Sociometric Reality Mining (REDUX 3/30/08)

 

 

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

 

Why Cognitive Activism (REDUX 1/25/08)

It is clearly evident that some ‘ways of knowing’ actively abhor the biosphere, and all forms or assemblies of organism in general. Perhaps more surprising is that a vast portion of the ways of knowing we commonly credential actively abhor human beings, and hate or attack all human children — merely by the nature of their character and function in the imaginal and real worlds. Why would we select or empower such modes, when an infinite garden of choices are immediately at hand?

Quoth Bro. Makheru;

As far as these Power Structure Apocalyptic’s are concerned, they have this world on a collision course with barbarism and ecological disaster. Whatever their underpinnings are, they have to be neutralized right now.

The Cognitive Activist response;

We will gain no advantage from any activism that creates dogmas and bureaucracies of itself — and must instead assemble new ways of learning and knowing together. Ways which by their changing and playful nature empower us to lift each other into a place of direct experiential access to new experiences and expression of mutual uplift, exploration, and the celebration of the real potentials of our anciently conserved and miraculously elaborated organismal sentience.

We are cognitive animals, in a hypercognitive environment. Our human activisms will fail, unless they can address the sources of our ancient confusions and failures to discover the clearly present ways and means of mutual prosperity inherent in the problems our broken access magnifies into our experience and history.

Perhaps we might thus agree that we desire an activism so general, that it’s different from anything we’ve ever considered or been exposed to. Possibly even something that doesn’t have or require a name. A game of activism so like what we are and become that rather than fashioning us into the likeness of some model it proposes — it empowers us to choose and celebrate together that which we actually are and may become.

o:O:o

All of human activism has arisen primarily in opposition to broken ways of knowing — employed and empowered by people who agree to believe ideas. But these ideas are ‘cached tokens’ of the experience of distant others. If circumstance is even moderately different according to the moment and the place — this ‘belief’ is too often far more logically false than what literalists might refer to as ‘the false position of faith’.

We’re about to assemble a form of activism with the potential to overwhelm the source of human atrocity — because rather than wasting time in opposing anything — it empowers us to become more than models of some idea. I am also certain we will experience this together, learning in ways beyond the possibilities of our wildest and most hopeful imaginings. When we have unity, access to our birthrights, and the protection of our unique human, personal and cultural diversity we accrue the power to openly oppose atrocity without reference to or memory of combat. We can now explore and become something together that there is no modern model even vaguely alike with — an experience of unity so liberating that its momentum gains speed and effect at unopposable velocities.

Most of our confusion and suffering at the hands of our foibles is the result of an accident. It’s the kind of an accident we’ve never heard a decent story about — and hearing a few radically altars our potential to notice and interact together with novel domains of co-operative play. Since no one had any way to speak of this accident, or the time before it, the best thing we have are badly mistranslated analogs. When we get to play with toys of knowing that are more like what we are and represent, the way our minds arrange and experience knowledge changes dramatically.

My personal sense is this comprises an entirely unexplored universe of human potential, primarily in the domain of an incredible new way of learning — and of human unity in mutual exploration — that will lead us to terrains of knowledge so vast an unexpected that they could entirely re-write most of what we consider to be fact within the next 5 years. Science, religion, and philosophies — are about to face an insurmountable opponent to their primacy and credentialing-power: pure organismal sentience, in liberated coemergence.

And this is what ‘Life’ is actually about. All of organismal reality is ‘attempting to recapitulate something’ in the same way our own genesis and experience as an embryo was recapitulating all of the terrestrial genesis of life. Something is being assembled by and with(in) physical organismal expression and activity...that is not physical at all in the way we would match with this idea. It is hyperconnective, self-elaborative, and it plays a unityGame that binds all participants ever more closely into something we have no metaphor of: Our world is a distributed organism...

[a multiply atemporal psybiocognitive hyperstructure]

And all of this has a lot to do with how we know, what we know, and what we can do with and about these gardens...in a radically new way: a way that makes new ways, instead of trying to preserve itself and children of itself at all costs.

o:O:o

This is why I support local, nuclear centres of activity free of the thanaturgic taint. It is also why any and everything short of that achievable objective, I discount as idle conversation, or worse still, a doctrinal recapitulation of the thanaturgic ethos that I detest. Those death-loving parasites are contagious and their modus operandi is addictive, repetitive and plainly discernable in operation...,

Something Else Ordered Yet Non-Repeating...,

ibn Khaldun |  Mystical ⁴⁶⁹ exertion, retirement, ⁴⁷⁰ and dhikr exercises ⁴⁷¹ are as a rule followed by the removal of the veil (kashf) of sensual perception. The Sufi beholds divine worlds which a person subject to the senses cannot perceive at all. The spirit belongs to those worlds. The reason for the removal of (the veil) is the following. When the spirit turns from external sense perception to inner (perception), the senses weaken, and the spirit grows strong. It gains predominance and a new growth. The dhikr exercise helps to bring that about. It is like food to make the spirit grow. The spirit continues to grow and to increase. It had been knowledge. Now, it becomes vision. The veil of sensual perception is removed, and the soul realizes its essential existence. This is identical with perception. (The spirit) now is ready for the holy gifts, for the sciences of the divine presence, and for the outpourings of the Deity. Its essence realizes its own true character and draws close to the highest sphere, the sphere of the angels. The removal of (the veil) often happens to people who exert themselves (in mystical exercise). They perceive the realities of existence as no one else (does).

They also perceive many (future) happenings in advance. With the help of their minds and psychic powers they are active among the lower existentia, which thus become obedient to their will. The great Sufis do not think much of the removal (of the veil) and of activity (among the low exis­tentia). They give no information about the reality of any­thing they have not been ordered to discuss. They consider it a tribulation, when things of that sort happen to them, and try to escape them whenever they afflict them.⁴⁷²

The men around Muhammad practiced that kind of (mystical) exertion. They had a very abundant share in the acts of divine grace, but they did not bother with them. (The description of) the virtues of Abu Bakr, Umar, ⁴⁷³ and Ali contain much (information) to this effect. They were followed in this respect by the Sufis who are mentioned in the Risalah of al-Qushayri, ⁴⁷⁴ and their later successors.

Recent mystics, then, have turned their attention to the removal of the veil and the discussion of perceptions beyond (sensual perception). Their ways of mystical exercise in this respect differ. They have taught different methods of mortifying the powers of sensual perception and nourishing the reasoning spirit with dhikr exercises, so that the soul might fully grow and attain its own essential perception. When this happens, they believe that the whole of existence is encompassed by the perceptions of the soul, that the essences of existence are revealed to them, and that they perceive the reality of all the essences from the (divine) throne to light rain. ⁴⁷⁵ This was said by al-Ghazzali in the Kitab al-Ihya', after he had mentioned the forms of mystical exercise.

The ⁴⁷⁶ (Sufis) do not consider removal (of the veil) sound, unless it originates in straightforwardness.⁴⁷⁷ People who do not eat and who retire (from the world), such as sorcerers, Christians, and other ascetics, may obtain removal (of the veil) without the existence of straightforwardness. However, we mean only that removal (of the veil) which originates in straightforwardness. It may be compared with (the reflections of) a mirror. If it is convex or concave, the object reflected by it appears in a distorted form different from the actual form of the object, but if the mirror is flat, the object appears in its correct form. As far as the "states" impressed upon the soul are concerned, straightforwardness means to the soul what flatness means in a mirror.

The recent (Sufis) who have occupied themselves with this kind of removal (of the veil) talk about the real character of the higher and lower existentia and about the real character of the (divine) kingdom, the spirit, the (divine) throne, the (divine) seat, and similar things. Those who did not share their approach were not able to understand their mystical and ecstatic experiences in this respect. The muftis partly disapprove of these Sufis and partly accept them. Arguments and proofs are of no use in deciding whether the Sufi approach should be rejected or accepted, since it belongs to intuitive ⁴⁷⁸ experience.

 Some ⁴⁷⁹ details in explanation:

Hadith scholars and jurists who discuss the articles of faith often mention that God is separate from His creatures. The speculative theologians say that He is neither separate nor connected. The philosophers say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. The recent Sufis say that He is one with the creatures, in the sense that He is incarnate in them, or in the sense that He is identical with them and there exists nothing but Himself either (in the) whole or (in) any part (of it).

Let us explain in detail these dogmatic opinions and the real meaning of each of them, so that their significance will be clarified. We say:

Separateness has two meanings. It may mean "separateness in space and direction." ^479a The opposite, then, would be connectedness. In this sense, the statement of (separation) ⁴⁸⁰ implies (that God is in some) place, either directly - which would be direct anthropomorphism (tajsim) or in directly - which would be indirect anthropomorphism (tashbih) ⁴⁸¹ in the way in which one speaks about (God's having) direction. It has been reported that an early Muslim scholar similarly professed the separateness of God, but a different interpretation is possible.

The speculative theologians, therefore, did not acknowledge this (kind of) separateness. They said: It cannot be said that the Creator is separate from His creatures, and it cannot be said that He is connected with them, because such a statement can be made only about things in space. The statement that a particular thing ⁴⁸² can be described as devoid of one concept and at the same time of the opposite of that concept depends upon whether the description is sound in the first place (or not). If it is impossible, (the statement is) not (correct). It is, in fact, permissible to describe (a certain thing) as devoid of one concept and at the same time of the opposite of that concept. Thus, a solid substance may be described as not wise and not ignorant, not powerful and not weak, not causing harm [?] and not being harmed. ⁴⁸³ Now, the correctness of describing God as separate in the way mentioned is predicated upon the possibility of ascribing direction to Him in the proper meaning of the word, but this cannot be done with the Creator, who is free from (such a description).

This was mentioned by Ibn at-Tilimsani ⁴⁸⁴ in his commentary on the Luma' of the Imam al-Haramayn. He said: The Creator can neither be said to be separate from the world, nor to be connected with it. He is not in it and not outside it. That is what is meant by the philosophers when they say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. They base themselves (on the assumption) that there exist substances (atoms) that exist not in space. The speculative theologians did not acknowledge their (existence), because they would have to be considered equal to the Creator in the most specific qualities. That is fully dealt with in the science of speculative theology.

The other meaning of separateness is "being distinct and different." The Creator is called separate from His creatures in His essence, identity, existence, and attributes. The opposite is being one, mingled, and merged (with something else).

(God's) separateness in this sense is assumed in the dogmas of all orthodox people, such as the great mass of early Muslims, the religious scholars, the speculative theologians, and the ancient Sufis, such as the men mentioned in (al­Qushayri's) Risalah, and those who follow them.

A number of recent Sufis who consider intuitive ⁴⁸⁵ perceptions to be scientific and logical, hold the opinion that the Creator is one with His creatures in His identity, His existence, and His attributes. They often assume that this was the opinion of the philosophers before Aristotle, such as Plato and Socrates.

That is what the speculative theologians mean when they speak about the (oneness of God with His creatures) in theology and try to refute it. They do not ⁴⁸⁶ mean that there could be a question of two essences, one of which must be negated or comprised (in the other) as a part (in the whole). That would be clear distinctness, and they do not maintain that to be the case.

The oneness (assumed by the Sufis) is identical with the incarnation the Christians claim for the Messiah. It is even stranger, in that it is the incarnation of something primeval in something created and the oneness of the former with the latter.

 

Za'irajah

A branch of the science of letter magic, (practiced) among the (authorities on letter magic), is (the technique of) finding out answers from questions by means of connections existing between the letters of the expressions (used in the question). They imagine that these (connections) can form the basis for knowing the future happenings they want to know. Here we have something like puzzles and trick problems.⁸³⁵ There are many discussions of the subject by them. The most comprehensive and most remarkable discussion of it is as-Sabti's Za'irajah of the World. It has been mentioned before. Here, we shall explain what has been said about how to operate it. We shall quote the poem that, it is thought, as-Sabti wrote on the subject.⁸³⁶ Then, we shall give a description of the Za'irajah with its circle and the table written on the verso.^836a Finally, we shall reveal the truth about it. It is nothing supernatural; (the indications derived from it) result from an agreement in the wording of question and answer. It is (just) one interesting way among others, and a curious one, for finding out the answer from the question with the help of the technique called the technique of "breaking down."

From the Science of Letter Magic THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun Very few people share the (self-scrutiny) of the Sufis, for negligence in this respect is almost universal. Pious people who do not get that far perform, at best, acts of obedience 464 freed from the juridical study of how to be satisfactory 465 and conforming (in the execution of the acts of divine worship). The (Sufis), however, investigate the results of (acts of obedience) with the help of mystical and ecstatic experience, in order to learn whether they are free from deficiency or not. Thus, it is evident that the Sufis' path in its entirety depends upon self-scrutiny with regard to what they do or do not do, and upon discussion of the various kinds of mystical and ecstatic experience that result from their exertions. This, then, crystallizes for the Sufi novice in a "station." From that station, he can progress to another, higher one. From the Science of Sufism THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun

Elven Queen Plumbing The Abyssal Reaches Got Me Wanting To Live Forever...,

Quantamagazine |  Furey has gone further. In her most recent published paper, which appeared in May in The European Physical Journal C, she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model symmetry group, SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1), for a single generation of particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units — essentially, because whole numbers are.

However, in that model’s way of arranging particles, it’s unclear how to naturally extend the model to cover the full three particle generations that exist in nature. But in another new paper that’s now circulating among experts and under review by Physical Letters B, Furey uses C⊗O to construct the Standard Model’s two unbroken symmetries, SU(3) and U(1). (In nature, SU(2) × U(1) is broken down into U(1) by the Higgs mechanism, a process that imbues particles with mass.) In this case, the symmetries act on all three particle generations and also allow for the existence of particles called sterile neutrinos — candidates for dark matter that physicists are actively searching for now. “The three-generation model only has SU(3) × U(1), so it’s more rudimentary,” Furey told me, pen poised at a whiteboard. “The question is, is there an obvious way to go from the one-generation picture to the three-generation picture? I think there is.”

This is the main question she’s after now. The mathematical physicists Michel Dubois-Violette, Ivan Todorov and Svetla Drenska are also trying to model the three particle generations using a structure that incorporates octonions called the exceptional Jordan algebra. After years of working solo, Furey is beginning to collaborate with researchers who take different approaches, but she prefers to stick with the product of the four division algebras, R⊗C⊗H⊗O, acting on itself. It’s complicated enough and provides flexibility in the many ways it can be chopped up. Furey’s goal is to find the model that, in hindsight, feels inevitable and that includes mass, the Higgs mechanism, gravity and space-time.

Already, there’s a sense of space-time in the math. She finds that all multiplicative chains of elements of R⊗C⊗H⊗O can be generated by 10 matrices called “generators.” Nine of the generators act like spatial dimensions, and the 10th, which has the opposite sign, behaves like time. String theory also predicts 10 space-time dimensions — and the octonions are involved there as well. Whether or how Furey’s work connects to string theory remains to be puzzled out.

So does her future. She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion. “Accordions are the octonions of the music world,” she said — “tragically misunderstood.” She added, “Even if I pursued that, I would always be working on this project.”

Civilization is the Monetization of Knowledge, Skill, and Ability

paulcraigroberts |  A white male professor of philosophy has discovered that in order to have an academic career in these days he must find “white privilege” everywhere. Professor John Caputo, according to this report, https://downtrend.com/robertgehl/professor-calls-reason-itself-a-white-male-construct, has found white male privilege in reason itself.

Reason, says Professor Caputo, “is a white male Euro-Christian construction.” Since reason is white, reason is not neutral. It implies that what is not white is not rational. “So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued.”

Professor Caputo ties into University of California professor Sara Giordano who defines science as a “colonial and racialized form of power” that “must be replaced with an anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021 

I can’t say that this would be all bad. This way we wouldn’t have nuclear weapons and the frustrating digital age. But before I vote for it, I want to know what feminist science is. I have a disturbing feeling that it brings with it the genocide of the white heterosexual male. After all, if white heterosexual males are responsible for all the evil and ills of the world, how can we tolerate their existence? 

The University of Oregon’s Jewish president was prevented by students from giving an university address this month about free speech. Free speech, declared the student protesters, perpetuates “fascism and white supremacy.” http://ijr.com/the-declaration/2017/10/1004087-protesters-block-speech-college-president-supporting-free-speech/?utm_campaign=Conservative%20Daily&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=57696223&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_lEYnedyjzkJdQg3N0OOoF5PhhKtm5yUGqIhbxb5fs878ae8aYjTk2wdWuWYc-7oq7BaJJbOQ6kJI-21n_qpeRECaKqA&_hsmi=57696223 

Journalists seem to agree with the Oregon students. The European Federation of Journalists is leading a “Media against Hate” campaign against hate speech and stereotyping of illegal immigrants. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11214/europe-journalists-free-speech In other words, any European who protests his/her country being overrun by foreign invaders must be shut up. The scenario in The Camp of the Saints is now happening before our eyes. 

A British university has blocked a professor’s study of those who regret their transgender operation because it is politically incorrect and could damage the university’s reputation. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4916026/University-bars-non-PC-study-transgender-operations.html The study, the university said, would be “transphobic.”

Uppity Dr. Baraka REDUX Originally Posted 4/12/08

The "condescending, elitist, UPPITY" Dr. Baraka had the audacity to touch and diagnose the angry and cancerous boil accumulating on the atrophying carcass of the American economy;

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I wrote about this a couple years ago at Vision Circle. Baraka has spoken to and will now be compelled to fully engage around one of the most challenging bulwarks of reality evasion in America. Joe Bageant understood it and spoke to it very, very well.

I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:

Good luck and godspeed. If he can successfully engage these folks, alay their anger and mistrust, he has a better than even chance of becoming president and potentially even functioning as a catalyst for constructive change. This is easily the most interesting moment thus far in the democrat primary.

the science behind the one-inch punch

popularmechanics |  Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch. From a single inch away, Lee was able to muster an explosive blow that could knock opponents clean off the ground. Lee mastered it, fans worldwide adored it, and Kill Bill "borrowed" it. But if you’re like us, you want to know how it works.

While the biomechanics behind the powerful blow certainly aren’t trivial, the punch owes far more to brain structure than to raw strength.

Biomechanical Breakdown
To understand why the one-inch punch is more about mind than muscle, you first have to understand how Bruce Lee delivers the blow. Although Lee’s fist travels a tiny distance in mere milliseconds, the punch is an intricate full-body movement. According to Jessica Rose, a Stanford University biomechanical researcher, Lee’s lightning-quick jab actually starts with his legs.

"When watching the one-inch punch, you can see that his leading and trailing legs straighten with a rapid, explosive knee extension," Rose says. The sudden jerk of his legs increases the twisting speed of Lee’s hips—which, in turn, lurches the shoulder of his thrusting arm forward.

As Lee’s shoulder bolts ahead, his arm gets to work. The swift and simultaneous extension of his elbow drives his fist forward. For a final flourish, Rose says, "flicking his wrist just prior to impact may further increase the fist velocity." Once the punch lands on target, Lee pulls back almost immediately. Rose explains that this shortens the impact time of his blow, which compresses the force and makes it all the more powerful. 

First Principle - Always Bet on Black - Redux

No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.

--Booker T. Washington

Having been invited to discuss solutions, I aim to summarize some of the experiences that have given rise to what I call an "open source business model". I should be able to accomplish this in three installments. (originally posted 12/20/07 - reposted 10/13/10 - one'mo gin today)
1. The power of cultural production.

2. The power of open source culture.

3. The power of creative collaboration.

So a few years ago, I'm experimenting with Content Management Systems (CMS) (the database driven backend to interactive websites) in the context of an image sharing technology. I read an article in the Kansas City Star about a comics creator in Kansas City Kansas who was experimenting with CD-Romics, or comics on compact disc. So I call this brother Anthony Jappa

Comics are extremely visual, the cover art is a major selling draw, and all-in-all comics would make perfect grist for the image sharing mill. Furthermore, I used to have a serious love jones for comic books. Long story short, though our initial collaboration did not yield a successful business model we've been friends and collaborators ever since. (digitizing covers for collectors proved excessively labor intensive, we couldn't get folks to do the work themselves, and eBay was already in full effect) And our continuing collaboration has produced a proven and successful methodology for infecting young minds with the urge to create, collaborate, and commercialize. I keep the original development site we constructed as a memento of our original scope and objectives - because where we've gone is so much beyond what this effort set out to achieve.

Back to the matter at hand. Brother Jappa is a true master in the field of creative cultural production. Largely self-taught, he has reached the stage in his career where he writes books and creates animated shorts. He earns his living doing what he loves to do. He is also one of the greatest natural teachers I have ever had the privilege of meeting. He can teach you not only the discipline, but can teach you everything there is to know about comics creation as a cultural production business, as well. It's in the latter domain that he has taught me a helluva lot about its history, its power, and changes in the nature of the thing that have resulted from monopolistic control of comics creation, publication, and distribution. The latter is the business reality against which he's had to contend for over a dozen years.

His innovative flirtation with CD-Romics was a preliminary effort to use technology to get around some of those distribution control barriers. When I met him, I was vaguely aware that the comics game had changed substantially since I was a kid, but I had no idea concerning the specific nature of the changes that had taken place. See, I was a hardcore comic book collector when I was boy. Back in the day, a dollar would get you 4 comics and an afternoon of mind expanding escape. Moreover, you could buy comics in any convenience store, many grocery stores, almost all pharmacies, they were everywhere newstands were to be found. Comics were not only the cheapest and best entertainment available to me - they became the core of my very first business, as well. By the age of 12, I had become a collector/dealer of comics. By the time I was 20, my collection was extensive enough that I was able to pay for my first two years of college tuition and expenses through the sale of much of that collection.

As anybody who has shared this addiction knows, comics are no longer ubiquitous and a dollar won't come anywhere near buying you even a single comic book. Jappa explained to me how the Marvel/DC/Diamond publication distribution monopolies had fundamentally altered the landscape of comic book availability and further, how the dominant business practices in the industry have made it exceedingly difficult for independant comics creators to break-in in any meaningful way into this field of cultural production and entertainment. For his business to succeed - and there's no question that his work is worldclass - Jappa's had to hustle and grind like a madman. Getting breaks here and there with dealers, working the convention circuit, and doing everything he can to figure out alternative pathways by which he can achieve mass distribution and proliferation of his work product.

Because my active interest in comics had fallen off after I sold the bulk of my collection, it had been years since I had paid comics any heed at all. However, I had noticed that comics were by no means as available as they once had been. Everything that Jappa taught me about the comic publication and distribution industry was a smaller scale instantiation of what Norman Kelley had written a few years earlier about the music industry.

Today, a great deal of public attention is misdirected toward issues of content in popular cultural production. Content is merely a symptom, it is not the root cause of the present malaise in popular cultural production. Control of production and distribution is the cause of the current malaise. There are worlds upon worlds of original, wholesome, uplifting, enlightening, and entertaining cultural production that never get published or put into widespread distribution. Folks lose their minds debating high/low distinctions of culture and anybody with an opinion is qualified to enter the fray. However, real practitioners and specialists in the business know that most of the actual barriers to the market reduce to business and interpersonal nuts and bolts. These include issues like;

• how artists are recruited,
• how contracts are structured for maximums profits for record firms,
• how much firms spend on the production of an artist's work,
• whether artists make their living solely by selling units or doing performances (a situation similar to that of blues musicians),
• how musicians lose the copyright to their music,
• the lack of royalty payments, and
• the Big Six publication and distribution monopoly

On a smaller scale, the comics industry is identical.

Very likely, there never will be a substitute for the paper comic that is the equivalent of the CD-ROM substitute for vinyl record albums, and the rapid and destabilizing emergence of mp3's as a substitute for CD-ROMS. But you never know. Brother Jappa has twelve years invested in the game and he's still hustling, grinding, and inovating in order to make that breakthrough. I'm going to support him with technology any and every way I know how to do.

Back to the matter at hand, the power of cultural production - one of the other fundamentals I learned from Jappa is the universality of the basic storyboard as the basis for all complex narrative storytelling. If you look into the basement of any movie that has ever been made, what you'll find that comics is the creative and preproduction grist for that creative mill. i.e., storyboards that lay out the visual as well as narrative flow that will be converted to the screen. Same goes for complex games and video games. The comics creation discipline is a fundamental prerequisite to any complex narrative cultural production that takes place in our society. It is a lynchpin of complex cultural production.

Readers of the assault know full well the power of images to manipulate and control the subliminal consciousness. As a singular historian and master of this game, Jappa has taught me a great deal about the intent and use of images across the history of comics - on both conscious and subconscious levels - to convey specific messages to the audience these comics are created to address.

Comics creation is an immensely powerful and fundamental narrative discipline that is imperative for us to master and control. There are no barriers to entry on the creation side, and we're Working overtime to figure out methods for short-circuiting and overcoming the market barriers posed by the dominant distribution monopoly. Technology is key to overcoming those barriers. The last really powerful aspect of this game is that both boys and girls enjoy and gravitate toward various aspects of the creative work involved with it. Children love to create, they love to do cultural production work, and they love to learn all the ins-and-outs of the technique involved with doing it well. It's a carrot with which draw children into an oasis of creation, collaboration, disciplined development of technique and invite him to meet and discuss ways in which we might collaborate.and last but not least the potential commercial rewards of harnessing their imaginations and plying their creative workproducts in the marketplace.

Matter of fact, it's the initial sugarcoating I've found effective for drawing children into routine use and increasing familiarity with open source technologies. We make a concerted effort to use only open source software in our digital production efforts. I'll explain this more fully in the next installment. It's important because not only do we want our kids to be creative producers and ply the workproduct of their imaginations in the market, we also want them to be creative technologists capable of directly controlling and modifying the tools used to do the fun stuff.

Work with open source tools and technologies conduces to exposure to the wide world of open source culture, as well - and that's a culture that is fundamentally all about surmounting control and distribution barriers. Our solutions will emerge from those small, dedicated crews that learn how to surmount current control and distribution barriers and collaborate with likeminded others to proliferate that knowhow far and wide...,

GOP position on the deficit is not about the money

Video - Uncle Jay presents the not funny truth about our useless Congress

TPM | If congress does nothing, the deficit will disappear. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget forecast, which looked surprisingly like the previous version of its long-term budget forecast.

It showed, as one might expect, that if the Bush tax-cuts remain in effect and Medicare and Medicaid spending isn't constrained in some way, the country will topple into a genuine fiscal crisis -- not the fake one the Congress is pretending the country's in right now.

Republicans, of course, seized on that particular projection, and claimed (a bit ridiculously) that it proved the government must adopt their precise policy views: major spending cuts, particularly to entitlement programs.

While all this -- from the findings to the politicization of them -- is perfectly expected, the forecast also presents another opportunity to remind people that the medium-term budget outlook is perfectly fine if Congress adheres to the law as it's currently written. That means no repealing the health care law, for one, but more significantly it means allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and (unfathomably) allowing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors to fall to the levels prescribed by the formula Congress wrote almost 15 years ago. In other words, no more "doc fixes."

WaPo | Reporting on the same CBO report, you'd think it was an entirely different document. The national debt will exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy by 2021 — and balloon to nearly 200 percent of GDP within 25 years — without dramatic cuts to federal health and retirement programs or steep tax increases, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

The dire outlook from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office comes as the White House and congressional leaders are locked in negotiations aimed at cutting spending and stabilizing future borrowing. The CBO report highlights the enormity of that task and the immense difficulty of paying off the debt, given an aging population and soaring health-care costs.

WaPo Blog | The Congressional Budget Office just released the latest edition of its long-term budget outlook (pdf), and it shows the same thing as always: If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO calls the “extended baseline scenario” — the national debt will be totally manageable. If Congress passes laws extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the cost, repealing the Affordable Care Act and its cost controls and protecting doctors from Medicare cuts without making up the savings elsewhere — the “alternative fiscal scenario” — the national debt will be totally out of control:This is a good time to remind everyone that when you hear politicians telling you that their plan cuts taxes or balances the budget, you always need to ask what baseline they’re using. Almost all the plans on the table, for instance, do less to balance the budget than simply doing nothing. But since they use a version of the “alternative fiscal scenario” as their baseline, they don’t have to admit that before they make the deficit somewhat better, they’re first planning to make it much, much worse. Fist tap Rembom.

operating limits

Video - Prism Defense Ship-Helicopter Operating Limits Fist tap Arnach.

the man-child born of a virgin

 

Video - John Marco Allegro in an interview with Van Kooten & De Bie. 

 

TSMATC | Describing the growth of the mushroom ( boletos), Pliny says: “the earth produces first a ‘womb’ (vulva) . . . and afterwards (the mushroom) itself inside the womb, like a yolk inside the egg; and the baby mushroom is just as fond of eating its coat as is the chicken. The coat cracks when (the mushroom) first forms; presently, as it gets bigger, the coat is absorbed into the body of the footstalk (pediculi) . . . at first it is flimsier than froth, then it grows substantial like parchment, and then the mushroom. • is born. 1 More prosaically, perhaps, the process is thus described by a modern mycologist: “In the genus Amanita a membrane surrounds the young fungus. In addition to this wrapper or volva there is another membrane, stretching from the margin of the cap and joined to the stem, as in the mushroom. Thus it is as if the “button stage” were surrounded by an outer skin. As the fungus develops this is torn apart. If its texture is sufficiently tenacious to hold it together, it is left as a cup at the base of the stem . . . With growth the membrane covering the gills tears and is left as a ring on the stem.” Of the Amanita phalloides, the writer adds: “Before the volva breaks the fungus looks somewhat like a pigeon’s egg half-buried, or like a small phallus ‘egg’. It is common in glades in woods and adjoining pastures after the first summer rains, and continues through early autumn.”2 It was the fertilization of the “womb” that most puzzled the ancients, and remained a mystery until the end of the last century. To Pliny the fungus had to be reckoned as one of the “greatest of the marvels of nature”, since it “belonged to a class of things that spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed”.3 It was surely “among the most wonderful of all things” in that it could “spring up and live without a root”.4 Until the invention of the microscope the function of the spore, produced by each fungus in its millions, could not be appreciated. The mushroom has, indeed, no seed in the accepted sense, germinating and giving out a root and later a stem apex with or without seed leaves. The walls of each minute spore extrude to form thread-like tubes which branch further until all mass together to form the spongy flesh of the fungus. The result is neither animal nor vegetable, and the mystery of its proper classification persisted until relatively modern times. Thus a sixteenth-century naturalist wrote: “They are a sort of intermediate existence between plants and inanimate nature. In this respect fungi resemble zoophytes, which are intermediate between plants and animals.”5 One explanation for the creation of the mushroom without apparent seed was that the “womb” had been fertilized by thunder, since it was commonly observed that the fungi appeared after thunderstorms. Thus one name given them was Ceraunion, from the Greek keraunios, “thunderbolt”. Another was the Greek hudnon, probably derived from Sumerian *UD_NUN, “storm—seeded”.6 It was thus uniquely-begotten. The normal process of fructification had been by-passed. The seed had not fallen from some previous plant, to be nurtured by the earth until in turn it produced a root and stalk. The god had “spoken” and his creative “word” had been carried to earth by the storm-wind, angelic messenger of heaven, and been implanted directly into the volva. The baby that resulted from this divine union was thus the “Son of God”, more truly representative of its heavenly father than any other form of plant or animal life. Here, in the tiny mushroom, was God manifest, the “Jesus” born of the Virgin “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation • . in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . .“ (Col I:15ff.). The phallic form of the mushroom matched precisely that of his father, whom the Sumerians called ISKUR, “Mighty Penis”, the Semites Adad, or Hadad, “Big—father”, the Greeks Patër-Zeus, and the Romans Jupiter, “Father-god”.7 To see the mushroom was to see the Father, as in Jesus the uncomprehending Philip was urged to look for God: “He who has seen me has seen the Father. . . Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” (John 14:9ff.). Even the detutns recognized him as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), and it was as “the Holy Plant” that the sacred fungus came to be known throughout the ancient world. The slimy juice of the mushroom which, in some phalloidic species, spills over the “glans” and clown the stem, seemed to the ancients like the viscous exudation of the genital organs prior to coitus and the seminal discharge at orgasm. The Hebrew word for “smooth, slimy” derives from a Sumerian phrase meaning “semen running to waste”,8 and figures in a number of biblical allusions to the mushroom.9 It was otherwise known as “spittle”, and Job asks if there is any taste in the “spittle of the mushroom” (as we should now read the name of that plant) (Job 6:6).10 To have “spittle in the mouth” was a euphemism in the Jewish Talmud for “semen in the vagina”, ll and the close relationship between the two fluids resulted in the very widespread belief that spittle had strong curative and prophylactic properties. Thus, as human semen was a cure for scorpion stings, according to Pliny,12 spittle was a repellent to snakes and an antidote to snake venom.13 Jesus is pictured making a clay poultice to lay over the eyes of the man born blind (John 9:6), mixing his spittle with dust, as Pliny reports that saliva used each morning as an eye ointment cured ophthalmia.14 Rain, the semen of the god, was spurted forth from the divine penis at his thunderous orgasm in the heavens, and was borne as “spittle” from the lips of the glans to earth on the storm wind.15 It was a unique concentration of this powerful spermatozoa in the juice of the “Holy Plant” that the Magi believed would give anyone anointed with it amazing power. They could “obtain every wish, banish fevers, and cure all diseases without exception”.16 So the Christian, the “smeared or anointed one”, received "knowledge of all things” by his “anointing from the Holy One” (I John 2:20). Thereafter he had need of no other teacher and remained for evermore endowed with all knowledge (v. 27). Whatever the full ingredients of the Christian unction may have been, they would certainly have included the aromatic gums and spices of the traditional Israelite anointing oil: myrrh, aromatic cane, cinnamon, and cassia, all representing the powerful semen of the god. Under certain enclosed conditions, a mixture of these substances rubbed on the skin could produce the kind of intoxicating belief in self-omniscience referred to in the New Testament. Furthermore, the atmosphere of the oracular chamber would be charged with reek of sacred incense consisting of “sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense . . .“ (Exod 30:34), giving the kind of overpowering hypnotic effect referred to by an early Christian writer when he speaks of “the frenzy of a lying soothsayer” as a “mere intoxication produced by the reeking fumes of sacrifice”.17 That these ingredients formed only part of the sacred incense formula is well known. Josephus says there were thirteen elements,18 and the Talmud names eleven, plus salt, and a secret “herb” which was added to make the smoke rise in a vertical column before spreading outwards at the top.19 With the characteristic shape of the mushroom in mind, we can hazard a fair guess now at this secret ingredient. Knowledge and healing were two aspects of the same life-force. If to be rubbed with the “Holy Plant” was to receive divine knowledge, it was also to be cured of every sickness. James suggests that anyone of the Christian community who was sick should call the elders to anoint him with oil in the name of Jesus (Jas 5:14). The Twelve are sent out among their fellow-men casting out demons and anointing the sick with oil (Mark 6:13). Healing by unction persisted in the Church until the twelfth century,20 and the anointing of the dying, the so-called “extreme unction” has persisted in the Roman Catholic Church to this day.21 The principle behind this practice remains the same: the god’s “seed—of— life”, semen, found in spring or rain water, in the sap or resins of plants and trees, and above all in the slimy mucus of the mushroom imparts life to the ailing or the dead.

your "ism" is not my heredity

Video - Pokemon Black or White Black Nerd Rant.

Scientific American | Nothing about the field of IQ studies is free of political influence. It's naive to believe that any kind of research on a purported measure of individual merit could be politics-free in a self-proclaimed meritocracy with wide inequalities. Binet's original work was meant to determine which children should have access to additional educational resources. IQ scores are used occasionally to sort out "inappropriate" candidates for various jobs, including those whose IQs are too high for a role. IQ as a proxy for merit is used to argue that a group does or does not face discrimination in educational or career opportunities. This is all terribly political.

The question isn't whether there are politics surrounding this issue or where. They're everywhere. The question is where does the politics get in the way of the science? Again, the answers don't favor Pinker's view of a fatwa against genetic explanations of individual differences.

No one is pretending BGI Hong Kong doesn't exist or that it isn't looking for genes associated with variability in IQ scores. No one is issuing fatwas to stop them or even protesting their work. Some people are questioning IQ as a proxy for intelligence, but no one is saying the work shouldn't go forward until a better proxy is found. Similarly, no one is pretending that Paul Thompson isn't doing some fascinating work in brain imaging and variability in brain structure.

What is in dispute is the likelihood that genes will be found that account for any significant fraction of the variability found in human intelligence and whether the current literature on the topic is sufficient to predict that. Here is where disagreement with Thompson comes into play. He has published a number of papers with "genetics" in the title ("Genetic influences on brain structure," "Genetics of brain structure and intelligence," "Genetics of brain fiber architecture and intellectual performance") that involve no genetic testing whatsoever.

Instead, these studies rely on degree of relatedness (usually between identical and fraternal twins) as a measure of shared genes. This sounds reasonable, and to a degree it is. However, unless researchers can measure or control for the way genes unrelated to intelligence interact with the environment, these studies can't tell us how much variation in brain structure is due to shared genes that code for intelligence and shared genes that code for something else, such as illness that limits time in school. Until these studies are designed to look for genetic influences in addition to environmental influences, these studies are useless for their intended purpose. Fist tap Arnach.

the location of consciousness

OCBBM | The final fallacy which I wish to discuss is both important and interesting, and I have left it for the last because I think it deals the coup de grace to the everyman theory of consciousness. Where does consciousness take place?

Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my head. This is because when we introspect, we seem to look inward on an inner space somewhere behind our eyes. But what on earth do we mean by ‘look’? We even close our eyes sometimes to introspect even more clearly. Upon what? Its spatial character seems unquestionable. Moreover we seem to move or at least ‘look’ in different directions. And if we press ourselves too strongly to further characterize this space (apart from its imagined contents), we feel a vague irritation, as if there were something that did not want to be known, some quality which to question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a friendly place.

We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads. We also assume it is there in others’. In talking with a friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from.

And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all! There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant.

Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people’s heads, knowing perfectly well that they don’t exist anatomically; and the location of these ‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary. The Aristotelian writings, 23 for example, located consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above the heart, believing the brain to be a mere cooling organ since it was insensitive to touch or injury. And some readers will not have found this discussion valid since they locate their thinking selves somewhere in the upper chest. For most of us, however, the habit of locating consciousness in the head is so ingrained that it is difficult to think otherwise. But, actually, you could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. Not really just as well. For there are very good reasons why it is better to imagine your mind-space inside of you, reasons to do with volition and internal sensations, with the relationship of your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as we go on.

That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward looking down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide commonly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an arbitrary matter.

Let us not make a mistake. When I am conscious, I am always and definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head. But so am I when riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not go on inside my head. The cases are different of course, since bicycle riding has a definite geographical location, while consciousness does not. In reality, consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has.

23. It is so obvious that the writing ascribed to Aristotle were not written by the same hand that I prefer this designation.

consciousness not necessary for reason

OCBBM | The long tradition of man as the rational animal, the tradition that enthroned him as Homo sapiens, rests in all its pontifical generality on the gracile assumption that consciousness is the seat of reason. Any discussion of such an assumption is embarrassed by the vagueness of the term reason itself. This vagueness is the legacy we have from an older ‘faculty’ psychology that spoke of a ‘faculty’ of reason, which was of course situated ‘in’ consciousness. And this forced deposition of reason and consciousness was further confused with ideas of truth, of how we ought to reason, or logic - all quite different things. And hence logic was supposed to be the structure of conscious reason confounding generations of poor scholars who knew perfectly well that syllogisms were not what was on their side of introspection.

Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or - better - as conduct is to morality. Reasoning refers to a gamut of natural thought processes in the everyday world. Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal - and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth. Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point here is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Consider to begin with the many phenomena we have already established as going on without consciousness which can be called elementary kinds of reasoning. Choosing paths, words, notes, motions, the perceptual corrections in size and color constancies - all are primitive kinds of reasoning that go on without any prod, nudge, or even glance of consciousness.

Even the more standard types of reasoning can occur without consciousness. A boy, having observed on one or more past occasions that a particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, will conclude directly in a new instance that another piece of wood will float on another pond. There is no collecting together of past instances in consciousness, and no necessary conscious process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen directly as floating on the new pond. This is sometimes called reasoning from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generalization. Nothing particularly extraordinary. It is an ability common to all the higher vertebrates. Such reasoning is the structure of the nervous system, not the structure of consciousness.

But more complex reasoning without consciousness is continually going on. Our minds work much faster than consciousness can keep up with. We commonly make genera assertions based on past experience in an automatic way, and only as an afterthought are we sometimes able to retrieve any of the past experiences on which an assertion is based. How often we reach sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them! Because reasoning is not conscious. And consider the kind of reasoning that we do about others’ feelings and character, or in reasoning out the motives of others from their actions. These are clearly the result of automatic inferences by our nervous systems in which consciousness is not only unnecessary, but, as we have seen in the performance of motor skills, would probably hinder the process. [19]

Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of intellectual, thought! Surely there at last we will come to the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such grandeur. The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously. Helmholtz had his happy thoughts which “often enough crept quietly into my thinking without my suspecting their importance . . . in other cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny weather!” 20

And Gauss, referring to an arithmetical theorem which he had unsuccessfully tried to prove for years, wrote how “like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.” 21

And the brilliant mathematician Poincaré was particularly interested in the manner in which he came upon his own discoveries. In a celebrated lecture at the Société de Psychologie in Paris, he described how he set out on a geologic excursion: “The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, the transformation I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry!” 22

It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the materials of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday experience, that this business of sudden flooding insights is most obvious. A close friend of Einstein’s has told me that many of the physicist’s greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while he was shaving that he had to move the blade of the straight razor very carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise. And a well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Köhler, “We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.”

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

19. Such instances were early recognized as not conscious and were called “automatic inference” or “common sense.” Discussions can be found in Sully, Mill, and other nineteenth-century psychologists.

20. As quoted by Robert S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 818.

21. As quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 15.

22. Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical creation,” in his The Foundations of Science, G. Bruce Halsted, trans. (New York: The Science Press, 1913), p. 387.

consciousness not necessary for concepts

OCBBM | A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones together into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus studying concept formation.

Max Muller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the senses.” [7] Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist.

Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them. When Muller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of. a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Muller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.

7. Max Muller, The Science of Though: (London: Longmans Green, 1887), 78-79. Eugenio Rignano in his The Psychology of Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), p. 108f., makes a similar criticism to mine.