Is Conservation Contrary to Nature?

The blog that you are about to read might confound or upset your own personal beliefs. But before you decide that I am an anarchist who wishes to see wanton and random destruction I want you to read the full blog, attempt to understand it on my terms and give me a fair hearing. You will then have the task of taking on board what I've said and bringing it into critical interaction with the beliefs you already have. This, as I understand it, is something like how our belief systems progress anyway. And so I ask for a hearing.

My blog today starts from one of my own beliefs. This belief is that conservation, not just ecological conservation but pretty much all forms of conservation, are contrary to nature. What do I mean by saying this? I mean that the nature of the universe, the way it works, the way things are ordered, the way this universe progresses, is not based on the conservation of individual specific things. The universe, for example, does not have as one of its guiding principles that you or I must be saved. It does not think that lions or elephants or rhinos or whales or planet Earth or our sun or our galaxy should exist forever. Indeed, it doesn't think that anything should. It just is. Conservation is not a part of its make up. The universe is a big engine of change.

So what is a part of its make up? From observation it seems that constant, radical, permanent change is a part of its make up. The universe, left to its own devices, is merely the living history of forms of energy if you break it down to basics. These forms of energy interact with one another to produce the things we see, hear, and experience. More importantly, they interact to produce things that we will never see, hear, experience or even imagine. Existence, in this sense, is just energy doing what energy does. There are no over-arching rules for it and nothing is mandated to exist or not exist because the universe is impassive and uninterested in what is - or is not. Its just random, chaotic energy. Out of this random chaos came us - quite inexplicably to my mind but that's another discussion. We human beings are not impassive or uninterested. Indeed, we need to be concerned and interested in order to survive. And so from this universe of chaotic energy we interested beings were produced.

I have observed the interest in ecological conservation as a phenomenon with my own growing interest for many years. Its one debate which can get some human beings very hot under the collar. When I hear people saying that we need to "save the planet" I often ask myself "What for?" For me its never really good enough to assume the rightness of an agenda merely because it seems to be either moral or, in some sense, on the side of good. I know both morality and goodness as interested ideas which are in no sense neutral but always serving some interest. You might think that the interests of saving the planet are very good ones but I would always seek to undermine the foundations of a belief to ask what presuppositions it stands on. Our beliefs always have these groundings and they are often very revealing and easily toppled. Such are human belief systems.

Of course, conservation is about more than wanting to save the planet or some species upon it (whether that is a rare kind of insect, a cuddly mammal or even us). I had a think and I reasoned that you could connect capitalists (who want to preserve their economic status in society as well as the value of capital), theists (who want a god to be the guarantor of everything that is as it is right now), Greens (who want to preserve the planet and species of life as we have them now) and Transhumanists (who want human beings to outlive our current surroundings and even our planet) all as types of people interested in conservation broadly understood. You may be able to think of others. Conservation is, of course, most commonly associated with the Greens but, as we can see, the drive to conserve things is actually apparent wherever people want things to stay roughly as they are right now (or in an idealized, utopian form of right now). My point, as I've said above, is quite simple: this is contrary to the way things are, contrary to nature, against the organizing principles of an indifferent universe.

You may argue that this is to misunderstand the way things are and that's a fair point to challenge me on. You may say that I am right and the universe doesn't care what stays or goes. It will just keep rolling on until the energy all dissipates in the eventual heat death of the universe in some trillions of years. In that context you may say that what is is then up to those species who can make something of it and that if the universe allows us to make and manufacture things a certain way, guided by our principles, then we should. I don't actually find this position all that wrong. My concern here, I suppose, is with those who reason that there is some form of rightness or naturalness or in-built goodness with this drive to conserve. To me it is entirely manufactured and interested as a phenomenon. It is the activity of self-interested and self-important beings. To want to save the whale because you have an impulse to save whales is one thing. To say that we have a responsibility to save whales is to use rhetoric in the service of an agenda. The universe doesn't care if whales live or die. It follows that there is no imperative for me to care either - although I may choose to and may give reasons for so doing. But these reasons will always be interested and (merely) rhetorical.

So what am I arguing against? I'm arguing against those who want to find or impose imperatives. I'm arguing against those who think that something put us here to "save the world". I'm arguing against those who see us as over and above nature as opposed to merely an interested and self-interested and self-important part of it, a species and individuals with a will to survive. I'm arguing against those who see us as anything other than a rather pathetic bug-like species on a nothing ball of rock in a nowhere solar system in an anonymous galaxy floating in a space so big you cannot begin to quantify it. I'm arguing against those who regard life as nothing to do with power and its operations and how those dynamics play out in human societies. Human beings are very conscious of their station in life and will seek to preserve or increase it. This, amongst other things, is why there are differing sides of the Green conservation argument. People have empires to protect. But seen from that angle life just becomes a power struggle between forms of energy marshalled to power differing agendas. We, instead of being the savior of our world, the universe and everything, are merely just more energy acting in the vastness of space until we dissipate.

So yes when I hear the slogans of Greens I chuckle. I wonder what we are saving and why. I smile at the naivety, if that's what it is, that just assumes this is the right thing to do. I wonder at the hubris that thinks we and our planet in some sense deserve to live. I wonder how these people have factored in the assumptions of our eventual destruction. I wonder how they explain away the fact that well over 90% of things that ever lived on Earth are gone forever without any human action whatsoever. Because that's what things just do - have their time and then cease to exist. I wonder where they reason the meaning they ascribe to things fits in. For nothing exists in a vacuum. (Feel free to ponder on the vacuum of space here and how that affects my last sentence.) The reasons we give for things, the beliefs we hold, are supported by other things and it is they, when articulated, that support our actions and drives. Life is wonderful and random. But it is not permanent. And, as far as I can see, it was never meant to be nor can it be. The drive to conserve is an interested human drive, just one contingent outworking of the energy that drives a form of life. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care or should ravage and destroy. Its just a context for something humans want to do for their own, personal reasons. It is, in the end, just one more example of the universe doing its thing, its the energy that exists exhausting itself until there's no more left. 

Its an example of the kind "Anything the universe allows is allowed".


Now you may feel free to think about this and decide who is right or wrong and, just as importantly, why.

Electronic Music: An Interview with Rory McCormick

A couple of days ago, through a Twitter contact retweeting a link, I came across the electronic music of Rory McCormick. I was immediately drawn to the sound he had created for himself and (what seemed to me) the fearless way he went about doing what he had done. His album WAVE IX is a mixture of melancholic electronica and performance poetry (with sometimes near to the knuckle content). It was, at the very least, something that made me sit up and take notice. Having listened to that I went on and listened to his albums Colony and Edgespace which continued the musical theme but without the poetry. It seemed to me that here was an artist, someone who had ideas behind what he did and I determined to see if he would consent to an interview to be published here so that I could learn more about it and, also, publish the results to a wider audience. I'm happy that Rory agreed. Printed below are the questions I sent him and the answers he sent back.


1. How long have you been making music and what is your setup? (i.e. what do you use to make music?)

I've been making music since 2013. To begin with I worked as one half of a duo under the pseudonym '6&8', I was responsible for the music, and she wrote words/poetry to go with that music. We released a number of digital albums and EPs on a net label called Xylem Records (http://www.xylemrecords.co.uk), and also one album that involved another collaborator, a music producer who works under the name 'Day Before Us', on Auditory Field Theory (http://www.auditoryfieldtheory.org). That all happened between May 2013 and March 2014, then later in the year 6&8 split up and I fell out of love with making music for a while. Plus various things going on in my life at the time seemed to take most of the focus away from my hobbyist attitude towards it. I started working on some bits I had begun but not finished in that period earlier this year, May-June time, and then wrote more in a similar vein and before I knew it I was hooked again and now don't want to stop. I think I must have needed to fill that gap of more than a year by releasing three things in one month – it takes the likes of Coldplay years to get one album together, I'm knocking out three a month, I think I know who's winning.

Due to financial and space restrictions, I don't have any outboard equipment or interesting boxes, I've always been drawn to hardware as a means for electronic music, it's the deliberately limited scope of possibilities (hardware depending of course, I'm thinking of analogue stuff here really) and the physical interactions that I feel would be more engaging when it comes to navigating the tumultuous creative process in search of inspiration. Anyway that said, I don't have those things, I mainly use a computer as a sound source, loaded with a selection of software instruments and environments. I guess the feeling is that software doesn't have any soul, but actually I don't think that's true at all. I like instruments/FX from U-he and Madrona Labs best, the Madrona stuff in-particular is really quite characterful. My main environment for sketching, composition and mixing is REAPER, but I have used Renoise in the past, and also Pure Data and SuperCollider, but I tend to steer away from coding now as I always feel so much further from the music due to the learning curve and program debugging that comes with that sort of environment. If I'm getting a syntax error I'm probably about 10 minutes away from going for a walk instead.

For my recent solo releases I have succumbed to my interest in the analogue approach and purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Tandberg 3300X. I also have a Technics cassette deck, for when I want to keep some of the clarity of the digital domain, as the Tandberg really does smear frequencies all over the place. Anything that is fed into that is a glorious lo-fi mess on the way back out. There are other small portable cassette machines laying around, as well as a Tascam DR-100mk2 for field recordings as well as two AKG C1000S mics. For my next release I have picked up a small collection of acoustic instruments: zithers, guitar, bass, xylophone, melodica, flutes etc. Which I will use to create source material for digital manipulation at a later stage. That's a fair bit of stuff I suppose. Maybe I'll just fill the wall behind my bed with rack analogue modules after all.

2. What are you making music for? Is there anything behind it?

It's a form of expression, it's interpretation of the world around me and my experiences: feelings, moments, awareness. It's also more abstract though, for example I take a trip to London to look at the architecture of the Barbican estate, all those edges and blocks of raw concrete, what senses do they evoke? What might they sound like? How could I communicate this appreciation of form and style with the timbres within my grasp as a musician? I want to depict shape, space and form with rhythm, timbre and melody in a way only a human being could. I will practice this until I stop.


3. When you approach making a track what is important for you?

I find that a track will begin in one of two ways:

1) I will be led by a melody I have found on the guitar, and then transplant this into the digital domain and build and orchestrate on it with other instruments.

2) I will be led by technology, some aspect or functionality of a computer program will start an idea and I will follow it purely with the digital techniques at my disposal.

Of the two I find much more satisfying, and likely to result in a finished track that I am proud of, is music with its genesis in method 1. When I play something on a guitar I can almost 'hear the future' of that riff or melody straight away, a developed piece of music appears like an abstract concept and I have greater success in following those abstractions than if they materialise during a session solely exploring software. When using method 2 I find that moment to moment my creative abilities are muddied by the task of navigating the software itself: 'How do I pitch the sample down?' 'What is the best method to automate this or that?' 'Wait, where has that toolbar gone?' 'I didn't mean to delete that' etc. That's not to say that purely software techniques aren't responsible for amazing music, you've just got to get a grip of them as well as I have of my guitar over the last 20 odd years. The reality is that methods 1 and 2 will blend during a writing session, sometimes seamlessly, but sometimes the gears will grind to a halt. I guess what's important is being able to get what's inside my head, outside my head with flow and accuracy, making use of any surprises along the way.

4. Your three albums on Bandcamp, WAVE IX, Colony and Edgespace seem thematically and musically linked. What are you trying to express with them?

Yes they are linked, in fact Wave IX only exists because I didn't manage what I originally set out to do with the material on Edgespace and Colony. The music on those two should have been the back drop to the spoken word of Wave IX but when I put it all together much of the music just didn't gel well with the words and I was making compromises all over the place to try and make it work. So just decided to let Edgespace and Colony go without the words and put other bits together for Wave IX.

But once I decided that, it did feel good to have instrumental tracks that appeared to link with the spoken themes on Wave IX, e.g 'Survey Team' on Colony is the sonic description of the brave men and women that descended back into the mining network we hear about in 'Faces in the Strata' on Wave IX, the auxiliary team on the surface is referenced in the title and the spoken word. 'In the Betweens' is in fact a description of Edgespace, heard on the release of the same name. There are further connections but I'll leave them to be discovered. It all seemed to work well splitting the work across three releases like this, like it was meant to be.

The stories told on Wave IX are linked to some degree, the themes seem to be to transcend the human consciousness/form, (In the Betweens, The Exchange, Prayer for a Sunken Lime, The Configurations), I think 'Faces in the Strata' strays furthest from that theme, perhaps as the survey team strayed themselves from their own world.


5. If you had unlimited freedom to make whatever music you wanted to make what would you like to do that you can't do now?

Since I realised electronic music was the gin in my tonic (early 2000's, camping trip to Cornwall, The Richard D James album on repeat in the car) and I started to delve into the culture and technology, I've always felt that Heaven would be a room full of modular analogue equipment. I still do - perhaps to a slightly lesser extent now – maybe that's because I'm making the most of the resources available to me rather than desiring things I'll likely never have. The money and the impracticality involved does put me off enough for it to remain a fantasy. I have a desire to perform music in a live setting, and as a hobbyist/nobody, hauling a tonne of oscillators, sequencers and voltage dividers around just seems stupid now. Laptop, mixer, speakers, ears, done.

As for music I'd like to make with the resources I have to hand, but have yet to, algorithmic and generative music is high on the agenda. Beat oriented music that one could consider moving to.

I do have some musical ideas that currently seem hard to realise. I'd like to make detailed environment recordings of industrial locations such as processing plants, data centres, and manipulate them subtly with almost imperceptible glitches and additions. But in my mind that would depend on having good quality, detailed, multilevelled location recordings of areas and installations that I would likely not be permitted to enter.

Similar to this, is the desire to make mock recordings of occult events, to stage a séance or pseudo-ritual for example and mix multiple recording sources. Not music so much as an audio play, scripted with a cast of voice actors, but perhaps with musical elements, unexpected rhythmic repetition, or low frequencies added to unsettle.

The perceived scope of such projects (maybe just the knowledge that I would have to involve others) has meant it has not yet moved from being an abstract idea into an achievable goal.

6. What music and artists have influenced you? (Maybe your influences aren't musical, of course.)

Mike Patton, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Helmet, Therapy?, pre-turn of the century Marilyn Manson, Stanley Kubrick, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Clark, Dave Monolith, Laurel Halo, Grimes, Morbid Angel, Boards of Canada, Blade Runner, Yes, Vangelis, David Lynch, J.G Ballard, Brutalist architecture, Shane Carruth Giorgio de Chirico and Calvin Harris (not really).

7. What would you like to achieve musically in the next 12 months?

I have several album projects to work on, next is something vaguely related to Wave IX, but instrumental (there is no further spoken word on the horizon right now, but all it takes is a second of inspiration for that to change. Hey it may have changed by 3pm this afternoon). Also I have what I hope to be a series of releases employing algorithmic techniques that takes its inspiration from plant inflorescences (see the Wikipedia article on that topic and you'll probably already be in the same sonic ballpark as I am) that will likely be far more rhythmic than anything I've done before. I am fascinated by the way plant stems branch off from one another, like a network of decisions from root to bud. Also not too far off is a project that takes great influence from the novel High Rise by J.G Ballard. I have a copy of that book packed with my own annotations and highlights that elude somehow to the sense of hearing, or that collide in an aesthetically pleasing way with my own sense of what is awesome.

As for other achievements, I'd like to release work on net labels again and have my material played on various online radio shows, just get it out there in ways. I don't do this for fame or money obviously, but it's a form of expression, of communication, so nothing I make can be fully realised unless others hear it. A major milestone as momentous as the alignment of the planets would be to play or perform my music in a live setting of any description, that would be a real achievement for me. To collaborate again is possibly on the agenda too, but we'll see.


I'd like to thank Rory for taking the time to answer my questions. Personally speaking, I think its great to find such thoughtful electronic music that has ideas behind it.

You can hear the three albums referred to in this interview, WAVE IX, Colony and Edgespace at Rory's Bandcamp, https://rrymc.bandcamp.com/

What is the Meaning of This?

Today's blog is about the subject of meaning and its a fairly "stream of consciousness" type of a blog. As I write I am just back from my daily exercise which is my chance to blow some cobwebs out of my mind and loosen up my gradually aging body. It happens quite often in these times that thoughts come to mind and coalesce in ways that are fruitful and many of the blogs you see here are a result of such times. This is going to be another one like that.

So if you have been reading this blog at any time during this year you will know that my grand subject has been human being. I have been asking myself what it means to be human, where humans might be going and what the difference might be between a human being and the possible technological beings that we might become in the future. There has also been a strand of that which concentrated on consciousness. I have found it all greatly stimulating and it has brought me forward in my own thinking and inspired much new music from me that led me down new paths.

It was a couple of weeks ago, however, that it finally dawned on me what this was all about though. It was then that I realized that the great question here, perhaps the greatest question of all, was the question of meaning. Read back through some of my earlier blogs if you like and confirm this for yourself. It further dawned on me at that time that the question of meaning had really been the question that has animated me from my earliest days as a thinker back when I was 8, 9 and 10 reading biblical stories or The Odyssey which I read aged 10 at school. There was always a sense of wonder with me (a naive sense of wonder, I might add) and that has probably not served me very well in the long run but it has meant that I wanted to try and get answers to the questions that have animated my life.

Fast forward to a middle-aged man with 35 years more reading and experience under his belt. Meaning, why things mean, how things mean, what things mean, have come to be the central questions of my existence. Perhaps they are, in various forms, for everyone. Not everyone confronts these questions of course. Some try to hide from them or run away from them, scared of the possible answers. But I take a more prosaic and present view of things. Life would be hell if I didn't try to work out some answers. My thinking and reading this year have brought some progress for me it seems. At least, it feels that way. And as those writing about consciousness know very well, how things feel is very important to we humans. This, too, is something else caught up in all the "meaning" questions.

So what of "meaning"? Why do things mean? This, it seems to me, is a problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Christof Koch sees consciousness as a feature of complex enough systems, systems, for example, such as the human brain. Koch himself does not limit the possibility of such consciousness to the human brain alone. He conceives it is possible that machine networks, if complex enough, could also become conscious. He also suggests that other animals with brains not so different from ours could be conscious - if in not quite the same way or to the same extent. For my purposes here the relevance of this is that with a developed enough consciousness comes the problem of meaning.

For with a consciousness such as ours, one that is self-aware, aware of its surroundings, able to extrapolate and problem solve, able to refer back to previous events and project forward into future ones, meaning floods in. Why is this? It is because meaning-making is a matter of relating things one to another, a matter of contextualizing things with other things, a matter of giving things a situation, a matter of relating and relationships, of networks. It just so happens that the universe bequeathed to us consciousness, quite blindly, and, in so doing, meaning flooded into our lives and all the problems that go with it. Meaning is what happens when conscious minds start going about their business. It is what happens when you take one object or idea, something that means nothing at all in itself or in isolation, and then relate it to something else. Or anything else. It is in the interactions of things and ideas that meaning is produced. As beings with a developed consciousness this was something we just couldn't help doing - the making of meaning.

In recent centuries our great thinkers have had problems with meaning though. Some wanted to try and fix meaning, believing that in so doing they could get things "right". Time and time again that project has failed but there are still those who believe that there is "a way things are" that could fix meanings. I am not one of those. Others have seen a problem with "nihilism" which is the lack of meaning. This issue is tied to the first inasmuch as by their constant failure to fix meaning it seemed to some that there was no fixed meaning to be found. I don't think that there is but I also don't think this should be cause for despair. Coming from a different angle, there were others who said that the problem wasn't that there was no meaning but that, instead, there was too much! These "poststructuralists" argued that the issue wasn't a lack of meaning but that there was so much it could never be fixed. Meaning was a matter of the "play" of many different meanings.

It seems to me that if you follow my basic ideas above of how meaning arises at all then it is no surprise that meanings are not fixed. It seems to me that if I am anywhere close then it would be impossible to fix meaning in the first place. For if meaning is simply a matter of relating things to other things then there are as many meanings as there are things to be related and in as many ways as you can relate them. In that, context may sometimes guide but it can never be determinative. We would still end up with as many meanings as it would be possible for people to have in any given scenario. It would seem that the poststructuralists were on to something with their ideas of a superfluity of meaning.

This, of course, brings its own issues. How is such a superfluity to be controlled? After all, we all need meaning and meanings for things but we all also need to live. In this I find something that the recently departed neuroscientist Oliver Sachs said deeply relevant. He wrote that "Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative." I find this to be intuitively and reflectively true. Sachs is here saying that we all build a story of our lives as we grow up and develop, one that gets added to every day with each event, thought, idea, that happens. This comes to be the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our circumstances, our possibilities, our past, our future. This forms a major context for all the meaning-making that we will do in life. It becomes the borders of what things can mean and acts as a stabilizing, if also sometimes an imprisoning, force. It is the boundaries of our thought. But these are not to be thought of as hard and impervious boundaries. The boundary can sometimes move and new meanings become possible. It is a movable border but a border nevertheless.

One corollary of this is that things will not mean the same thing for everyone. Nor, if this is right, should they. Difference is in-built into this understanding of things and is something to be negotiated rather than denied or avoided. We will tell completely different stories about ourselves and live individual lives and this will add to the list of possible meanings that can be made. This in turn speaks to an amazing plurality of lives and of meaning-making that often scares those who want to fix things or find a "way things are". There is no "way things are". And this is why there can also be no gods. Gods are used to try and fix meaning. They are there as guarantors of "the way things are" and act as a kind of über-context for everything. But there is no über-context. The universe did not come with meanings attached. It merely blindly created beings for whom things must mean.

This is what is bequeathed to us: to make things mean something useful to us, something that we can understand and live with. That may be a struggle but we cannot avoid it unless we die or go mad. I hope to study meaning and its making further over the coming days and weeks. There are those, such as Nietzsche or Foucault, who studied how things mean in more detail, for example, by using "genealogical" or "archaeological" techniques - but upon knowledge and its meaning itself. Nietzsche did great studies into the history of morality, something he saw as a problem, whilst Foucault, amongst other things, studied the history of prisons, sexuality, the treatment of mental illness and even scientific knowledge itself. None of these things, or their meanings, are givens. The idea of the "given" is one that those who want to fix things one way (and its always their way!) would like us to have. But following the path I have that seems crazy and to be rejected. What intellectual studies such of those of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown us is that no knowledge and no meaning is a given, Rather, it is all created and with a very specific history that was necessary for its formation. We would do well to remember this.

So we are in a world of play, the play of meanings. We are free to make ours to the extent that our lives, and the stories we tell about them, allow us. Meanings do not come with things so the idea of an "in-itself" with a meaning attached is silly. The meaning comes in the relating of one thing to another, in the activity of our conscious minds.

Commentary (Part 2)

This week I'm running a series of blogs entitled "commentary". They take the form of a series of personal reflections on life - a bit like if someone were looking in the mirror and reflecting. Each acts as a self-contained thought but some may be linked together. It is for the reader, of course, to decide if any of the comments offer insight of any sort.

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21.

I don’t understand the sense of ungratefulness some people feel (or accuse you of) when you say that you wish you had never been born. Life, for these people, is regarded as some kind of sacred gift and you are meant to feel, first of all, profoundly thankful for it. Is this the overflow of some religious sentimentality? I honestly don’t understand it at all. Life is random, an accident. It might never have happened, as I mused in one of my musical pieces called “Point Zero”. Point Zero, I considered, was that moment at which you were conceived. But what if it had never happened? What if mum had been washing her hair that night? What if dad had been tired and turned over and went to sleep? It’s not as if any of us are fated to exist, much less willed by a higher power. Nothing chose you. We just are, a cosmic accident, the work of a moment that might never have been and yet, right in one moment, was.

22.

Life is a large pool of clear, refreshing water. But it only takes a little piss (or one conspicuous turd) to contaminate the whole pool.

23.

We all have drives and sometimes the desire to satiate them can be overwhelming. Experience is one means by which to counter them. Providing we can learn from it!

24.

I suppose I do not really regret the things that have happened to me. It’s natural to wish things had turned out differently but, then again, each situation is an opportunity for many things and not just one. There is always the opportunity to learn, whatever happens. Things are never uniformly good or bad.

25.

“Travel broadens the mind” is a truism. And true. It should be compulsory. Isolation breeds only mistrust and easy lack of empathy.

26.

I have an inkling that the most important of philosophical subjects is our human relationship with time. Temporality is a subject that towers over us, much as space puts us in our true place in the physical realm. Even thinking that all our sense perceptions, intuitions and thought processes are time-bound and time affected is a huge subject. We are defined as beings and as Being by our relationship to time. It makes sense why Heidegger would write a book called “Being and Time” and why it would be a pre-eminent philosophical topic of discussion. And yet…… it’s all relative. What is the meaning of time in the context of infinity? (Irony: my song “Stream of Consciousness” plays as I write this.)

27.

I still have great moments of ego. I should keep working on it. The Ego is nature’s gift to us for survival but the way it operates is most strange and completely selfish. It’s literally there to ensure your survival…. and that’s it. I would like to think, in my more cerebral moments, that I am learning to countermand and control it. But maybe this is yet more self-deception. I would like to think I can rise above it but then I ask myself why I would even want to do this. Is conscious thought somehow more pure or noble than the unconscious prods of Ego? What version of me is it trying to save? In every sense "I" is a fiction.

28.

The human being is a random beast. In public they prefer order, considered thought and coherence of thought with action. In reality, they are vain creatures of habit, drive and inconsistency.  It’s a consistent phenomena we see through the history of human thought to find an ideal of their own making which human beings do not live up to.

29.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

30.

Humans have a will to meaning that mere beasts, perhaps, do not have. This throws them into a game they have no choice about - to make things mean something. Where meaning gaps or deficits appear this can only manifest itself as a crisis.

31.

Beware the lures of knowing

Imagine, if you will, 100 country mansions. In these country mansions are 100 libraries.

Every room in these country mansions is a library and each one of the mansions has 100 of them. In this great space you spend your life storing up all the things you learn, all your knowledge collected together. But what you don't have, in this fable, is any inkling as to what any of it means. What, then, I ask you, is the point of all this collected knowledge? Have you not simply spent your life collecting useless facts? Is it not just so much jumble? Is knowing an end in itself?

We switch focus. Consider the biblical tale of Eden, a place of innocence and freedom from the burden of knowing. But its carefree inhabitants lose their innocence and become burdened with knowledge. And now, as knowers, they are burdened with what to do about what they know. Their crime, if crime there was, was in wanting to know too much and our intrepid gatherers of knowledge and eaters of fruit did not realize the consequences of knowing. Human beings have a need to act when they know. And this knowing will lead to acting and, if they do not have other necessary qualities, their knowing will lead to bad and negatively consequential actions. Perhaps now we understand why the biblical innocence was to be preferred?

There is a traditional dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. Some people (and, indeed, communities) prefer one over the other - and there are various intellectual and/or religious shrines to both in various places. Some people venerate knowing, and the need to know, above all else. (Examples could be those who wear scientism heavy on their brow or certain essentialist and foundationalist philosophers.) And I take issue with this. For knowing is not, and cannot, be an end in itself.

There is, of course, no end to knowing. We cannot imagine that there would ever be an end to all the facts. But the situation is more dire than simply letting a drive to know have its head. (I ask myself here what the outcome of letting a drive to eat have its head would result in - by way of analogy.) There is what we may call a crisis of knowledge - and a crisis of knowing - in that knowing is simply not enough. Knowing, of course, does not realize this itself because in its knowing it does not have the wisdom to know that knowing is not enough. (In the same way, Reason often doesn't realize that reason is not very reasonable, rationality doesn’t realize that it is not very rational, etc., ad infinitum.) And it’s not a case of the amount of knowing but of what simply knowing is able to achieve. A collection of facts, as I hope my parables illustrate, is actually a pretty useless (but also burdensome) thing. Knowing, by itself, is in the end both impotent and potentially dangerous. Other things, perhaps we may describe them collectively as wisdom, are needed to enable us to appropriately deal with the things we know. I can immediately think of 3 strands here:

1. You need to know what knowledge means (the question of meaning).

2. You need to know how to appropriately use the knowledge (experience).

3. You need to know how things fit together, or can fit together (understanding).

An issue with knowledge will always be that the knowing and the collecting of knowledge will never be enough. Knowledge leads inevitably to action and people almost always feel the need to do something about the things they know. And it’s precisely here where knowing, by itself, is impotent because knowledge does not tell you what to do with it. Its not part of the package but, instead, a separate skill and not one anyone is forced to have - regardless of how many of their 100 houses with 100 libraries is full of knowledge. The second issue is that that need to do something about the knowing is experienced as a burden for, in reality, people do not simply store what they know in libraries. This leads to the spectre of doing the wrong thing or using the knowledge badly. Knowledge is dynamite, it’s a dangerous thing with consequences.

In the light of these twin issues (and the at least three other separate requirements I mentioned above) it seems to me that wisdom dictates we can know too much. The drive to knowledge, if given its head, is a bad thing with a negative impact. It produces more data than a person (or community) can handle. The appropriate response is to curb the drive to know and, instead, have a sober and reflective innocence. Without the extra tools that wisdom provides knowledge becomes but a blunt instrument of possible self-harm. What those who wrote the story of Eden saw was the dangers of an inappropriate lust for knowledge, a lust which raised up knowledge and knowing above its station and made it the god at whose temple we all now had to worship. In those circumstances, knowledge and knowing were always going to be capricious gods who abused their power and destroyed us by virtue of attenuating our all too corruptible egos. In the end, the moral of the story of Eden is both that you can know too much and that knowing is not without burdensome consequences. It's a message we need to hear again and again.

32.

PS Who amongst us knows things they wish they didn't know?

33.

“What is the point of my life?” update! There is not, nor can there be, any antecedent point, of course. I’m currently drawing breath on the basis it is at least an opportunity to try and understand something, anything. Maybe myself or the world of my experience? Once all the metanarratives and metaphysics have been burned away by an innocent honesty what’s left is an empty space to fill. So rock on as much as the world of experience allows. You may end up trapped within a bubble of your own making (and without really knowing it) but what’s the alternative? Or the harm?

34.

Two people share the same belief but have completely different behaviour as a result. Would this not show that beliefs do not determine behaviour? Would it further show that beliefs and behaviour, theory and practice, are simply different and not necessarily related things? If you cannot determine someone’s practice from their beliefs then, with that, the idea of a one-to-one correlation is put in doubt. Where that leaves the idea of a coherence of beliefs with behaviour is then also a matter for discussion.

35.

I have mellowed (in my own way). I have grown more appreciative and reflective with age. Maybe this is natural and what happens to all human beings as they get older. I wouldn’t know about that though as I’ve never done it before.

36.

I am reminded on just how few crumbs a dream can actually feed. There is something to be said for the human spirit. Or is it a (sometimes necessary) blind stupidity?

 
37.

“Philosophy as music” is my motto for my musical output. It’s thought in sounds. Alternatively, think of my music as my opening a conduit to my insides and what is there flows out in chunks. “Its not necessarily good but it’s honest” is another way I have described it. Such naivety is my authentic signature. I’m like some dumb, fluffy creature unaware there are so many bad things that can happen to me in the world.

38.

Contradiction corner. - Is my musical practice a result of my anti-foundational, anti-essentialist beliefs? Is my focus on its directness and honesty, at the cost of professionalism or “doing it right” according to antecedent standards, because of what I value and what I don’t? Have I created an existential form of music or, as my friend on Twitter says, a “toe-tapping nihilism”?

39.

Suffer is what human beings do. Its the downside of feeling and thinking. Anyone who thinks for long enough will meet a crisis. Evolutionary fate has dealt us the cards and we must play our hand and suffer the consequences.

40.

Enough said.

Existenz²: A Fable of The Inhuman Future

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer. (Nietzsche)

I have been writing for a number of months now about human being both as a musician and also more philosophically too. At the same time I became interested in matters of consciousness and also future technology, initially because of an online contact with similar interests. Simultaneously, I have had an interest in our species and how it is changing in modern times. I have always been interested in standing back and taking a larger view of things and asking myself how things have developed or are developing. I find it good to ask myself the questions "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?". A specific interest in this time has been the worlds of technology and social media and how they have changed us. Because they have changed us. Today I was looking at a stream of tweets and it struck me as totally bizarre the messages that people just send out into the ether. Its like somebody in public suddenly blurting out to everyone what is on their minds. You would think that person was crazy if they did that in public.

The problem is that all these simultaneous concerns are complex and large topics even in themselves. It requires some serious thinking and some kind of conceptual framework to even attempt to make something from all of this. But I am nothing if not ambitious and, crucially, I am one of those people who sees a need to think things through to come to some sort of serious conclusion. So I apologise in advance if what follows seems to only skim the surface of the issues or be a little shallow. I put that down to the fact that these subjects could each take up many books in their own right and this is but a little blog where I doodle my thoughts. However, if it is the case that any of us regular Joe’s should be thinking about the world we live in, and reaching reasoned positions about that, well then please count this as one of my first hesitant attempts.

What I tell here is a fable of the present, where time means nothing or is absurd, something we are totally conditioned by but feel completely lost in. In this world innocents are crushed beneath the wheels of instrumentality, all value gone. Disappointment is inbred from birth here and dreams and hopes are but memories. We enter The Inhuman Age as humanism multiplies humanism and, as it must, devalues and devours itself and ends in nihilism. Men, the loci of a supposed rational agency, subvert their own descriptions of themselves. The more they insist on their rationality, the less it seems evident. Knowledge, truth, science and technology are venerated as our saviours but we are blind to their fallibilities.

In this fable our culture becomes about mass media, mass culture, social media, mobs, primitive emotions that shove thinking aside.  Everything, all our thinking, our whole narrative and its meaning, must be squeezed into 140 characters or less, or a picture or an instant message. Needs are mediated through what ever source. Politics here is in the service of base desire rather than people. Survive as anything or die as nothing is the rule. Speak up or be ignored. The more you have a voice through various media platforms the less your voice actually counts and the more anonymous you become. The more homogenized things are, the more fractured they become. Die in a corner and without any fuss. All fall into your liberal democratic camps to argue for your point of view whilst half the world population still live in huts and eat basic crops, a serious and on-going divide.

This is a fable about the humans who magnified themselves and magnified themselves and in that magnification they destroyed themselves, revealed themselves to be not exceptional but animal, just cleverer apes, a biological phase in the life of an unimportant planet. Eventually, they evolved beyond their biological origins and became pure technology. Humans were never heard from again.

Of course, this is a very 1st World fable. I am a first world person and have never set foot outside of this world. The populations of Europe and the USA come to something just over 1 billion people. This is basically the pool of views that any of us reading this now might ever hear from. Give or take. Social networks report 1 billion members and we sit and draw breath at the enormity of it. But the fact remains that far more people have never heard of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than have ever used them. There is an unheard of and unconsulted population of the earth that numbers billions. Why do you think that Facebook, for example, are building super drones that can carry free internet around the world? To increase their membership and bring the “benefits” of Western society to other places and new populations.

In so doing I think its not too wide of the mark to say that they will be hastening the demise of the humans. I think this demise is being hastened on its way by the rise of a 24/7 world of social media interconnectedness in which each of us connected is expected to have an opinion on everything. In this world you are basically anonymous (even though you may have given yourself an amusing handle). People on these networks become anonymous anyones, nothings that replace the something you might have to genuinely look at and respond to (a physical person). People online are not real people, at least not while they remain there. They are cyphers for real people but ones you can block, mute, ignore, insult, threaten or abuse without any real consequences in the main. This removal of consequences is just one of the traces of a barely perceptible change, a change which in my thinking takes us from humanity to inhumanity.      

Should one wish to find an example of inhumanity in progress it is not hard to find. This Internet world of interconnectedness affords many places where one can egotistically proffer ones views as the fount of all knowledge in the face of others who demur and argue, to the contrary, that it is their views that should actually hold that place. One is left wondering, having observed such goings on, if any real communication ever took place. The Internet has allowed us people on the way to inhumanity a space where we may be brutes expressing our heartfelt urges and base thoughts, a place where we may offend others for the purposes of reinforcing our own identities. I imagine that some bright spark somewhere has invented bots that go online and run through a whole playbook of arguments to no purposes. Many people have probably interacted with them not even realising that they weren’t even talking to a person. It was just an agenda all along. But I validated who I am as a person so who gives a rat’s.

But what does this do to the humans? It pushes them one step further to becoming inhumans. Knowledge is not now about deep thought anymore. You cannot express a deep thought in 140 characters and certainly not unless you have had practice at doing so. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche did not develop their pithiness by tweeting or posting a Facebook post but by thinking. And this is precisely the activity that social media does not promote. It promotes instant response, the sharing of your gut feeling or your opinion. But it does not promote you giving a thought out, considered response. Social media promotes “feelz” as the new kid in town. Saying what you feel is now what matters. This changes us in terms of attention span too. We learn to expect instant solutions and instant answers. Now, now, now. The next thing. Repeat. Thinking becomes something strange and foreign.

But let’s switch focus from the content to the hardware. Technology. Devices. Everyone in the 1st World today knows that you have to keep in touch with everyone else. You need to be on top of things and know what is going on in the world. You need something to play games on and listen to music on. This is where you need to be at. If you don’t have a smartphone or a tablet you are literally not part of the human race anymore. Pretty much every day now as I take my daily exercise I will meet people staring into screens as they walk along in the street. I should declare at this point that I am old enough to remember when these devices didn’t exist at all. Its not that long ago really. Unless you are 25 or under in which case it probably seems ages ago. If you have lived both sides of this technological divide you are in the perfect position to be able to sit back and see how things have actually, demonstrably changed in real time as you lived.

When I was a lad (cue violins) if you needed to tell someone something you went round to their house and asked if they were in. Or you picked up your home telephone, if you had one (we didn’t), and spoke to them that way. In addition, all the people you knew would be from your locality. They were the people fate had decreed you were to grow up with. But then technology came along and everything changed. Now you can speak to people in every continent every day. If you want to you can even speak to them while seeing them. Technology has changed the horizons. You may think this is good but, ask yourself, where does it stop? In another article I wrote recently I mused about the possible future technology that, who knows, someone somewhere may well be working on right now. It makes sense that these communications devices we carry around with us actually become a part of us. Google Glass and other wearable tech is a step in this direction. One day someone will figure out an implant that gives us the global communications we say we need but not just as wearable technology but as technology integrated into our bodies. There are Futurists out there right now who dream of this.

When this happens, as I’m sure it will, it will be a big step. It will be a step along the technological road we have already headed down even though, maybe, you don’t realise that we have. Technology that changes us forever will not be presented as such. And this is part of my argument here as I talk of us going from humans to inhumans. None of this will be overt. The technology will be presented as beneficial, helpful, benevolent. You will almost certainly want it just as you want your smartphone and your computer right now. If you don’t have it you will even feel left out. I remember going for a job some years ago now when I didn’t have a mobile phone. The prospective employer asked for my mobile number and I replied that I didn’t have one. The look on his face spoke a thousand words. I didn’t get the job and I’m convinced that was a large part of why. Not taking part in societal norms can have consequences.

I have spoken a lot in the past few months about a technological future some see for humans. This is one reason why I see the future for humans as becoming inhumans. I read the futures mapped out by Futurists and Transhumanists and I concede to myself that it is foreseeable, one day, that some of the things they dream of will come to pass. Of course, as I’ve said before, a lot of their hopes are mere speculations that are yet to be proved possible but it is clear to me that there are significant funds and personnel tied up in making various technological futures happen. Those who hold out the hope of a pain free, disease free world will always be able to attract a certain audience too. For my purposes I have been content to point out that their future dreams of “techno-humans”, to my mind, leave the humanity part behind. (Our mass media, 24/7 society is part of this development and has effects as I am arguing in this very blog.) And this is what I’m explicitly saying in this blog now. Technologically advanced humans won’t be human anymore. Human beings are defined by their imperfection, not by their increased, increasing or actualised perfection.

There is another angle from which to view our progress along a scale from humanity to inhumanity and that is in terms of a focus on subjectivity. In our modern age we have very much been encouraged to be in control of things, primarily through the technology that we carry with us. Even our currency, money itself, is now being taken from the physical world and “contactless payment” is taking its place. On our TVs we have for some years now been encouraged to think that our views count as we are invited to vote in various popularity contests. The message is that we, as subjects, matter. The metanarratives of yesteryear are gone and even forms of intersubjectivity are shunned. You, the thinking subject, are what counts.

The flip side to this is that things have become rapidly de-centred and now its really just you on your own. Or a helpline in a country where the person speaks your language with a thick, ununderstandable accent. Nevertheless, the subject has become the focus of all things but it is as an anonymous, anyone kind of a subject. There is a sense in which we are all just subjects sitting in our homes in need of purpose, control and something to do. Its very disjointed. There is a move away from social cohesion to social isolation. People to turn to recede to online or difficult to access worlds where an actual person with a face does not exist. In a real sense our age is the age of the world going online which forces you to access it a certain way as nothing else exists. Is it really so hard now to imagine that we become cyber-beings, code with a personality? We are daily creating a world in which being a physical being matters less and less.

What is the symbol of this modern age, of the human becoming inhuman? I want to get in first and say that this symbol should be masturbation. This is the age of the masturbator. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that at any one time millions of us will be online masturbating to something. But my analysis is a bit more profound than this. Masturbation is a non-social way of giving yourself pleasure. It is, for now, a physical act but, in the end, that will be overcome since sexual pleasure is really only a matter of tickling the right neurons. It has nothing to do with penises and vaginas in our inhuman future. Masturbation is the symbol of our age because it is the ultimate subjective experience. Its you with yourself imagining. Its the thrill which reminds us that we are still alive, that there is more than a humdrum world largely devoid of meaning. It is the moment that means par excellence. Before it recedes and is lost again. And its only purpose is that thrill which lasts less and less the more you do it. But masturbation is also a disguise. Its there to cover over the fact that you are all on your own. Its another nothing that covers over where a something should be. No one would masturbate if they could have sex instead.

So this is my modern, badly explained fable. It is that our race, which has taken itself as the measure of all things and called it humanism, is on the way to making itself obsolete by means of itself, its own values and its own progress. It is a reminder that nothing stays the same and that things are always moving on down the pipe. Things always come from somewhere and always go to somewhere else. Standing still is not an option. In this, “inhumanity” and “inhumans” are not moral judgments. They are merely words which express the idea that humanity is changing and is fated to become something else. The animus of our age is technological and its effects upon us both now and into the future are fundamentally changing both us and our world. This will continue, in my fable, up until the point when there are no humans left any more. There will just be the inhumans that we have become. 

What form of life these beings will take is not yet clear but they will not be biological for biology is but one weakness that needs to be overcome. This Futurists and Transhumanists know well and I think they have a chance to succeed in their aims. As I have tried to show here, though, its not just a matter of turning our thoughts and memories into code and building a robot. Our form of life right now is changed by the devices we use and the networks we insert ourselves into. Humanity is already changed and continuing to change because of these technologically enabled networks and the media and opinion they dispense. 

My conclusion is summed up by the term Existenz². Existenz² is an idea, the idea that humanity, humans and humanism, through their excess and the superfluity of themselves and their values, thereby devalue and degrade themselves to nothing. They cause their own destruction and annihilation. Existenz squared is the end of humanity and the beginning of inhumanity. Think of it by analogy to sound which can be overdriven until the point at which it is pure distortion and the sound you began with has been annihilated. At that point you have just another sound. My message is that more and more of humanity does not equal a better humanity but the end of humanity. All values devalue themselves whether truth, love, compassion, knowledge or whatever. To all things there must be limits.

We as humans are defined by time, by our contingency in time and our finitude as beings in time. This is our lot, to be imperfect, fallible, weak and powerless. But we are also innocent beings, beings who strove to know and valued knowing but could never know enough or truly know anything at all. We were forever stuck with our own descriptions for things and our reasons for needing them, creatures who always wanted more but were always unable to get it. This realisation, naturally enough, leads to terminal disappointment and, in some, a blind refusal to accept the truth. This truth leads to the fact that the project of humanism will come to an end and we humans, the measurers of all things, will, eventually, become inhumans governed by a new project of inhumanism in a context bigger than our world, the world that has defined us but that we could never leave. Human beings are thus revealed as a phase of biological life on planet Earth, one that was always temporary and destined to be succeeded.

I do not know what it will be like to be an inhuman but it will surely not be like this. For just as to a person from 1500 who, were he stuck into the middle of a modern city 500 years later, would be overwhelmed by the world he found himself in, so would we be overwhelmed by the world of an inhuman. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be a machine for machines do not feel, cannot know pain, nor do they need to eat or drink. Should some future humans find a way to transfer our minds and personality to machines then our journey to inhumanity would be complete and we would die out for a superior form of life would have been born.

PS There is, of course, one huge rider to all this. And that is that we do not wipe ourselves out completely first before the inhumans we are fated to become have fully come to be.

This is written in support of my latest album called simply Existenz². You can listen to the sound of the approaching inhumans HERE!