664 - Vandana Shiva Quote

Quoted in Pip Pip (Jay Griffiths, 2000):

The more effectively the cycles of life, as essential ecological processes, are maintained, the more invisible they become. Disruption is violent and visible; balance and harmony are experienced, not seen. The premium on visibility placed by patriarchal maldevelopment forces the destruction of invisible energies and the work of women and nature, and the creation of spectacular, centralized work and wealth.

674 - Ludic Self

Nice quote, Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For A Different Way Of Living (2004), p.48:

"But the idea of a 'playful self', of a self that plays with its boundaries and masks, was birthed long before tricksy ad campaigns and postmodern theory. The clear starting point is Renaissance literature, and that list of writers - from Rabelais, Erasmus and Machiavelli, to Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell - who used their art to imagine a self that was not validated by Church, nobility or tradition. And their most favourite strategy was the ludic self - a literary persona that toyed with the very idea of being a single unitary consciousness."

Also, earlier in the chapter, a telling reference to the effect that the opposite of play is not work, it is depression.

And for the record, the chapter explores Brian Sutton-Smith's six rhetorics of play, which are:

• Play as progress
• Play as imagination
• Play as selfhood
• Play as fate and chaos
• Play as shared identity
• Play as contest

679 - Four Colour Theorem

This states that it is possible to fill in any pattern of shapes across a single plane using a maximum of four colours.

Bizarrely, I suspect the same is true for story plots - that conceptually, a plot being a field, and therefore representable as a shape on a map, it might be possible to prove that any larger plot can be reconfigured as a combination of smaller plots for which the four colour theorem holds true.

Colour in this instance would be a metaphor for action (or emotional hue?).

683 - Upstarts

[thanks to http://www.hageprat.com/images/eden/eden-tropical-biome-1.jpg]

As Firefox has it, inviting you to clothe your browser in a chosen skin: Choose your persona.

Christianity is Trinitarian, which in conventional terms has rounded edges. At least, of the three personalities, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each has been assumed to bind in, or at least, mutually support the others.

Jesus, by his life, is seen to have left this family to redeem a fallen humanity: those who choose his path are bound back in, where previously, presumably, they were Hellbound. Heaven is seen as mutually supportive, safe environment; Hell as feral, where the beasts that are bigger than you bite, and those that are smaller burrow. It is possible to read the scriptures as promising universal salvation, but only if you assume the storyteller has a twinkle in the eye when the story is told: Oh , the sheep will get to heaven, but the goats will be cast into outer darkness [*But we know, listeners, that no-one will really turn out to be a goat*]. Christianity has, somehow, to incorporate a fall, even if it is wholly happy with evolution as a concept.

But what if the Trinity were a little more ranging? What if, for example, the Holy Spirit were a bit of an upstart, blowing where it will, including in all the awkward places?

If any of these were true, there might, despite the scriptures, be a cause for believing a person, or people, could exist who were perfectly happy to live their allotted span on the Earth, be called into existance at birth, and out at death. Somehow at the end they might become part of the firmament of Love in which dwell all others: they might for the duration be the Holy Spirit, and explain an anarchic streak in humanity, and perhaps elsewhere.

Such a people might live by pre-fall myths, as Hugh Brody, delicately unpicking Genesis, and interpreting its creation stories as wholly agriculturalist (even Adam starts a gardener, and the first murder is by a herdsman of a farmer) suggests Hunter-Gatherers continue to do. Or somehow they might dwell in myths of the new Jerusalem, with the old heaven and earth passed away already. Or not dwell in myths at all, but in the conscious heart of the universe, expanding despite the odds, or expanding and contracting continuously from and to a point of singularity, as Einstein's scientific poesis defines it.

They might find each other out, or simply recognise each other by the twinkles in their eyes, and know they are somehow one, even though the myths, beliefs and practices they have been shaped by are wildly different, even mutually contradictory. It would be for them to wrestle meaning out of the primordial mud, and watch it sink back again (or not watch, as their senses depart despite themselves).

These people would be neither good nor evil, might dream they are deific, but wake to the demonic (remembering that dreams can occur in waking reality, and waking reality in dreams). Finding enough succour in each other and the anarchic Spirit of Holiness, they might be borne by each other through the hard times, and be blessed in the good, directing their blessings to their friends in the dark till roles are perhaps reversed.

They might find wisdom comes midway through such a life, so that they no longer need rely for absolute being on the support of others, but shine their Spirits, enflamed by Love, for the benefit of all. They might even appropriate the myths of others, but only to enfuse the myths with compassion, expanding them past the realms of feasibility till all are redeemed, so that they need not hand the myths back, because they have already given the fruit of them to those they have taken the myths from. (And these in turn have grown their own myths, with which to feed their anarchic friends.)

A model by which we might see such interactions could be the networked domes of the Eden Project, which contain and make possible the ecosystems within them. You go to see the plants, but you also go to see the star-crossed architecture which makes them possible.

Some may be called, from time to time, to explore each other's worlds. The anarchic trinitarians might lower a friend into the ecosystem, or an archaic Trinitarian might fly a kite to the anarchists. A touch of realism, however: of course (of course) each would return to their kind: Model 2 might be deep sea diving, or aeronautics: no-one could remain anywhere without the support of their fellows. (A network of tetrahedrons, extending upwards and down, might just perform the job.)

In conclusion, beyond the calls demanded by individual religions might be a further call, to each and everyone, to which each and everyone responds. I (who am biased in this) might phrase it thus: Choose your persona. Go and Story!

684 - Christian

The deepest, toughest, most demanding week of my life, the week just gone. I will draw on it for the rest of my life, and write about it honestly here from time to time.

Suffice to say, for now, that I've concluded that being a Christian means ending cycles of abuse. No more, no less. And if you have to stop being a Christian in order to do so, then stop being a Christian.

But as for me, now, I no longer feel that is necessary. So from now on, I'm happy to wear that label, and will do my utmost to wear it well.

I am a Christian.

691 - Pottery is Poetry With Typos

Hmm. Self-identity as an artform? Midlife must be the point in the creative process when you want to ditch the clay and start again.

693 - Reluctant Shifts

Funny how words don't appeal very much any more. A bit dramatic, perhaps, and tough given the vast neurological networks I am, as well as possess, dedicated to language and its written form. Like being a typewriter of great insight, aware that it is being asked to perform like a word processor - a mix of joy that its visions can be better expressed, and despair that the job is beyond it.

The Christian vision, which I bought, then rejected, until a mystical experience convinced me there was a deeper truth beyond the words, gave me great hope that everything I wanted to do or say could find creative expression within its remit. But alongside the hope is a great despair, and as ruts form, and I physically age, and as I test the boundaries of the vision, the despair has overtaken the joy, recently, too often.

The appeal is then to revert to word-level truths, or even abandon words altogether. A spirituality that takes evolution seriously, that allows a place in heaven, or whatever might follow, if anything does, for everyone, shouldn't have a problem with choices like these. A sick animal dies, or recovers to die later. Too much pain and anyone is let off the hook. Everyone breaks down sooner or later.

But a third option is to sense oneself as part of an evolutionary shift through words to a state somewhere beyond. It would be Lanarckian to claim that exposure to the information age is inducing an evolutionary shift within a single generation. That's not what I mean. But it is possible that our societies are demanding, or inviting, new responses from us, to which some may be better suited than others. And those of us with a predeliction for words, like me, might find ourselves brutally tested, and failing, if societal shifts of too great a moment occur in our lifetimes.

That might not mean that we cannot catch the vision, and run with it as far as we are able, like the aspiring word processor that collapses in a jumble of levers and lead typeface, but has sensed, at least, the shape of things to come.

What might a post-verbal world be like? One where people communicate not just by sound and text, but by total performance? That's surely already happening. And come to think of it, maybe it's been there all the time anyway. Dance, drama, ancient ritual, being what they are. Maybe I'm chuntering on about nothing. Probably, okay definitely, am.

696 - After an AUB

Certain thoughts pertaining to identity formation, to consciousness, superfluity, life-purpose, follow from the perambulations on which my reading programme has taken me.

It is important to me to try to summarise the hypothesis I am now about to entertain.

Something happened to me, going on thirty-four. Something happens to a lot of people. During my year at theological college, many of those called to be vicars were in their thirties. It was expected. My father, too, in his mid-thirties, chose a career change. If the gospel stories are just stories, that Jesus was in his mid-thirties when he died seems an apposite choice for the storytellers. If they contain accurate biographical material concerning the days leading up to his crucifixion, it would seem that his mission, a revelation of his identity, achieved its completion when he reached a similar age. At my theological college none of this went unnoticed.

At thirty four, in certain cultures, this is the age that boys finally become men, or having become young men, warriors, in their teens, now become elders. And I've noted that at twice seventeen, or thereabouts, this is also the age, biologically, that parents see their children grown to the age where they can bear children, where the focus on nurture switches from eldest child to potential grandchild. It seems natural to me that such a switch would be accompanied by a widening of perspective, a concern growing for one's community as a whole, rather than one's immediate family.

So what happened to me then? I experienced what psychologists call a moment of Absolute Unitary Being - AUB. At this point I re-engaged with the vocation to vicarhood from which I had in my twenties walked away; though not in a desperate sense, more in the sense that any choice I might make would be good - or perhaps honest, okay, are better words. In a nutshell, my perspective widened. I sensed a one-ness with everything, including my understanding of God. Indeed, my understanding of God widened to include everything I didn't know, as well as those things I did.

How to make sense of such an event? One way might be to describe it in terms of identity. This was the moment I knew myself as an individual. Jung calls it individuation. It's quite easy to see such a moment as the apotheosis of one's life. Nothing will ever feel as good. Enlightenment is pursued through one's novitiate: afterwards, the Buddhist saying goes, one returns to chopping wood and lugging water around. Recently I've found it next to impossible to shake the idea that having experienced the AUB, yet again I've returned to a sinful state. I've been given a free pass to Heaven, and even turned my back on that.

I think - and this is the hypothesis - that a more helpful conception of what is happening would be the following. The AUB was about individuation: since then, however, I've not been regressing, I've been developing. Every faculty by which I achieved my identity the first time has not been switched off: instead it is going about its business building secondary, perhaps even tertiary or further identities. Identities that finesse the one I already feel good about, extending my range, building my empathy, giving me alternatives, allowing me to venture beyond myself at just the point in time when the first intimations of mortality start whispering about my joints (think evolutionarily, rather than idealistically, pre-cod liver oil and U3A).

The difference this time round is that I already know I'm okay, and everyone else, and everyone else I could be. All I need to do, when spectres of guilt haunt me, is remind the new identity I am constructing around me, that I inhabit, that, for the duration I am, that it is every bit as okay as the AUB proved my first full identity to be.

Multiplicities; stories with new characters I have created myself to be - these take shape as I pursue the relevant and new-minted art of storying, an art which may, actually, be what evolution has hardwired us all to experience.

702 - Hypnosis

Nice definition by Bryan Appleyard in Aliens: Why They Are Here:

Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.

This, I am pretty sure, is what must be harnessed if storying (deliberately shaping your life/lives to stories of your choice) is to become a shared artform.

703 - Exegesis

Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, underwent an experience of mental intrusion and enlightenment, in an altered state of consciousness induced while taking painkillers, which he proceeded to interrogate over the last eight years of his life. The result, a million pages of journal writing which he titled 'Exegesis', will be edited and published in two volumes next year.

According to Bryan Appleyard, in a subtle book, Aliens: Why They Are Here, Dick came to believe the Roman Empire had never fallen, and found its current expression in rampant materialist capitalism. He also believed that a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) orbits the Earth, using symbols such as the Christian fish sign to disinhibit people to whom it wishes to communicate. Appleyard writes:

Dick glimpsed the centrality of the alien in the postwar world. He was himself a stranger in a strange land, a troubled drifter. In his madness he lived in the third realm of aliens and angels. The world was alien to him and he was alien to it. He understood the eternal truth that we don't fit and he saw how modernity had heightened and dramatized our discomfort.

'The fish sign causes you to remember,' he wrote in his exegesis, 'Remember what?... Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA... You remember your real nature... The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.'
(pp.156-7)

I can identify with Dick the drifter, not least because I can see my own in his experiences in altered states of consciousness. I particularly like Appleyard's suggestion that making sense of his experiences required him to move into a third realm where the supernatural, or extraterrestrial at least, was commonplace. My own experiences precipitated a similar search for explanation, which I tried to find in Evangelical Christianity, and I'm very sure I wasn't the only one there to make such a journey.

I'm less happy with the suggestion that alienation is an eternal truth, in the sense that having realised we are here in a thrown condition, we can do no more about it than pick up the pieces and start walking. My subsequent journey has been about the discovery that if we are all aliens, then we are aliens nurtured by the world we have been born into - that has evolved us to be who we are. We are social aliens with four billion years worth of fine-tuned mutual space-suit around us.

I'd like to suggest that alienation is only half the picture: familial warmth provides the rest. The Gnostic sense of thrownness is there, but so is rootedness: my learning path, hereon in, is about using each to critique and expand my appreciation of the other.

I think this expands Appleyard's third realm to the breadth of the cosmos. That is to say, there is no third realm worth speaking of, the first (physical) and the second (mental) having always fallen away by the time we pause to analyse them. Or to put it another way, we are all of us born into the third realm, where the unknown stands side by side with the known, and as we grow we turn first to the physical and then to the mental (maybe vice versa) to make sense of it all.

I guess we all have to journey the full length of our journey. Quick fixes and permanent stop-offs in realms along the way are not an option. Dick's Exegesis, which I would like to read, will prove no more (or less) than a map of his particular path through life.

706 - Analysing Dreams

A line of thought developed in conversation with E last night. It must have worked because I slept smiling and woke at 2.30am with an idea for a great new card game. Calling it Aseco, and played it this morning with E, who offered great spousal support: "I hate to admit it, but this is really quite good!"

I'll post the rules and a sketch later in the week - lots happening to do with board games, etc, which it'll be fun to let you know about.

In the meantime, line of thought:

1 Our life, linearly through time, proceeds from sleep to waking to sleep to waking, so on and so on.

2. Therefore, one source of information for a particular night's dreaming is the events of the day preceding it.

3. And one outcome of a night's dreaming is information expressed in the way we live the following day.

4. People for whom, in given circumstances, this process occurs more beneficially are more likely to survive and pass their genes on.

5. Therefore, because we are here, we are likely, unless circumstances change, to find processes 1 to 3 beneficial to us.

6. Elaborating on the processes, information from one period of waking is likely, during the subsequent period of dreaming, to be well-integrated with previous experiences of waking and sleeping.

7. Similarly, information from this subsequent dream period is likely to inform not only the following day, but days and nights (waking and dreaming periods) beyond.

8. All this will tend towards a positive outcome, given reasonably constant physical (health, environmental etc) parameters.

9. Not only will a smooth process of waking and sleeping, with little or no conscious analysis of preceding and subsequent states, tend towards a beneficial outcome, but also disruptions to that process, such as a sudden wakening, and hence memory of dreaming, or induced slip into an altered state of consciousness.

10. Waking strategies to deal with disrupted sleep states will inform the waking and sleeping processes following their implementation, as these will be a part of the greater body of wake-time information to be processed.

11. Similarly, sleeping strategies to deal with disrupted waking states will inform future life experience.

12. Given that all this tends to the beneficial, one is free to approach dream analysis any way one wants, tried and tested or experimental (or indeed to ignore the process of analysis entirely), confident that subsequent cycles of sleeping and waking will allow one to refine and/or expand that technique, in the same way that any other process of learning evolves.

13. If non-linear time is also allowed, and/or multidimensionality of other kinds, as a source of information for dream or waking states, this too, from the perspective of linear time (and perhaps from all perspectives), can only be seen as an evolving process, and as such, beneficial, or at worst, neutral.

14. In the same manner as dream analysis whilst awake, analysis of waking experience whilst asleep will tend towards the beneficial (at worst neutral), over subsequent cycles, and can therefore begin at any point, and in any way.

15. I am writing this because as of today I wish to recommit myself, and redouble my efforts at, dream and waking analysis.

707 - Two-Way Traffic

[Joseph Campbell (1973, rep. 1991), Myths To Live By]

Niche Construction would suggest that all we aspire our technology to do is to allow us to be the human we already are. Therefore we do not need to look outside of ourselves to find the relevant myth for a given technology or the event/s it precipitates.

The dynamic is sketched at the foot of the page.

708 - Binker

Binker: measure of the correlation between empirical reality and a given account of it. Or between two accounts of it.

709 - Fictitious

As of today, this blog'll be containing fictional posts as well as factual. I'll stick a 'fiction' tag at the foot of each such post, for clarity. I want to start feeding invented moments into the blog as an experiment in storying. And if it all goes a bit rubbish, I'll stop!

(I'll tag this post 'fiction' too, to link the explanation in, but it's up to you to decide whether that is a valid commentary on its content or not.)

711 - A New Strategy

The Game Of Life makes my skin crawl a little. It's a boardgame that portrays life as a path through education or work to success, wealth, property and retirement. Then you die, sometimes lingeringly, though that isn't presented as an option on the official board.

The truth is that the game offers a baby-boomer life story, very modern, very black and white, and measured in dollars.

I'm in a conciliatory mood, so I want to suggest that this is a valid life story, but it is still, surely, only one of many. The postmodern Game Of Life would offer as many options, as many strategies, as each player chose to imagine.

My idea is that this could be the ideal way to start exploring what storying, as an artform, might mean in practice. I've started to get a grip on the concept of identity, but storying (follow the tags!) is more than the establishment of a conscious identity: it's also about arranging life circumstances in such a way that moments evolve into the stories you want, as a conscious and creative act.

It's easy to get bogged down: if you can't generate a story worthy of Tolstoy, Trevor, Proulx or Nabokov, why start? But games, especially the classics, are simple, like narrative rules. Though they do generate great complexity, which is why chess is a beautiful art, they grow organically from very small beginnings.

What better way, therefore, for me to begin to get a grip on the rules of narrative than to play them out as a series of games?

713 - Nature/ Nurture

I think these three quotes all say the same thing. Do you?

Now here's the pivotal point: the neurology and functioning of the brain create a mercurial type of human consciousness that is universal. And the ways in which that consciousness can be accommodated in daily life by human beings are not infinite, as world ethnography, spanning a multitude of cultures, indeed shows.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005), Inside the Neolithic Mind, p.9

[Our perception of aliens] is to do with the ambivalent nature of consciousness and our uneasy sense of being both within the world and outside it. This is, in part, a commentary on modernity, but also it is about an eternal aspect of the human predicament that has been massively amplified but not created by modernity.... For now, I need simply say that I start from the undoubted reality of aliens. they may or may not exist but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something, possibly about themselves, but certainly about us. In order to understand what they are saying it is necessary to abandon the usual barriers between fiction and reality. There are many important connections between the aliens in Star Trek, H. G. Wells' Martians, the abductors of Betty and Barney Hill, the cattle mutilators in Montana and the committee of beings known as the Nine who speak through the Florida medium Phyllis V. Schlemmer. These connections form an enormous mirror of ourselves and of our age, through which, like Alice, we can pass and find ourselves in a different world.
Bryan Appleyard (2005), Aliens: Why They Are Here, p.9

What is The Filth?
The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. Metaphor combines two or more seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that stimulates lateral thought processes and creativity...
What is The Filth used for?
This comic book is used to treat all manner of disorders including Internet pornography addiction, insomnia, grief, "mid-life" crisis, schizophrenia, the ignorance of samsara and the 21st century blues, especially in patients whose millennial anxiety and general paranoia has not yet responded to normal treatments.
When must The Filth not be used?
If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
Grant Morrison (2004), The Filth, opening pages.

I think each of these is saying that culture is by definition fiction, because we make it up. And nature is by definition reality. And to be human, we have to hold the two in tandem. We can't avoid it. It's what we do.

I think what we do, what all of us do with this tension, is make church.

717 - Memory, Nostalgia and Civil Rights

Imagine if the memories of Whitley Bay submitted by you and I to Francis Frith were manipulable, erasable, through targeted pill use or disruptive stimulation. We could forget the Dome ever was, our trip to the seaside having been prevented from forming. That kiss-me-quick under the wurlitzers? The dodgy B&B we stayed in? Gone. Or last week's return trip - how downbeat, compared to the childhood memory, how disappointing. You could lift it, replace it with happier times (though the physical buildings, and our bodies, would still degrade).

Well, they are, just about. A report on Radio 4 this morning described one recent experiment where memories of traumatic images from old public information films were prevented from 'developing' - it takes six hours for them to set in place, it seems - by having viewers play Tetris after watching (the cognitive processes used are so similar, the brain 'forgets' to remember the film images). The Today programme interviewed Anders Sandberg and AC Grayling afterwards. Both agreed that such technologies are useful for dealing with disfunctional memories - induced, for example, by post traumatic stress - but they raise profound questions about what it means to be human.

We are our memories, bad as well as good. Or is that actually true? Perhaps we can 'dress up' in fresh memories, the way you'd wear a smarter dress if you had the choice. Why, in a meritocracy, let a shoddy past hold you back?

This is why, in a blog dedicated to Whitley Bay, I've spent so much time getting my thoughts straight about communal and personal identity. It really does impact on the real world. Whitley, a nostalgia-buff's wet dream, has a stronger identity than most, and one, perhaps, more often let down. The seaside town's journey to find a new identity offers a perfect case study for reflection on the kinds of questions raised by neuroscientific and biotechnological research into identity formation. (Perhaps a bid could be prepared for some of the new seaside town regeneration money, also announced today on the programme, to fund a research project into nostalgia and its cure.)

I call the creative use of fresh and manipulated identities storying, because I believe stories, in all their beauty, are both the outcome, and the best tools by which we may get a handle on our identies. The potential is huge, but scary, and I suspect attempts will be made to control such technologies, not always for the best of reasons.

I reckon I'm pretty much on the money, too. The joke in the interview was that our grandchildren will look back at us as Neanderthals, exclaiming, as James Naughtie put it, 'They didn't know what pill to take!'. More pertinently, Sandberg explained, our right to control what goes on cognitively in our own heads should be "considered one of our basic liberal freedoms".

Storying is a civil rights movement.

719 - Personality and Consciousness

Geoffrey Miller, in Spent, documents research into five key personality traits, and concludes that, together with General Intelligence (or IQ), they give us pretty much all we need to know about the inner life of the people we meet. The traits are openness, conscientiousness, agreeability, stability and extroversion. Broadly speaking, populations are distributed in a bell-curve across every trait, and also across IQ. There are few correlations between trait scores, although openness correlates fairly positively with IQ.

Miller suggests IQ is a measure of the healthy functioning of our nervous system, and the personality traits reflect survival and reproduction strategies adopted by our earliest ancestors. Daniel Nettle, in Personality, suggests that openness is a measure of the breadth of connections we make amongst concepts and sensory stimuli. Although there is no moral value attached either to high or low scores in any trait, different communities have favoured traits differently at different times.

Openness carries with it the benefits of creativity, but the risks of psychosis. Nettle argues that openness evolved as the ability to manipulate symbols became increasingly valuable in early human communities. Miller wonders whether displays of extreme openness amongst the young reflect a strategy for demonstrating the essential soundness of their minds.

Openness is linked to artistic creativity, as well as receptivity to unusual experiences, and as such, one might hypothesize, is important to any consideration of spirituality and religion, though a high score would not predict religiosity, which has frequently a conservative bias.

But David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, in Inside The Neolithic Mind, offer an alternative measure by which the religious content of a community might be explained. They locate the source of religious imagery in experiences of altered states of consciousness. Our minds function across a spectrum of consciousness, from attentiveness to waking reality, through periods of reflectivity, to daydreaming, hypnagogic states, and finally, in sleep, our normal dreamlife. The modern west, they suggest, values the wide awake, rational state, where earlier cultures favoured the various dream states. Therefore, earlier cultures developed concepts of dream wisdom and spiritual realms, which we abandon (perhaps legitimately) for logic and empiricism.

It is certainly very pleasing to correlate religious concepts of the immanence and transcendance of spiritual powers with, respectively, attentiveness to the details of reality, and dreaming swoons. It is also intriguing to ask whether measures of openness and of consciousness correlate. If they do, one might ask whether they are interdependent, or in fact facets of a single trait. If they don't, it might be fair to ask that consciousness be accorded value as a mental trait in its own right.

Perhaps the consciousness spectrum will be found to equate to IQ, instead, except that high alertness might exist in dream states as well as maths tests, but some might prefer to operate in the former, whilst others are predisposed to the latter. If you choose one rather than the other strategy for obtaining survival tips, this may fairly be described as an aspect of your personality, rather than a measure, like IQ, of general health. In any case, whatever the analysis, one might expect preferences to be distributed in a bell-curve across the human population, in much the same way as other traits.

720 - Art; Cosmologies; Bill Thompson

All at Cafe Culture Newcastle last night.

Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.

He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.

This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.

Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.

I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.

He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)

This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.

This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.

Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:

Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods.... These shapes are... a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought.
(p.22)

I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.

David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.

On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.

722 - Playing With Identities

Still trying to get my head around whether storying will work as a concept, and if so how. That's the deliberate creation of and dwelling in one's own story-world, as an artform the time for which, with growing technological focus on identity manipulation, has come.

Choice of identity must be key. I'm looking for evidence that people are manipulating their identities as a form of self-expression. Alongside the growth of interest in improvisation courses, burlesque, role-playing games, and Second-Life, I've noticed people getting increasingly creative with their social-networking site images. It's no longer just yourself aged sixteen, or manga-tized, or Legolas instead, but paintings, photographs of look-alike stars, images snatched from all eras of popular culture.

Hmm. Are we just having a laugh, or are we trying these personas on for size? And given that facebook is about realtime-life as well as online game-playing, are we taking these personas out into the world with us when we switch the computer off?