"Different" collapse perspective

(There's not a lot of direct collapse talk in here so it may not qualify, but I think it's relevant to collapse because it has aspects of the "collective human machine".)

I want to describe the collapse from the perspective of someone under the influence of cannabis, the strain of which is unknown to me. (At least that was the plan, but it also sort-of turned into pro-pot propaganda.) This essay isn't going to make any arguments about the utility or otherwise of this. It's just to point out elephants in the room. Places where connections aren't being made.

This essay sees the human animal with respect to particular kinds of ignorance. The point in drawing out the obvious is that, when seen how we operate by our components in slow motion, we can get a different perspective on what the human species is, just as you can get quite a different view of the human body if you look at anatomical maps. I don't mean simplistic differences like the intellectual-toy feeling of “cool, it's a map”, but those ineffable feelings that come from, for example, realizing the power of an emergent law in the universe, like when you see our bodies are composed of networks, which are a structural essence of nature.

I don't mean this in a “Whoa, dude!” way, though there is nothing wrong with that (and it should occasionally be encouraged). I mean this in a “Mathematics!” way. Look what emerged here: An entity composed of networks figuring out, with the help of larger-scale networks, how to understand itself in a conceptual way, while “conceptuality” is only verified in a completely inexplicable way. Because while a concept may be algorithmic in nature and computed in our minds, our minds are ultimately only satisfied if there is a subjective feeling of “correctness” itself, which could be intensely felt in the case of a long-sought discovery, or passively felt in the calculations of habitual, daily affairs.

On the other hand, you can imagine a brain that arrived at logically flawless conclusions yet experienced a tremendous subjective distaste accompanying such calculations. The brain then rejects these and this species lives in blissful chaos. Our minds, on the other hand, subjectively get off on the logic. And of course illogical things as well. And these categories of thought might even have substantial if not complete overlap on a subjective level, but there are currently no metrics for subjectivity itself, though perhaps physical correlations could be measured (not that the correlation could be proved).

Is one group of people – the logical group – actually getting off on “correctness” though? Or is it getting off on a complex of neurological phenomona, which is the underlying basis for our reactions and the structure of which is not terribly inferrible from the conceptual content and logical machinery of our thoughts? Likewise, the people who seem to revel in living whatever nonsense of whimsies whorl them through life, when and how do they differ subjectively from logical folk? Do they feel unsatisfied with their illogical conclusions or decisions?

Maybe you could say that irrationally leads to more suffering, but this is a dubious claim. But this does raise the other half of the question. What is the subjective difference between the feeling of logic having failed (because of under-analysis or what-have-you) and having failed in some other way? Because such feeling is again a complex of neurological phenomena, and when we speak of our feelings in these contexts, what we speak of usually doesn't reflect some sort of map between the semantic content of our thoughts and the dynamic processing of the organ giving rise to these oft-delusional thoughts to begin with.

What does this say about the feelings that come with surfing the implications of mathematical universals threading different aspects and levels of reality together into a self-referential unity? I guess not much, because we don't have terribly good ideas about what's going on in the brain, do we? And we assume that's not a problem. We assume, then, what? That evolution programmed us with the magical ability to plan relative to the future in the context of an ever-corrupt information-accelerating society without having a realistic model of ourselves, in particular our brains, and it's implicitly trusted that what emerges from the human network of networks – patched together with complexes of computer code so deep, nested, and intertwined (and buggy) that no individual can even understand many subsystems, much less the whole – would somehow just “work out”? And democracy is going to do this perhaps?

Our species hasn't even tried to define “working out” except for a few isolated and irrelevant thinkers and organizations, and the brains-that-didn't-know-what-they-were were just going to thrive in accelerating complexity as a result of said evolutionary-mechanisms-off-the-track? Getting an inkling of what's actually in the “driver's seat”? I don't want this thing driving. And this thing is our current collective intelligence. What has emerged from us is horrific and out of control in the most literal sense, which I'll leave to your imagination. You are node – a cell – in a technologically-knitted-together plague-of-apes, and no one has control of this thing (and no one has control over themselves).

But I digress. I want you to understand the importance of the brain's of children. Children have a different subjective experience of the world than we do. Now, forget we're talking about children because I don't want sentimentality to interfere with this. As our brains age our subjective experience of the world changes. It's possible an explanation for this in terms of neurological correlations is beginning. For example, researchers like Mark Solms talk about consciousness being invoked in moments the brain encounters unexpected stimuli (e.g. you didn't expect a rattlesnake in your tent, but now you're awake, yes?). In such situations the brain is roused to problem-solve and also work on a model for the future (e.g. get used to rattlesnakes in the tent [probably something our collective intelligence would do], or develop a new model that keeps snakes from ingressing your tent [boring and rather quaint sounding]).

Children don't have good models of the more complex world (e.g. world of adult affairs) in their heads. Nor does our collective species. Maybe children are always “surprised” in a sense, which is what happens when you need to pay attention. That's perhaps why we had a rich sense of consciousness when we were children, which was especially delightful because these feelings of intense consciousness accompanied fanciful models of the world, plus we had a feeling of immortality, which was because we were blessed from having a subjective sense of inexorable, mechanical time.

I'm just speculating and I don't know what Solms would think of the childhood “surprise” hypothesis (which certainly isn't original), but do you think there is an important relationship between consciousness and the information processing we're doing at the time of a particular subjective state? Regardless, do you think your childhood memories are with subjective value in themselves, if you can recall echoes of that time or perhaps recall briefly awakening as an adult, surprised by a new spring wind, then falling back into the habitual rattle of your mind? And how about the subjective states of childhood? Are they important in and of themselves simply because they represent states within whatever the total subjective state space of the universe is? A subjective state space is what we're dealing with and one question (i.e. the “easy” question) is what dynamic matter configurations correlate with the subjective state space. We just treat consciousness as a joke most of the time. Strange attitude to have toward the biggest mystery and most inexplicable phenomenon in the universe. We're so smart we're leaving the best for last. Is that it?

Do you think the point of childhood memories is that evolution decided you should have some inexplicably wistful attachment to your childhood? Actually there could be. Perhaps being able to hold such echos of childhood allows the mind to empathize more as a caretaker, but it doesn't intuitively feel to me this would be a big factor, and seems a clumsy mechanism requiring more brain complexity than needed since caretaking functions can be controlled with older brain architecture, so why build a more complex system upon that?

Is something more prosaic also happening in recalling childhood memories? Like entering brain states rarely needed since childhood, if at all, and then misinterpreting the recollection as “belonging” to that period of time, whereas it's just a recognition through time and only surprising by its lack of occurrence? Again I'm just speculating. My point is that the real answer is probably not going to “wow you” more than this dry speculation.

So, subjective state and information processing seem to have a relationship. We don't know what it is, and it seems like a tremendously difficult problem to tackle. But say we don't tackle it at all, which isn't the case now – people are all over it – but what would the response be even in that case? Ignore it? Not think it's important somehow to human development? Or is it a highly influential component to our development that just happens to be so complex we can't be bothered to factor it in? Of course it's not childhood consciousness that seems particularly important, but the adult subjective states since we're the ones destroying our world (and programming [e.g. advertising to] the next generations of consumers to continue our behavior).

At the beginning I said I wanted to consider collapse from the child's perspective. Now that you've thought about different subjective states and information-processing, the question is – how are children who are exposed to collapse information responding? Perhaps teenagers can be cynically immune and don't care to run thoughtful simulations, but what about younger people? How is such information processed by an imagination that isn't tempered, at least on an intuitive level, by the limitations of the world?

On the other hand, I've written this entire essay while “high”, and my point is that both the content of what I had to say and the subjective state accompanying it will be rejected because it came from a cannabis user - and the information processing was different "than normal" in my brain at the time, thus assuming no logical or conceptual merit. And this judgment is handed across by a collective neurological system (i.e. people) that doesn't even have a model of itself, and is currently trashing its world in an out-of-control fashion. This thing is what's telling me not to be where I am now, and that what I have to say from here doesn't matter. And then goes to continue its global psychopathy.

Experiences like mine should be considered valuable information. As I've noted a few times already, consciousness is one of the biggest mysterious in the universe (even over concepts like dark energy), and the types of information processing our minds like to do and are able to do changes with the subjectivity. Are we looking for neurological correlations for consciousness or aren't we? You know what definitely isn't an intelligent thing to do? Putting people into jail or prison for treating their PTSD with pot. That's idiotic, cruel, and corrupt. That's the sober people right now. That is, the state of mind that prevents some of the most interesting scientific research there is (while killing its planet as I mentioned). Of course, evolution couldn't plan for a technological society. What, probabilistically, do you think is going to happen? How many “stable configurations” of human beings do you think there are? Is our subjectivity blinding us?

There are many angles to see “The Ship of Fools” from, and different states of mind to explore these angles from.