The needle in the skull

The brain in 1911 - Encyclopaedia Britannica

  Always at my back I hear, sethren, those chariot wheels, time, thundering.  We’ve just got a photo of that, apparently, time so old it has hardly begun, a time when time had only been about for 380,000 years, less than twice the time, that, our species has occupied the earth, and the thing I’m talking about, Evoculture, has occupied our species.  So the thunder of time, those chariot wheels, it’s not just the ringroad and its burden of death, the rumble and hiss of butyl on bitumen, one futile hydrocarbon on another, it really is time, getting shorter, and we have far to go.  Onwards.

  A sewing needle; a simple thing.  It is differentiated from a pin by having a hole in it, and differentiated from a hypodermic needle, and the fang of a snake, and the sting of a bee, by the placing of that single hole.

The needle is a shaft, pointed at one end and rounded at the other.  Because its function is to pierce and slide through woven or felted material or hide, it should be as thin as possible, firstly, so as not to damage the material needlessly, and second to do the least possible work.  There are three constraints on this thinness, the strength of the material from which the needle is made, the calibre of the thread, gut, leather lace, which it has to pull through the material to be sewn, and the thickness and toughness of that material.  But when I say, sethren, a needle in a haystack, I’m guessing the standard demon, the needle in your head, is about… that long, and about… that thick, and it is silvery steel, a tiny highlight shining off it, and it's got an elliptical hole at the rounded end, and a point the other, and there's just the echo of that sharp prick in the skin of your finger.  And maybe, if you’ve ever done any sewing, a button on a thick coat for instance, that almost uncomfortable pressure, turning to, not pain so much, but a pointed region of discomfort in the side of the middle joint of the index finger as you push it through.  Which is why thimbles evolved along with needles.

  So, there are all the demons in a needle.  Function, topology, shaft, length, diameter, aspect ratio, hole, point, substance, surface, reflectivity, silver, receptor nerve stimulus.  Thirteen in all.  Thirteen demons make a needle in the metaverse

  No, we don’t call all those things all those names, sether, of course we don’t.  That’s just language, and the metaverse is not composed of language, not at all.  You’ve got to get hold of this; compared to the complexity of the metaverse, which is entirely a function of the complexity of the human brain — astrocytes indeed, sether — language is a very simple system, and it's all open to us, we know what it is, we know how it works.  The metaverse, and the node of it inside each of our heads, is of at the moment incalculable complexity, and its workings are almost entirely hidden from us.  That is, the meeting place, the self, the I, I’m going to carry on calling it the work space, is almost entirely insulated from the incalculable processes of the brain.  If it wasn’t we couldn’t think.  I know analogies only cause more confusion, but here goes, look at it this way.  Imagine if, when we were watching the television, we didn’t just have to follow the complexities of the programme, as it might be Come Cook with Me, but we also had to perceive, analyse, calibrate in real time the internal processes of your flat screen LED HD telly, down to the last electron, the last quantal whatsit.  You’re right, sether, not fucking possible.  I gather we’ve dropped the partially deceased.  So be it.  Natural selection will have its way.  Verging on extinction already.

  So that’s what it would be like, multiplied a million fold, if we had to watch the processes of the metaverse; as well as the question which I’m sure you’ve spotted already, the question of what it would actually be that was watching this process?  For both those immutable reasons, we, being the workspace, are for ever insulated from the metaverse.  And that is a cogent reason why we always have, and always have had, way back to our origins as a species, a sense of, a yearning for, the beyond; the reality on the other side of the membrane of the cave wall.

  Demons are summoned, or arrive unbidden, into the workspace, in small platoons, a needle, in almost infinite hosts, the Standard Theory.  They do their work, they are sent back whence they came, crowded out by more instantaneously apt demons, or by a process of the organism, get the gone.
  That’s the metaverse.  Language on the other hand is a simple system in which demons travel through the world.  Between each ideoverse and the world there are portals.  Two of them, on inwards along the neural high roads from the ears and the larynx, lungs and mouth, let language in and out, but they are insulated, constricted, filtered, firewalled, we have no idea what they are or how they work.  They are just areas of the brain, we call them Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area.  There is one kind of thing one side, in the neural substrate, in the ideoverse; Evoculture; and another kind of thing in the rest of the organism and in the world; language.

  So when I anatomise a needle into thirteen demons, that is language, that is labelling.  And when we summon up the demon needle, the natural concept, thank you sether Lev, I merely surmise that in the metaverse these thirteen demons associate in a fairly ready way with needle.  It’s language (not that for a moment I want to diminish the role of language, look what I’m using here), it’s a crude, functional representation of what goes on on the other side of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

  And I do not say, sethren, that that parade of thirteen demons is all and only what gathers round a needle.  Each ideoverse is unique, dynamic, ever changing.  Every time we mention complexity, that complexity is an order of magnitude less complex than the complexity of which it is a part.   We’ve just got to live with that.

    What?  I can’t hear you, sether Cavilia.    I thought that’s what you said.  A knitting needle.  Fuck.  No hole.  Fuck.  See what I mean?  Lunchtime.

Where meaning is

  The weather?  Indeed it is an outrage, sether Albert, but there is no remedy.  The most powerful on earth, corporations and their functionary governments, even they are powerless to reverse the effects of sudden stratospheric warming, even if they cared, and why should they?  They are not standing in a layby on the Huddersfield ring road, looking for the truth.

  Which we are, sethren.  Enough of weather.

  We are still looking at demons, for demons are at the heart of the matter.  But before we nail a demon, there is a confusion to be tied up.  Language, words, all that stuff that vibrates through the air and the non-existent ether, all the stuff that is locked up in the dark in closed books or in the entrails of a Kindle or a laptop, and of which there is an abundant store in all our heads, or most of them; language is different from demons.  Language is merely coded allusion.  Note, sethren, I said allusion, not illusion, though it can be that too.  Language is a sort of signalling system, flashing lights, waving flags, between the little universes in our skulls, each our own ideoverse.  In prehistory, language was always instantaneous, but in time, writing could freeze it, or more truly petrify it, or paint it onto flat surfaces with ink, and nowadays language can travel through little electrical switches, on or off, 0 or 1, to be or not to be, in the beginning was the word, by the waters of Babylon, in the Dreamtime they wandered the earth, I entered the holy land of Kurukshetra.  All flag waving, a way of getting stuff from one of us to another.  “But what’s the stuff?” you cry out with one voice.   You cry out with one voice.  Thank you sether Pritchard-Achebe-Wajda, one voice will have to do.

  The stuff — is meaning.  Meaning.  I know, I know.  That way lies endless circularity.

  Let me approach it this way.

  Of course.  Of.  Course.  Each of these is a word.  The word of suggests a relationship.  The word course suggests some sort of progression, a cross country race, the journey of one's life, an associated but conditional something or other of a river.

  We could go on for a long time, but it’s the two words together that I’m looking at here.  Of course. It can suggest that:

  We all accept that x is axiomatic.

  The group I am about to refer to are in error (“Of course, some people think…)

  Most certainly.

  Certainly not (“Of course” said with a quizzical, ironic smile).

  What else can I say? (“Do you love me?”  “Of course.”)

  I do realise that reservations would be in order here (“Of course there is the Bayesian analysis to be taken into account.”) — No idea, sether Constance, it is possible to use words without having a clear understanding of what they mean.  Try reading some science journalists, let alone economists.

  Do you think I’m entirely stupid (“Of course I knew that.”

  Enough.  What this makes clear is that words and phrases do not have meanings.  What they do is to make connections, physical, material connections, through the ear, to a bit of the brain with a fancy name which is clearly interconnected with all the other bits of the brain in one way or another, and thence onwards to that infinite network where meaning exists.  I read only today that one human brain processes 300,000 petabytes of data a year.  I think that’s 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but I was never so good at the counting, especially all those zeros.  A lot anyway.  Of course a lot of a lot will be repetitive; hello, sorry, excuse me, fuck off, that kind of thing, but even those have considerable amounts of meaning lurking behind their black and white exteriors.  So that infinite 4D network in the brain where meaning exists may have loops and recursiveness about it, but it’s still infinite.  And each infinite network of meaning, each ideoverse, is connected, physically connected, in any way we can possible understand physics, to every other infinite network of meaning, every other ideoverse, literally, physically connected (just check this; take these words as they get into your brain, electromagnetically through the eye, and check the physical continuity from the brain of Brother Jero.  If not, how else did Jero get there?).  And this continuum between each and every ideoverse (each one unique) and between all those ideoverses and the universe, we might call the metaverse, the space where all infnities of meaning exist.

  I just want to make it clear, sethren, that I am not labouring under a delusion here.  I am not proposing a metaphysical entity (nothing so disturbing, sether Albert).  I am merely suggesting that meaning is distributed, not to be found in one place, and that physical objects are part of the location of meaning, an actual chair, an actual Higgs boson, all are loci of meaning, demons fly out of them as well as into them (I name this pad, i-)

  Hunger, sethren, hunger calls you I see.  What is the meaning of horse?  Last week, scandal that the poor were fed on the slurry blasted from the noble beast’s guts and bones, and this week the beneficiaries of our pluto-fascist kleptocracy are eating the best cuts of Arabian Thoroughbred in the best restaurants of the metropolis.  Subway, is it?  Till tomorrow.  Tomorrow we will try to see a demon with the naked eye.