequences of systemetizing the same materials/ or ever more raw material, the representative material of numbers in an equation (though some theories of mathematics actually presuppose an Ideal realm of numbers, and there is modern Pythagorianism; see "myth of religious neutrality"); like matter is 'basically' energy, but accumulates into different sorts of systems out from the exact same material itself result in a world of different "things" (figures/factors in an equation can give rise to very different results; how different base assumptions that themselves have rules applying to them (something like how gods from pagan cosmologies aren't Divine, because they aren't the base assumptions, they derive from them; greater rules apply to them: they are born, live, die, submit to codes of law, etc,) dualism and binary code, Leibniz, the I Ching/Pa Kua and Binary, etc), how whole
"universes" of difference in a sense be derived from essentially common structures; the differences between Divinely (what fits the category of the Divine varying from cosmology to cosmology), Granted knowledge/inf/wisdom and that of the (seemingly) secular system derived "experimentation/empirically sourced knowledge/inf/wisdom; think on how certain crafts are considered as having been Mediated to individuals such as swordsmithing in Japan (even certain forms of swordplay as having been taught from "On High"), different conceptions of revelation and what happens when it's written down (Midrash/Aggadah on Mattan Torah and Lahavdil ben Kodesh l'Hol Rig Vedas, Sutras, etc). Also matrixes, greater contexts (nesting of contexts into ones that don't abide by the same rules and Rulemaking Divinities/ Ruling Principles that are "The Divine") and Ray Bradbury's "powerplant" essay, Orality and literacy, cognition and visual language, paleography, more later