It's 2:37pm. Do you know where your breakfast smoothie is?

Seriously, all I've had to eat today is alchemy, and that's not very filling. I've taken to experimenting with smoothies, with mixed success. Today's effort is pretty good - an apple, watermelon, strawberries, yogurt, golden flax seed meal, whey protein, greens+. Pretty simple, quite tasty. The last one I did contained way, way too much mint extract - it burned from coldness. Other failures included trying to add ashwaghanda... mmmm... sour piss... Currently on order is some maca root, suma root, and chlorella powder, which will replace the greens+. That ought to yang it up a bit. I'm hoping the chlorella will be more concentrated, and less green than the greens+. I quite like the lovely red/pink it comes out before the greens+, rather than the grey/green it turns after. One time it came out purple, from blueberries.

Hey internet peoples, do you have any further smoothie suggestions?

Just call me Organic Psychosyndrome. Just call me Mr. Butterfingers.

Every year, winds carry 40 million tons of dust from the Sahara desert, across the Atlantic, to the Amazon. There, the rains wash it out of the atmosphere, and the minerals and nutrients from the dust fertilize the jungle.

From the Berstein Lectures on Hegel...

"When I say that philosophy is always historical and cultural, I'm saying that philosophy emerges from a crisis. Which is why you can always tell bad academic philosophy, because it doesn't emerge from a crisis, it emerges from a puzzle."

If we take the extended mind hypothesis seriously, even in its most banal scientific formulation, it means that to understand the mind we have to look at it as conditioned by history. It has already been clearly demonstrated that the brain reconfigures itself given different patterns of use, to a dramatic degree. The brain can reconfigure itself in startling ways, that, for example, the heart or kidneys never could. To really understand how the brain works then, we would have to look at it under a broad variety of kinds of use. Generally, neuropsychology is done on 'average' people. That is, people conditioned to a dense semiotic field of historically unique proportions, and a set of tasks likewise unique in the animal world. Lots of interesting work is done on people with aberrant body-minds, of course. But given that it is such a young field, nothing so far can be done to compare, say, the neuropsychological differences between those in the renaissance and people now. Foucault's The Order of Things suggests to me that cognition is immensely mutable, and that the answer to "How does cognition work?" partly depends on which culture and epoch you're talking about. Could it be possible to take The Order of Things as a map to explore the different ways we can use our brains?

Did you ever have a dream where you found new rooms in your home? I had one some months ago, when I didn't have that feeling in my waking life at all. Now, at the end of one job and one degree, I've got some of that glow. This is what neurogenesis feels like, methinks. It's about time, too - I suspect I have a case of cortisol burn.

Last night was Play, an art party. Picture a bar full of people painting and drawing. Making odd objects out of plasticine and pipe cleaners. Also, a table for dominoes. It was magnificent, like an ironic twist brought 360 degrees to become sincere again.

This summer, I'd like to get to know Hegel. What I'm after is metaphysics in motion. The temptation to produce metaphysical systems is the temptation to draw in detail the shape of the intellectual horizon. However, Wittgenstein reminds us: "In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)." But of course the horizon is not a clear and fixed point - it is both a more-or-less kind of thing, and constantly evolving. Perhaps we could become aware of the horizon, and give provisional accounts of what it may look like, based on what it has looked like in the past. We may hope for speculative accounts of what it may look like in the future.

It was a good solid 12 hour day today. 8 hours of making pictures frames, 4 hours of marking  essays. A good balance, I think, and just enough work to exhaust but not exasperate. We should all be so lucky as to use what we have.

Something jumped out at me marking the essays on Freud. People overwhelmingly tend to focus on either aggressiveness or sexuality as the "main" instinct driving humans. They will invariably mark in passing the existence of the other drive, but insist nonetheless that their focus is the main one. And further, they will be thoroughly convinced that it was Freud who focused on the one they themselves have fixated on. Sometimes, they even chastise him for his tunnel-vision in this regard.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080423121427.htm

"By blocking certain mechanisms that control the way that nerve cells in the brain communicate, scientists from the University of Bristol have been able to prevent visual recognition memory in rats. This demonstrates they have identified cellular and molecular mechanisms in the brain that may provide a key to understanding processes of recognition memory."

A pet peeve:While these researchers may have identified a mechanistic process underlying memory, there is no reason to think that they have reduced memory to a mechanistic process.

Consider an analogy: What if  I claimed that I understand the mechanism by which my computer  produces video images, because I could prevent it from doing so by knocking out the video card?  "Look, if I knock out this one part it stops working. Therefore this part produces video. Now, we understand it." We would hardly have explained how it works.

This kind of muddled talk pervades the popular literature around science. Things are said to be "explained" when only the barest description has been achieved. Thus, the illusion that science has demystified the world persists.

I've been inside a fairy tale called The Golden Key for about a week now. It's the subject of the last essay of my BA. Appropriate, I think.

I have found my golden key. I'm not sure I've fully uncovered the iron chest though. In alchemy, iron is associated with Mars - instinctual affect, drives, aggressiveness. But the casket is a distinctly feminine image, containing, womb-like. I understand the iron chest as the cthonic body, the body as a voice of the innermost, a voice of the unconscious. I know it's there, somewhere. I know because I found the key.

What if morally relevant freedom isn't something we have achieved yet? Or perhaps, have only achieved in the rarest instances, with a few exceptional people, or better, a few exceptional moments, when it bloomed into the world. What is free will is something in our future, something we are growing into, rather than the real conditions of our present existence?

If consciousness is an emergent property of matter, matter being temporally prior, then presumably there has been a gradual shift from a situation where our bodies were merely aggregates of matter, to the (hypothetical?) point where the mind causally influences matter. If this is the case, then there seems to be no principled reason to suppose that we're done now, that our degree of "freedom" or perhaps, causal autonomy, has ceased to increase. I'd say there is reason to believe that correlated with our own continued complexification we are experiencing an increase of internal holism, and therefore causal autonomy. How much can you actually control your body with your mind? A handful of a few hundred or thousand voluntary movements, the nuances of which are almost all involuntary? Through years of extensive training, a few individuals can do much more. What if the conditions of our existence change such that the 'miracles' of yogis seem like party tricks?

But autonomy is not enough to entail freedom. We must also be connected to the material more thoroughly. That is the prima facie paradox - we must be both independent, and connected.

The idea of freedom as a kind of amor fati has always both appealed to me, and repulsed me. You are free to embrace your destiny. Blech. But in moments of ekstasis, when the subject-object line is demolished, linguistic monstrosities like this make perfect sense. Perhaps it is possible that our experience of the relationship between mind and body will be so altered by what is to come that an 'amor fati' kind of freedom will become a psychological possibility.