Cosmos Café - Bioelectric Fields and Cognition [2022-05-05]

[madrush (Marco V Morelli)]

@johnnydavis54

And when I would like to make sing…can that happen?

I have been working on it, slinking my way towards a target morphology. After reviewing our last Café, along with my notes from the reading, here is my latest attempt (a progressive iteration):

https://cloud.cosmos.coop/s/ZRtfQM3wsbGe6ND

Unfortunately, I’m having trouble recording a new rehearsal/performance, which perhaps the crew could help me with one of the next times we meet.

I also hope to be able to read The Enigma of an Evil Dream whenever that’s ready! The process of a piece “taking on a life of its own that is weaved together with my own sense of agency,” is very familiar (and yet ever more strange) to me.

[johnnydavis54 (john davis)]

@madrush

Unfortunately, I’m having trouble recording a new rehearsal/performance, which perhaps the crew could help me with one of the next times we meet.

Might I make a suggestion? Could you take the text out of the Cloud and post it on the next Cafe page.?Then you perform it at our next live call. We could then begin the process of integrating acoustic and visual spaces with an attuned social space. Then we could ask as a group what does this poem amplify, retrieve, reverse into, obsolesce? We might invite a fresh response, a devil’s advocate, and an invisible third.

I find communal spaces are becoming so dis-connected from a shared rytyhmic beat within a beat, anticipating the next beat, that most of our vibratory potentia gets lost in our wish lists of possibilities generated by the robot within. I hope we can break out of the possible as soon possible and start taping into our vast, undiscovered, potentia. To do this, however, we need two others who can catch the vibe. This is becoming a lost art as we are turning quickly into the anti-touch, asyncrhonicicity of the laptop. As our next session is dedicated to attunement in ethical dimensions this could be a good start. In my world, ethics and aesthetics are very close to one another, inseperable. Trying to seperate them is Evil.

Think six impossible things before breakfast, the Red Queen told Alice, and I think this is a very good practice but we also need to share our impossible dreams and nightmares in the safe vibratory chamber of a triad ( rather than another stodgy, off -with-their-heads, steering committee.) And a triad is very different from the politeness of dyads that are more prone to an addiction to report upon bad weather and being very nice to each other. This leads to boredom real quick. I have wanted to turn this dyadic/triadic tension into an art form that could save us from the Luciferic muck our discourse has become and I am growing less optimistic this will happen each day. But one always tries to stay open to the potentia. My story is all about this…

Neuroplasticity, we are learning, comes out of mistakes and errors, not by repeating formulas and best practices. That is why experts have so little to offer us these days. Can we stumble in public and turn the stumble into a dance move? It seems our times requires a small group to make this kind of willingness to stumble into an aesthetic movement.

@madrush

The process of a piece “taking on a life of its own that is weaved together with my own sense of agency,” is very familiar (and yet ever more strange) to me.

If you put your garments on the line to dry, and are willing to risk that a stranger may steal the garment, this risk is worth taking. Too many of our garments are flapping in a breeze, and don’t we get tired of wearing the same old thing? It may be a sense of delight that we notice when someone has snatched our favorite garment off the line. We need to feel the absence of the old and the desire for something else to re-direct our imaginations out of the algoryhtmic psychic ruts our too, too solid flesh is heir to.

[madrush (Marco V Morelli)]

Here is my latest, with all the pathos I could muster in the midst of everyday discombobulation and disruption:

mvm_impossible-biological-objects_3rd-it.pdf

I maintain the PDF form in order to preserve the structure of the words on the page. However, below, I paste the raw text without formatting. This is my third (and possibly last) iteration. I would be happy to re-perform it live during the next Café, as a good example of my process of “poetic listening” for what sung to me in Levin’s discourse.

By listening to my listening, I believe, I was able to make some kind of novel sense from our subject of study. I suppose you could say this is a kind of “Devil’s advocate” reading response.

Impossible Biological Objects (after Michael Levin)

Picasso frog faces
whose heads deprogress
& literally explode

Photon clouds irradiating the subject
in a field of all fields
on booty patrol

Who is responsible for carcinogenic
defection from
the body plan?

Symbiogenesis of subtle
anatomical structures gone wild:
predict & control

Somatizing greedy infotaxis
with data compression in nested dolls
of homunculi stacks

Reprogramming sublime slime molds
through memory-lattices of virtual governors
via astral introjection

Calling out all militaristic industrial feminized
pharmaceutical infotainment orgies, bypassing
the Dreaming of the Earth

Biosemiotic gestures in sub-units of metazoan swarms—
organic suspects (in the cybernetic sense) ensuring
a specific sensual range of parameters

“Well, hello, speed-optimized nervous system—
would you like some caffeine & sugar to go
with those novel stressors?”

Transcriptional cascades, central channels holding tensions,
thresholds tipping—navigating worlds while maintaining
metabolic integrity

The purposive activity of brains
is of no concern
to the Nirvanic Void—

The scaling of cognitive capacities from axial axolotls
empirically culminating in flaming Bodhisattvas
beyond the pale of time

Beyond computational boundaries: tunneling nanotubes
for the sake of ecstatic outcomes
would be a true pinnacle of synthetic biology

Highly diverse types of agents
could be exobiological or artificial
or what have you…

For cells gone off the reservation, angelic overtones
slinging through ion channels, over gap junctions,
may serve to minimize surprise

Identifying higher order structures
with finely tuned bullcrap-detectors & counterfactual loops
might optimize control policies

A non-magical state space
where no claims about first-person
qualia are made

From simple homeostatic pathways
via evolutionary ratchets, we are directed
towards electric goals.

[Michael_Stumpf (LaughingCryingDancing)]

@madrush

By listening to my listening, I believe, I was able to make some kind of novel sense from our subject of study. I suppose you could say this is a kind of “Devil’s advocate” reading response.

Boundaries & Permeability

@madrush

A non-magical state space
where no claims about first-person
qualia are made

From simple homeostatic pathways
via evolutionary ratchets, we are directed
towards electric goals.

[Oliver_Rabinovitch (Oliver et al Rabinovitch)]

hey guys, do i understand correctly that y’all are looking to modulate, rhythmically speaking?
may I be a 4 in your fib-in-gnocis? lol

to be sure though, the fields at play are playing the field here in good stead. I’ve reviewed the trialogue once above with healthy patterns arising in modulation within and without…

i’ll be back later to entwine

[madrush (Marco V Morelli)]

Why don’t we catch up sometime, Oli? Later in the week or over some weekend, maybe. How have you been?

[Oliver_Rabinovitch (Oliver et al Rabinovitch)]

Hey Dreamlet, thanks I’d love to. I’ve been bully. Always learning, at the snail-pace. you know me.

later in the week is good, i’ll be on the look out for ya

[Oliver_Rabinovitch (Oliver et al Rabinovitch)]

Like a fungal well
we could divine infinite
i suspect
or you could
ask

[Oliver_Rabinovitch (Oliver et al Rabinovitch)]

i’ll never understand why children are afraid of the the bootieman…

The Brand New Heavies - Boogie (2004)