The Mobius strip untwisted, enter the ideoverse

  Sethren, through the long hours of the night I wrestled, and could see no way forward, and was in despair.  Then this morning, creeping into the town library for a little warmth, I read a review by Peter Godfrey-Smith of a book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel.  What kind of wuss puts Almost into a title of that grandiloquence?  Make up your mind, mate.  But then I read that Thomas Nagel thinks there is still a mind-body problem.  Whereupon I bethought me, fuck that for a lark.  If such atavistic error can still be found in a book with a fifteen word title that the London Review of Books (who refused to publish my ground-breaking 17,000 word closely reasoned disquisition on the evolution of culture on the grounds that it was slightly overburdened with wordage [was a special supplement so out of the question?] saw fit to send out for review to so eminent a distinguished professor of philosophy at the City university of New York as Peter Godfrey Smith (who agreed with me, that the mind-body problem is bollocks) then it is not time to accept defeat.  It is time that loins were girded.  How does one gird, sether?  Frankly, no idea.  Let us get on.

  So, the problem.

  We set out to demonstrate that human culture, what one might call Evoculture to distinguish it from The Ring Cycle and pointillism and all that stuff, is an obligate symbiont with the human organism, and evolves in the human neural substrate.  Brain to you and me.

  If the metaverse, which extends into every ideoverse, is populated by demons, and a demon is a locus of irreducible difference.  As between needle and pin, or cat and dog

  And if a concept is the superimposition (as in red triangle) or sequential coupling (as in if… then…) of two or more demons
  And if we take the demon needle (the locus of irreducible difference with pin, awl and so on), as we did a few weeks ago,  and anatomise it into other demons, its geometry, topology, constituent substance and so on

  Then the alarming conclusion is unavoidable.  A demon is a concept.

  Yet I had asserted that culture can only evolve at the level of the demon, just as life can only evolve at the level of genetic and epigenetic material.  But if every demon is a concept, then I appear to be saying that culture can develop at the level of the concept.  And yet I have also demonstrated, I hope at least to your satisfaction, sether Albert, that a red triangle cannot mutate into a blue tetrahedron except at the level of smallest irreducible differences; at the demon level.  Here we have, if it is the right phrase, a reductio ad absurdum.   It must be resolved.
  Try this for size.

  We are looking at an ideoverse.  It is continuous with the universe, we know, but let us focus in on that bit contained within the envelope of the human organism.  And, taking that as a given, let us zoom in further, just for simplicity, into that bit in the skull, the brain, the cortex, the, for our purposes, infinite space for the accommodation of loci of irreducible difference that is made up of trillions of potential connections among neurons and astrocytes.

  Let us take nipple.  I know, sether Femina-Botox, that you think I have a fixation here, and I acknowledge it, which human being does not?  But that’s not the reason I choose it.  I choose it because, developmentally, it is one of the earliest demons.  It is the target of the neonate’s desires.  But, bingo, as soon as I say target, something takes over in the ideoverse that in a moment we will look at.  Well, yes, after a manner of speaking, sether, though I feel the deployment of the word tits is not wholly apt, and the rest of the way you put it even less so.  But yes.  The circle within a circle, and so on.  Ramifications, ramifications.

  But we are at a time when, in the neonate’s ideoverse, the resident demons are few, huge, and hopefully by and large pleasant.  The demon nipple is one such.  At this point it is a demon of a kind that all animals could entertain (except no other animal has nipples).  It is a demon unlabelled by language, unconnected to any concept.  It is just the locus where the energy of blurry sight, pheromonal stimuli, tactility of lips, palate, tongue, coalesce.  The baby has no more idea what a nipple is than a dog does. (Shut up, sether.)

  Except, of course, sether Albert, what you say, totally unsuitable to the polite company of this layby on the Huddersfield ringroad though it is, is supremely apposite.

  I am suggesting that there is a root demon nipple which, as long as we were breast fed, has formed in every neonate’s ideoverse for quite some way back along the hominid line.  And now we jump in time to ourselves, here, now, and a whole cascade of diverse nipple stuff starts going on in our respective ideoverses.  We need not rehearse it here, certainly not in sether Albert’s case.  And unless we call it into the workspace it will not be language-ised — not the kind of inelegance I usually tolerate, but it serves to put that process rather the world side of the black box, which is where it ought to be.  Though language is a great stabilising process.  The cascades of stuff that flick and flitter through the ideoverse, a bit like dreams, when nipple happens, are transient, short-lived, one taking the place of another, or side by side, drifting, dissolving, superimposing, swapping material, until the workspace fixes one, at which point there is, language being available, a process of language-isation; target; the word, the image for me an archery target, red black white blue concentric circles, painted canvas on straw (I am not a young man) the smell of straw, playing among straw bales as a child, one can get into James Joyce territory very quickly, and this is all literary, it has nothing to do with the cascades in the ideoverse set off by the word nipple.

  Try this for size.  A root demon is a locus (we have no idea of the architecture, it may be in itself quite distributed) in the neural substrate.  It responds to stimuli, both from the ideoverse of which it is a part, and from the metaverse, which mediates everything that has our attention.  Once stimulated, the root demon emits simulacra of itself, not like down a wire, but broadcast across the ideoverse.  Again the architecture of this broadcast is unknown, we can guess it will be an unimaginable complexity of parallel pathways, branching pathways, inhibitory cascades, selective destruction, and no doubt much more.  Perhaps the rarefied reaches of information theory could have a bash at describing the kind of thing it might be, I can only smear a smudge of an image.  But that’s what happens.  Some journeys are much shorter than others, nipple to target for instance.  Why this is so can only be explained by the architecture, which is plastic, dynamic, and so far unintelligible to us, even though it is going on continually just the other side of the language barrier.

  Now we are looking at an evolutionary situation.  Demons depend on selection for survival and reiteration.  Nipple ripples across the ideoverse.  It stimulates other demons.  If it stimulates nuclear submarine it, unless it is in the ideoverse of a reincarnation of a metaphysical poet, is not likely to forge an alliance which is going to go places — a bit of a dead end.  Taboo sexuality could work on it, but we are talking about what is spontaneous.  So we could suggest a whole lot of potential demon allies for nipple, the utilitarian, the erotic, the scientific (in the sense of biology, not concept), the graphic; milk, antibodies, Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid, gland,  graffiti.  But here is the problem with language, these are not language (well, antibodies probably are) they are manifestations in the ideoverse, like to the stuff of dreams, as I say, flickering and transient.

  The behaviour of our root demon, for selection, survival, reiteration, is to stimulate enough useful demons to work with it in an alliance, while repressing all the other demons that are signalling back, me, me, but, and this would have to be already evolved in the architecture, must be repressed so they don’t clutter up or negate an alliance in which they are useless or destructive.

  The formation of an alliance causes a flicker.  It will often last only microseconds.  If it is below the threshold of the workspace, its achievement will be minimal, a slight modification of the architecture perhaps.  If the workspace registers it, but takes no action, its duration will be slightly longer, and the architecture modified a little more.  And if the workspace selects it, and we’re talking very black box here, then work will be done with it and on it.

  Few demons can work on their own.  Red, maybe.  But the effective role of a demons, as far as survival and reiteration through the metaverse is concerned, is in an alliance.

  And alliance may be an act, suck.  It may be a natural concept, doggy.  (No, dear, it’s a cat).  Or it may be a scientific concept, a red triangle.

  A demon is only a concept when the workspace calls for a concept.  Then, if the evolved architecture is such that it can cascade like buggery, its chances of selection are strong (if I am looking at the mechanics of pre- and post-natal nutrient transfer, for instance).  If I am merely, one of those games that come in a box, trying to compile as long a list of body parts as I can in one minute, nipple’s just a demon.

  The reductio ad absurdum is no more.

  Just try it for size.

Concepts. And hyperbollocks in eleven dimensions

  Sethren, I return even thinner than I left.  MadamMeMe’sMeatyBits will seem to me as the cherries of Paradise.  No fucker told me that the holy monastery of Skellig Michael has been a ruin since the Sixth Century.

Demon? Locus of a hundred concepts?

© James Waddington

  And here in the world, I gather, the tapeworms of government have been suffering orgasms of enraptured grief (insofar as a tapeworm’s orgasm is distinguishable from a morbid twitch of the integument) because a decayed leader, one who has brought about the ruin of our land and sold it off to global corporations and bankers, one furthermore guilty of nepotistic embezzlement and fraud, and therefore the moral beacon of all her tribe, has snuffed it.

  Leader!  A very exemplar of the human stupidity of which I spoke before my involuntary fasting in the wilderness on that rocky waste miles out in the Atlantic (I had imagined mead and fish stew at least).  She was not a leader, she was a politician.  Leaders are the cultural artefacts of war.  Politicians are the mouthparts of power, and power is ultimately wealth.  Behind the mouthparts of power is a great echo chamber, where demons become the size of clouds, few, but huge in presence, and they bounce around and around, an ever-present clangour.  This dead person's clangour was the public bruting of a counter-revolution already present, capital’s transition from production to consumption, to siphoning off the atrophying wealth of the nation into the proliferating proglottids of the City tapeworms.  Beyond the dead's melancholy hooting, she was a paltry human being, ignorant, spiteful, conservative, totally unilluminated by any idea that could not be fully expressed in five words max.

  Yet our present pundits beatify her.  They attribute miracles.

  Britannia had ruled the world, then this sceptred isle went down the plug hole, but the dead person came trailing clouds of glory, and she put the Great back in Britain.  And all the peoples of the earth now bow the knee saying, behold, thou art great among nations, the paragon of humankind, you Brits.

  Hyperbollocks in eleven dimensions.  Let us dismiss this irrelevance from our discourse.

Demon    thing    act    concept    map    praxis    Culture

  You will not believe this, sethren, but when I returned from Africa to this land at the end of the Sixties (the people afire with Beatles, Minis, car and skirt, street fashion and street revolution) to do a further degree (for though I am now as you see me, in tattered robes, stained with the filthy splash of passing traffic, I was once educated and full of promise) I did not know what a concept was.  Our tutor kept using the word, and we students looked askance one at another.  “Concept”, he would say, and none liked to admit that they knew not the fuck what a concept was, in case they were alone in their ignorance.  Up to 1968 we, the intellectual élite, got through life without the concept of a concept.

  Yet Lev Vygotsky had made things plain, half a century before.

  Red triangle.  Yellow triangle.  Yellow circle.  Red circle.

  What you see are pairs of demons (but remember that each demon consorts with many kinship groups and even clouds of associate demons); red; circle; triangle; blue.

  A concept at its simplest is two demons, which still exist independently elsewhere, but are now coupled. To go back further, it is two loci of irreducible difference that, interlocked and superimposed, make a third locus of irreducible difference.  I am reminded (as learned people say) of the disc of mammoth ivory with a mother Auroch on one side and her calf on the other.  Spin the disc, and they are side by side.  The concept of a virtual superimposition of two separate demons would be easily apprehensible to our ancestors 20,000 years ago.  And even today it not so difficult.  In a triangle that is wholly red (not for instance bounded by a black line) the redness and the triangularity are inseparable.  Yet at the same time we know perfectly well what component is redness, what triangle, and can easily separate the one from the other, two pristine demons.

  A red triangle has no sequence, except in syntax (and language, as I have said, is a clumsy, hugely overdetermined system for locating demons in an ideoverse and transmitting them through the metaverse, no more than that.  Poets have long lamented this state of affairs, while failing to note that overdetermination is what gives us poetry.)

  If… then…

  Logic is a concept.  Why I even approach it with the wind howling round my head here on the ringroad I don’t know.  Logic has sequence.  The infant learns sequence young.

  We are going out.  We find the pushchair.  We put on something warm.  We are going shopping.  We find a bag.  Keys? We have keys.  We unlock the door.  We go out.  We shut the door.  We lock it.

  Some of these acts can be done in another order.  Others cannot.  One thing must come before another.  The basis of logic is already there.

  If… then…

  A precondition is a state of affairs that must necessarily come before another state of affairs.  Having a key is a precondition of unlocking the door.  So is the door being locked in the first place.  Getting mush on a spoon is a precondition of shoving it somewhere in the region of your mouth.  If, and only if, there is mush on the spoon, can I shove it in my gob.

  Thus logic, in the form of Vygotsky’s natural concept, is already there.  The scientific concept will take time to develop.  If is a word that links to the demon precondition.  At first glance it would seem more difficult, more complicated to anatomise the demon precondition than the demon red.  Red is of course almost pure demon.  One can produce a thousand demons, a million all keen to surround red, envelop it, stand for it; the electromagnetic spectrum, the visual cortex; but we know full well that none of that busy-ness is red, sethren.  Red is red, end of story.  Pure demon if ever there was one.  And then  you can make it into a triangle.  If too is pure demon.  "If I am good can I have an ice cream?"  "If, my son.  If."  Pure demon simply understood.  But ask the child to anatomise the concept if, it won’t have a clue.

  If all cats have hearts, and Orlando is a cat, then Orlando has a heart.

  If all cats have hearts, and I have a heart, then I am a cat.

  The scientific concept of logic has to be developed, the sequential coupling and obligate linkage (there can be no if without a then) of the if… then… demons has to be explored and refined.  But the concept of logic is a relatively simple one.

  The demons that combine in alliances if one tries to anatomise the demon movement are multitudinous and hard to marshal, and thus the concept of movement is hard to explain (except for “movement is when something moves”-type explanations).  Yet movement is a very simple and basic concept.  It seems that concepts, processes that are abstruse… er… conceptually, are much easier to recognise as demons than simple things like needles, where the various bits (associated demons) are obvious to the eye (or neural substrate if no needle is present).

  Some concepts are quite extensive, the Standard Model, for instance.  Others are less so.  Food, for instance.  Our bellies rumble, craving mechanically recovered horse slurry, the poisonous soya, glutinous white sludge embrowned by who knows what magic into gravy.  Madam MeMe subverts our hunger, elicits self-destructive craving.  As a picture puzzle in the search for concepts, let me commend to you the work of the great Martin Rowson.  The horror. The horror.

Throttle people, make bread and love

 

Skellig Michael - Wikimedia commons

    Supposing all you say is so, so what?  We are still beset by unwholesome weather, and eat muck.  And now we have been told by our noble leader that social security leads to infanticide.  Sethren, our noble leader may have the mouth parts of a six foot tapeworm, but he also has a first class degree from Oxford.  PPE, admittedly.  I have no more idea than you what cutting-edge intellectual content resides in a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford.  Nugatory, one would imagine.  But enough to rule.  And the tyro tapeworm clearly had enough brain to master it splendidly.  A first class degree.

  Sethren, the mouthings of the great leader may evince stupidity, but they are designer mouthings, crafted by years, centuries of evolution to embody a gargantuan gormlessness.  Not his. Ours.  Our  stupidity, sethren.  The stupidity inheres not in the crafting of these obvious, children’s picture book, fatuous lies.  The gargantuan stupidity is in us, who are the butt of this ludicrous mendacity.  And yet we believe in it utterly, and remouth it and remouth it continually, as if we ourselves were not as withered grey-green carcasses on the Huddersfield ringroad, but plump pink tapeworms whose every comfort is eternally assured.

  Surely, sethren, our so thoroughgoing stupidity needs some explanation.  The last person to try to explain it was Karl Marx; false consciousness, opium of the masses; spot on, old Karl.  But a century and a half ago.  The Communist Manifesto was published nine years before The Origin of Species.  Nobody has attempted to explain our moronic collective credulity since then.

  I will.

  But first the building blocks.

  An act.  A kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.

  In the human world, maybe in the Hominin world (and I read on my phone yesterday, sethren, that Sahelpithecus is likely to represent the divergence between Homo and Chimp, seven million years ago or thereabouts), in the human world, an act is seldom isolated from a thing.  “Manus amimam pinxit, my pen is in my hand” as the old fascist put it.  There is not much that we do with our bare hands.  Throttle people, make bread and love.  But by and large a human act is an obligate symbiont with at least one thing.  It is the nexus of doing and done to — obligate symbiont, Sether Albert? Have I not mentioned it before?  Oh.  No I fucking haven’t, then.  Two different kinds of organism living in a cooperative relationship upon which both are completely dependent; trees and root fungi, mammals and their gut bacteria; human beings and politicians.

  Think of sewing, sethren.  Sewing without needle, thread and two bits of material to be joined, is not sewing.  But a needle and thread and so on cannot be sewing without kinesis, fingers, musculature, neural substrate.  Most human acts can only exist in the context of things.  And most things can only evolve in the context of acts.  The old joke goes, when a simple lad had finally been taught to add two apples to two apples and get four apples, he asked, “does it work with pears too?”  Does the concept of obligate symbiosis work with acts other than sewing?  Pears, sethren, pears.

  At the level of demons, there is no distinction to be made between an act and a thing.  An act is a thing.  Sewing, like a needle, is a demon.  Sure, as with a needle, other demons consort with the demon sewing, many more than the minimal ones we associated with a needle.  We could anatomise the demon sewing into quite a lot, or if you prefer, a whole bunch of demons.  But if you are running your eye over the contents of a design technology course to see if it is suitable for one, oh ye paupers, of your profligate quantity of offspring (whom, because you may rely on social security, you are quite likely to go home and slaughter) and in the midst of a list of course components, joinery, web design, you note for the fraction of a second your eye overflies it embroidery before the epicentre of vision moves on to automobile aesthetics; then embroidery occurred as a demon; not totally unexamined, because there will be a locus in the neural substrate which awakes and leaps to life screaming me, me, and would be only too delighted to call up other demons into the workspace, needles, coloured thread, the Bayeux tapestry, whatever the fuck you like as long as you are going to take notice; but not a chance.  The automobile aesthetics demon is already having its microsecond flicker.

  So, at the demon level, things and acts are not differentiated.  But, you will say, we humans can distinguish between a thing and an act.

  Sethren, we can distinguish between a trillion things and another trillion things, had we but world enough  and time.  We have no difficulty telling the difference between angels and fairies, between cricket and baseball, between a virus and a bacterium or a gigue and a saraband.  But we do it at another level.  We shall come to concepts in time, sethren, but you will not be amazed to know that concepts, like everything in the metaverse, are also alliances of demons.

  For it is only at the demon level that evolution can take place.

But, you may say, the ancestral organism became the hippo and the whale.  Surely it is at the level of species that things change?

That is what we see, because we cannot see genes.  Darwin didn’t even know they existed.  But it was genes, sethren (and epigenetics, of course).  Evolution takes place at the level of the cell, and it is only the sum of cells that is the organism that represents the, to us, apprehensible species.

  And you will say, but culture doesn’t have to be like biological life.  Just because evolution takes place at the level of genes, not the level of the hippo and the whale, there is no reason why culture should follow suit.

  Agreed absolutely, sethren.  Give me another explanation that will lead to an account of why we believe the simple lies of our Great Leader, an explanation that does not rest on metaphor and religious platitude, and I will go along with you.  Until then, the evolution of culture takes place at the level of demons.

  The question still lies open, can there be a non-kinetic act?  Clearly.  Acts can take place in an ideoverse unexpressed by any kinesis.  You cannot look into the face of the beloved and know of whom they dream.  The raven surveyed the meat, the string, its perch for several minutes before it acted.  The high jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  This, sethren, is why I call it an act, not an action.  All that we do happens in the theatre of the skull.

  Sethren, tomorrow, sabbatical.  I go to the monastery of Skellig Michael to watch and pray for a week.  You must wander the streets of Huddersfield alone.  Watch the behaviour of your fellows, and ponder my words.  Dwell on our stupidity in especial.  When I return, and if, in like case to the Earl of Groan, I am not consumed by puffins, then concepts.