notes on alchemy

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:42:11 GMT

if transgendered people are trannies, does that make cisgendered people cissies?

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:53:40 GMT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wgoodyear16/BNStory/National/home

"Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.

“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail."

___________

The only possible reason why belief or non-belief in evolution would be a religious question is if one thought that Christianity and evolutionary theory are mutually exclusive. He calls it a religious question. He then states that he is a Christian. The logic of the situation isn't complicated.

I'm more disappointed than anything else. I rather thought this is the kind of thing that happens south of here. I find it embarrassing.

the Order of Things again

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:47:35 GMT

The transition from the 16th century mode of understanding to the Classical mode was a transition from divination to signification. In the 16th century, the world itself was a series of signs, which existed previous to our knowledge of them, placed by God waiting for us to divine them. The early 17th century brought a transformation of this mode of knowing, into a world where there was only arbitrary signifiers and what they signified, a world of measurement and ordered series. Everything became what it is, and not anything else. Now, we're in the modern age, typified by organic (autopoeitic) unities.

Speculation: evangelical atheism represents a regressive tendency, a desperate attempt to return to the classical episteme. Notice: the worldview of someone like Dawkins is virtually identical to someone like Bacon, or Hume. He is a man of the 17th century. The feigned target of his vitriol is the 16th century world of magic and divination. But that mode of understanding is 5 centuries away. The real (semi-conscious) target of these attacks is the modern episteme, the cutting edge of thought. In the autopoeitic unity, there is a kind of teleology; each part exists for the sake of the others (cf. Kant on the telology of organisms). This mode of understanding is implicit in the kind of 'explanation' utilized by complexity theory - unities and holism are beginning to speak again, not in the 16th century mode, but in an entirely new one. The evangelical atheist is one who sees this, but cannot tolerate it, cannot even understand it - it appears as nothing more than the even older mode of understanding. But it is not that - it is a new unity, where holism (16th century episteme) and analysis (classical episteme) exist in a synthesis, a dialectical relation rather than a relation of one dominating the other.

A Jolly Holiday Package

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 23:39:43 GMT

As seen at the Eaton's Center today. This eased the trauma of having to go to the mall somewhat.

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:49:37 GMT

At work, someone asked me if I could explain the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Like any sane, reflective person, my immediate answer was, "No." That kind of question is murky at best, and hopeless at worst. But given that my only options were to come up with something more verbose or go back to work, I felt the need to spin something together. It went something like this (only shorter):

We could define the beginning modernism as the moment when the subject appears in discourse. We always used the personal pronouns, of course, so I can't mean anything quite as banal as that. What I mean is that the fact that 'objective' reality isn't something we could ever have access to as such, but is only ever experienced through someone's subjectivity. In visual art, this was experienced as the challenge posed to realism by impressionism, expressionism, cubism, etc... The transparency of subjectivity was challenged, and the act of seeing became part of the art itself. In literature, it was the self-conscious use of literary forms. Literary form itself becomes part of the story, rather than the transparent medium through which it is told. Think of Don Quixote. Philosophically, the appearance of the subject happened partially in Descartes, with his method of starting from subjectivity, but far more fully in Kant's famous Copernican turn. For my money, Kant captures the spirit of modernity better than anyone: the analysis of subjectivity must come first, and anyone purporting to examine reality without having first acknowledged that we apprehend reality as subjects is just out to lunch.

Ok, so what's postmodernism then? Postmodernism is an extension of this modernist eruption of the subject into discourse. We became post-modern the moment we began to experience the necessary presence of the subject as a negation of some of the value or validity of discourse. We have seen our own hand in creating what we previously took to be objective reality, and the post-modern experience is that this undermines the realness of reality. (note: I say "we", but it's just as likely that this doesn't apply to you. Not everyone alive today is 'post-modern' in this sense... some of us aren't even modern) This experience is the infamous post-modern irony, a kind of self-awareness that at once upholds and undermines a given discourse. Hutcheon writes in The Politics of Postmodernism, "Postmodernism paradoxically manages to legitimize culture (high and mass) even as it subeverts it. [...] As producers or receivers of postmodern art, we are all implicated in the legitimization of our culture."(p.15) For examples, see just about any Simpsons episode - a typical television gag will be put forward (wait for laughter), then that very gag will be made the subject of a further gag, and the joke becomes a joke on us. We are made to laugh at ourselves as viewers for laughing at ourselves laughing, ad infinitum. Or perhaps better, watch A Clockwork Orange with this in mind. After feasting on the visual pleasure of ultra-violence in the first half of the movie, our own gaze is then captured, as Alex's is, and turned around on us, and we are made to feel sick at ourselves. The movie implicates itself, and actively, even violently, shows us our own place in it (watch that movie with 'the gaze' in mind, srsly)

The flagship philosopher of this negation is probably Baudrillard. His notion that everything shold be understood as Simulacrum is precisely the experience of negation that we feel when our own participation in constructing reality is lain bare. We are left with nothing but "copies without originals". It should be obvious by now why postmodern analysis is always self-reflexive, and therefore must always unravel itself. Derridean deconstruction works precisely on this principle of unraveling. By showing how the apparent (conscious) meaning of a text is actually constituted by its relation to the implicit, possible meanings, any possibility of providing a fixed meaning disappears. By making the unconscious dimension of a text (what I've been calling the presence of the subject) conscious, what was originally taken as the conscious meaning is experienced as negated.

Though they would be horrified to hear it, I would place the early Analytic philosophers right at the turning point between modernism and postmodernism. Their work was explicitly anti-psychological: anything subjective, empirical or psychological was to be expunged from their philosophy, leaving only "pure objectivity" behind. The fanatical vigour with which they persued this project is testament to the threat they felt the modernist insight to hold. Truly, the Analytics felt this negation as acutely as anyone. The only difference between them and so-called 'postmodern' philosophers is that the reaction of the Analytics was to try to claw their way backwards, back to the Enlightenment before the position of the subject became impossible to ignore. But the cultural impetus that moved them is the same as any postmodern philosopher.

It's important, I think, to keep in mind that this negation isn't always a bad thing. The critical eye which has been turned on our language and way of making meaning has exposed much of what was or is rotten about our culture... I'm thinking especially of Foucault and his critique of psychiatry and body-politics, but there are other examples, such as post-colonial studies. These are good and useful projects, imho.

But I can't help but feel that this experience of negation cannot last, and should not last, at least in the immature form it is in now. We, as a culture, are struggling through the early stages of coming to terms with the unconscious. We are becoming aware of how the social, cultural and biological conditions into which we were born shape us, which is a necessary step in the development of consciousness. To see our own (unconscious) hand in shaping the world is necessary. And the shock of this experience will, probably also necessarily, be hard to get over. But the next step is to begin to develop a more mature attitude with respect to our cultural unconscious. It shapes us: of this we should have no doubt. But by coming to awareness of that fact, we can begin to have a hand in shaping it, consciously. Rather than undermining our experience of meaning, self-reflexive awareness will begin to underwrite it, to be the foundation upon which we build.

important science news

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:18:49 GMT

Live updates on whether the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the earth yet:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Also, the word of the day is: geoid.

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:52:31 GMT

The tiger dances; the dragon mounts the wind and waves;
the principal seat of the true centre generates the mysterious pearl.
Fruit produced on the branch will, in time, ripen;
could the baby in the womb be any different?
South and north accord with the Source [through] inversion of the signs of the trigrams;
at daybreak and dusk the five phases [of the adept’s body] accord with the celestial axis.
[You ]must be able to understand this great mystery [while] dwelling in the chaotic market place;
what need is there [to retreat] deep into the mountains to preserve peaceful solitude?

ch.5, Chapters on Awakening to the Real: A Song Dynasty Classic of Inner Alchemy
Attributed to Zhang Boduan (ca. 983-1081)

the science of energy work

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:26:00 GMT

This is something I'm posting over in neurotheology too...

One of the most interesting intersections of science and religion right now, for me at least, is the studies being done on Qi-Gong (Chi Kung). For millennia, various form of Qi-Gong (literally meaning "energy effort" or "breath work") have been used for preventative and acute medical treatment. Either a person spends time training themselves in the practice, or a Qi-Gong master can "heal" another, by emitting Qi energy to improve their energy flow for them. This latter practice is called 'external qigong".

But that's all pre-scientific mumbo-jumbo, right? Right? Surely practices that came out of ancient Chinese shamanism and taoism have nothing but placebo and hocus-pocus to offer, right?

Well, let's look at the actual studies, shall we? There have been mountains of them done. If you're interested, go to Google Scholar or PubMed and do a search for Qi-Gong. For those of you who are too lazy (or don't have access to the full-text articles like us lucky blighters at good universities) here are three of my favourites, with links to the abstracts:

Yan et al. "External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong differentially regulates the Akt and extracellular signal-regulated kinase pathways and is cytotoxic to cancer cells but not to normal cells" The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology 38 (2006) 2102–2113
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16893670

This one I like particularly because the natural reaction to hearing about something like this is to shout "Placebo!". This study makes that interpretation much harder. In it, a qi-gong master directed qi at petri dishes with cancerous or non-cancerous cell cultures. The cancerous cells were weakened, and the non-cancerous cells were strengthened, both to a statistically significant degree. And petri dishes don't experience the placebo effect. Straight up.

Yan et al. "Structure and property changes in certain materials influenced
by the external qi of qigong", Materials Research Innovations (1999) 2:349–359
http://www.springerlink.com/content/28h24p51wtdcwr26/

Another fun one, this time not even on living cells. They claim "These experiments show that external qi of qigong produces significant structural changes in water and aqueous solutions, alters the phase behavior of dipalmitoyl phosphatidyl choline (DPPC) liposomes, and enables the growth of Fab protein crystals." In some of the tests, the qi-gong master involved was kilometers, even thousands of kilometers away. F'ing weird.

Lee et al. "Effects of Qi-therapy on blood pressure, pain and psychological symptoms in the elderly: a randomized controlled pilot trial" Complementary Therapies in Medicine (2003), 11, 159–164
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118705741/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

For me, this is interesting, but the least impressive of the three. It is a randomized, placebo controlled trial, which is good. But it's only a pilot study, and the controls could have been tighter. Still, they were able to make old people feel better, and the placebo controls seem reasonable. They had one group they did real qigong on, and another in which they used the same masters, but had them just pretend to do qigong, instead focusing on just counting in their minds. Again, the difference was statistically significant, showing a positive effect.

I could go on and on. There are many more studies - not all are as positive as these three, but if you do a search for yourself you'll find that the overwhelming majority support these findings. So what are we to conclude? It really looks like science is backing up what people have been saying for millennia about this energy stuff. IMO, the only real stumbling block keeping people from accepting this stuff is the lack of a mechanism - a detailed account of how it all works that doesn't use the word "chi".

So what do you think,? The next big thing, or a big pile of bunk?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:35:08 GMT

I knocked off work a bit early today, because the boss accidentally dropped a tablesaw on my knee. No shit.

Well, not ON my knee, per se. It glanced off my knee, leaving me with about a square centimeter of skin missing (not scraped, gone) and a joint that smarts considerably. There was very little blood. We were moving it off a dolly, and it just tipped over.

Hey, at least I got off early.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:27:09 GMT

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:45:39 GMT

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?

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:10:13 GMT

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

On Purity

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:40:35 GMT

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.

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:39:06 GMT

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."

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:50:54 GMT

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?

Thu, 29 May 2008 04:26:27 GMT

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.

Fri, 02 May 2008 02:47:51 GMT

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.

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:43:27 GMT

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.

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:32:04 GMT

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.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:24:24 GMT

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.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:07:21 GMT

It was time for a name change. _vitriolum_ is no more. The little underscores were driving me nuts.

The new one started off as "autopoiesis", but some bastard called autopoiesis took it. Then it became "autopoietic", but that got typoed into autopoetic. It stuck.

I think I like it, but like with a new haircut, it will take some time to know.

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:59:17 GMT

I wish this surprised me. Orgasms at the push of a button.

That, some nicotine gum and a bottle of alcohol free wine, and we'll have sucked all the goddamn fun out of everything.

in the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:25:57 GMT

Terry Pratchett has early onset alzheimers.

fuckityfuckfuck.... It is, as he says, an embuggery. But he will fight. He even gave a million dollars to Alzheimer's research.

"Personally, I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance", quoth Pratchett.

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:30:10 GMT

Yesterday, someone asked me for dating advice. I was a little taken aback. I almost refused to advise him, on the basis that my history of failure disqualifies me.

Then it occurred to me; my history of failure is precisely what qualified me for the job. I've awkwardly fumbled relationships, been unceremoniously shot down, missed obvious signals, and furthermore, tormented myself over these incidents for years. I've seen a good variety of disastrous dating conclusions, and so was able to offer some suggestions as to what not to do. I wasn't, of course, able to tell him what he ought to do. Only he can decide that. But I was able to give him some perspective on the more common ways (in my experience) that things can go awry.

I feel like my highschool years of bouncing from one disaster to another are somewhat vindicated.

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:17:52 GMT

Walking to work through the ice and snow this morning, I lifted my head for a moment to contemplate the great lazy snowflakes that were falling. I thought about how spectacularly complex they must be, minutely articulated in interlocking lattices vast beyond the human capacity to survey. And just then, one smacked me in the face, melting on the heat of my lip.

I guess you had to be there.