Short video on synaethesia:
The main flaw I see in most people’s perception of how this phenomena works is that they are thinking of it as an aberration, an abnormality in certain individuals. They’re almost looking at it like its a disorder or a riddle to be solved, when really that takes away from the majesty, the mystery, the grandeur and beauty of human experience, which is a much more varied thing than most people are willing to accept.
I like this writing, very synaesthetic:
Peel another layer of skin off the Great Onion of Deeply Held Musical Centrisms. I’ll see your Rockism and raise you a Pop Teleologism, whereby musical value is assumed to derive from artists’ intentions, purposes, ends, and other human-faced things that go bump-and-crunk in the night; and there is the stuff psi takes aim at. A shadowy Brooklyn noise trio whose membership consists of three hermetic improvisers masquerading as three hermetic noise musicians masquerading as three beer-swilling metal-stoner dudes, psi describe themselves as “evolving into nothing.” Rarely static, the music expands, contracts, breaks, oozes, but it does not develop towards an end—thankfully. Good noise, like good science, renders insensible the teleological values of intelligent design, and psi becomes what it is in punctuated fits and starts that pretend to nothing but what they are. They massage the ears with murmuring quizzical streams of ululatory sonic babble, crushing-to-painful timbral quilts of sounds, teasing references to brut-rock rhythm, and the occasional carelessly processed vocal fits resembling at turns both the extended vocalisms of Jaap Blonk and the early Wolf Eyes-Andrew W.K. collaborations.
While multifractal spectra are convex, general field theoretic arguments show that power of field operators $\phi^f$ yield a concave spectrum of exponents as function of $f$. This is resolved by appropriate choice of operators to describe multifractal moments. In a Lagrangian field theory of two mutually interacting species of fields $\phi,\psi$, operators $O_{f’f}=\psi^{f’}\phi^f$ with traceless symmetry give rise to multifractal spectra of harmonic diffusion near absorbing fractals when evaluated for zero component fields.
I don’t quite know how to explain it yet, but I think this same effect is happening for me with the internet lately:
The first telegraph company opened for business in 1858. The operators who were around the receivers all the time soon learned to hear the song of the clicking and clacking and found they didn’t have to look at the scribed tape at all! They could read the messages in their heads as soon as they heard rhythm of the sounding brass. Cli-cli-click clack cla-cla-clack cli-cla-cla-click soon registered in their head as “STOP”.
Mysterium tremendum, man’s experience of the numinous, Mandala OS, Wilhelm Reich’s FBI file declassified:
Because the mysterium tremendum is wholly Other, i.e., is unlike anything that we have encountered or ever will encounter, it arouses in us a mental state of stupor, a “blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”
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Have been seeing a lot of positive chatter lately out of the ham community around the subjects of what is the amateur radio service and where is it going. Addmitedly, my exposure to the culture, community & history which supports and perpetuates this important technological paradigm has been limited. I’m a newbie and I haven’t taken any of the FCC exams or received my initiatory shamanic call sign/alphanumeric spirit animal, nor do I own any radio equipment - aside from a couple FM-AM receivers and an old borrowed CB handset with some crystals inside of it. I don’t even think they are the magic kind.
So I recognize that from an insider’s viewpoint of what ultimately is a hierarchical and traditionalist aesthetic system, that my outbursts and spoutings on what I think amateur radio and other forms of open community-based telecommunications are or ought to be may not really count for all that much. I don’t even have a call-sign, after all. But I do have a strong background in computer technology, and a tremendous unwavering devotion to the old-fashioned American ideals of free and open communication, and of harmonious self-determination and sovereignty of peoples working together for mutual benefit.
Ham Culture As Cultural Snap-Shot of By-Gone America
This is, in fact, a major part of what interests me so much about ham radio: is that it was birthed as a technology (and a supporting user aesthetic) at a particular point in history, and somehow - almost magically - encoded within the perpetuation of the technology itself is inbuilt a snapshot of what America once was all about. It’s like people focused their hopes and dreams, refining them in the inner fire of their imaginations, and then manifested creatively their intentions in the world at large through a technology which allowed them to express themselves and to form an authentic community built simply on service to one another and service to the technologies and frequencies which support that level of interaction.
In a world of rapidly changing, disruptive, chaotic and often unstable and unsustainable technologies, radio spectrum frequency transmission and reception has stood the test of time and proven its usefulness as a wholly separate and other paradigm. This, to me, is the kind of approach which will carry forward telecommunications into a future where any person with technology bought at a drug store can - in essence - become the receiving and transmitting hub for all the world’s knowledge.
Preserving Alternatives & Legacy Technologies
Amateur radio, in my eyes, ought to preserved as is, fully intact simply because of its historical status, its archaic tendencies and organizational structure: which, when you look at it, turn out to be not so very different from the kind of strategic thinking which originally spawned the internet. We don’t want to lose it as a human wisdom tradition amidst a sea of corporations spouting neologisms and throw-away brand names, all clamoring for a slice of the airwaves - which these other ham operators point out - are a limited natural resource. Electro-magnetic frequencies only go so far up and down the dial. What we do with them, what we transmit with them, what kind of communications are really worth it become more and more important.
I’m anxious, more than any other political changes occurring, to find out how the digital transition is going to affect the population of the United States. Most people, I feel like, aren’t aware of how basic technology works nowadays. The element of focus has gone someplace else, but the amateur radio service retains this as its central focus. Wrapped up somewhere in this is a lesson for how a common technological dream can become a real rallying point for the coming together of people to share their lives with one another, simple human communion.
Safeguarding The Spectrum of Reality
More broadly, the question of who controls radio spectrum and what the rules are is tightly bound up with how I view reality. I see consciousness itself as a field of experience, with a whole spectrum of options available to us: we can go out and have any kind of experiences we want as human beings, provided we have the resources to pull it off. When consciousness is viewed as a spectrum of possibilities, the limitations you place on acceptable or “normal” behavior can become arbitrary gradations which we pass on through our behaviors to those around us. But if we are able to sit up, look at ourselves, take notice of what kinds of things we’re receiving in our lives and what kinds of things we’re transmitting, we can take steps towards empowering our own communications - no matter what kinds of technology we’re using. Thank you.
Continuing on the line of conjecture related to sensory substitution. The article on how simple, scientifically, it is to induce the sensation that you’re perceiving your own body from outsid yourself uses the following image:
Summarizing what they seem to be saying, you have a harness rigged up to yourself and to a mannequin so that you’re perceiving when you look down at your “self” the actual body of the mannequin which has cameras and other input devices mounted where it’s figurative head is. Similar to the ganzfeld effect, I imagine, they are saying that’s basically all it takes: is creating just enough of the illusion of it happening that your brain then goes the extra mile, takes the “leap of faith”, and completes the perception more seamlessly than maybe any technology could. Okay, that’s me interpolating and extrapolating a little bit, but I think it’s basically how it works.
They were even saying that if you come at the mannequin body with a knife like to cut it that the perceiving center physically attached to a human body elsewhere in timespace will react with anxiety, like it’s own person is in danger. The somatic identification is that strong.
Maybe I’ve just been thinking about the Mercer Box of Philip K. Dick a lot, but the imagery involved of somebody stabbing this mannequin which becomes sort of like a universal “everyman” type identifier, well it just reminds me of the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism, which you’re supposed to sort of follow around inside the space of a church and ritually reenact the Passion of the Christ, as it were. One part of which involves him getting stabbed in the ribs by Roman soldiers.
Funny how things change.
