Language. Manipulation. Serious stuff.

Source

As for the options you give about the usefulness of folk psychology, I agree with the second one, about the sensorimotor loops and environmental manipulation. Of course that’s how we use our model of the personal self, to manipulate each other in our social interactions. The terms “belief,” “desire,” “meaning,” and so on work to that extent. 

Augh!

This isn't specifically in regards to Ben's comment. Here it is as well:

Language - To humans as picks are to thieves, minus the alarm system.
— R. Scott Bakker (@TheDevilsChirp) April 17, 2014

And I think some of the arguing isn't about big evil corporations coming to control us or about some sort of cosmic aesthetic. It's from the other side of the perspective. Because I mean, who cares if the big evil corporation manipulates you if you are only ever manipulated or manipulate others?

The thing argued about, in part, is for something other than manipulation.

Taking on the second quotes analogy, that would be a key.

Let's take the boardgame analogy, so as to make this a bit more concrete and explicit (rather than trying to appeal purely to maybe some sort of feelings you have on the matter but are barely aware of and...yeah, as legit as that sounds)

In chess certain moves are valid. To use them is okay (well, assuming the other person has agreed to play!). They are a key, in other words - the right way to use the lock.

So you can argue alot in regards to biomachines manipulating biomachines. But to a certain degree there can be keys.

Ants have this thing where they will pass food onto each other with the right antennae strokes. Quick, they are manipulating each other! But then there's this beetle which can mimic the antennae strokes to get them to give it food...so which is the manipulation? Both, equally as much? Certainly the ant gets more back from giving to it's fellow ant than to the beetle. Certainly in Darwinistic terms it's genes/structure of life will continue onward.

Never mind what all the arguing is otherwise - or what this post is otherwise. It's hard to get at this subject because my guess is that, as said, it's about the other side of the perspective.

What's the point of saying language is a lockpick, unless you address the idea of a key - surely such a statement is just more lock picking then, isn't it? It picks the lock that stops others from picking other locks - most useful for a certain agenda.

Sans keys, it's just a theif who would lock out other thieves from his loot. No chess interaction, not even an ant ensuring something like him will be there in the future by its giving.

In the end I guess I am left trailing off in an appeal to that unseen/unseelie of the perspective.

Time is a flat boardgame

Made a post about summerising morality into a transparent boardgame model, over here.

The internet dissapointed me as I was not called a jerk or anything. But we can only hope (I mean, really you gotta hope to be called a jerk on the internet because it happens nine times out of ten, so how else are you to avoid dissapointment but to hope for it? But then I get enthusiasm, so I still end up dissapointed! ;) )

Ended up as a main post topic over here.

It's fiddly ground - for hundreds of millions of years humanity essentially has worked off of someone who just calls the shots (don't ask why, for now) and hoping that they will 'see the light' (ie, see it your way) and call the shots in your favour.

Of course we have laws over time, because I think other people wanted to call the shots (don't ask why they couldn't but still wanted to, for now) and as maybe a compromise instead of it just being left to someone elses whimsy, it became a written rule. And maybe slightly emperically measurable! Maybe just slightly.

The thing is, you, gentle reader, must have played a boardgame at some point.

In it, if you knew the rules a bit, you knew how to do something in the game. How to get some points - how to get somewhere. Or atleast try.

Your traditional laws don't enable you to get anywhere. They just prohibit.

And generally for the rich, they use their money to circumvent such prohibition. So the laws just stop you from getting anywhere (and if you're low upper income or upper income and reading this, I'm sure you're scowling - I mean, everywhere you look everythings fine - therefore everything is fine. You can see for hundreds of meters and that's the sum total of everything, right?)

The thing boardgames do is promise a (sort of) life.

They don't just say 'you can't do X, Y and Z'. They have a promise of maybe getting some points and stuff.

Who promises shit like that in real life? Heh. No but conmen, generally.

About the title

So, dusting this off...

I don't know how to make an about page, so I wanted to note something about the title. It's a joke, see? There's this crude humour in a movie I heard about once (yeah, I take jokes from movies I haven't even seen!), where someone comes out of a toilet and loudly proclaims they feel five pounds lighter!

Here it's three pounds.

I started this blog when the three pound brain blog wasn't quite so wordy - even then it seemed to warrant some fun being made of its attitude. Now so even more with the massive posts. Yes, I know they are being written in the genre of the academic, who can't feel anything unless it's bunkered in between ten thousand words between it and the cold, hard black.

Then again I guess at best this blog, what it's said and possibly even with a refining eye for this in the future, is just forming another word bunker. Kind of like a board game, but with word bunkers all the elements are static - I guess that's why they need so many since nothing moves, its a matter of having enough parts to forget some to develop an apparent vibrant and moving landscape in what is static and still as dirt.

What's that?

Just boundary musing. You might be coming from the heart of a bunker of your very own, so it makes no sense - the very boundaries of the world are words, so it would seem. So talking of boundaries beyond boundaries...well...

Anyway, that's the traction issue. Outlaid as a sort of principea etchicus.

Comic Book Brain Missconceptions: Are you amongst the wrong?

I flipped through 'Deadpool kills the marvel universe' today. Not really digging on the theme - but that's just one strike.

Then *spoiler, kiddies - though it's near the start anyway* Deadpool gets his head exploded (some sort of kinetic control attack).

That's fine.

Then he gets up, having regenerated his head, and continues his doings. Delivering a line telling his attacker about their mistake.

Oh jeez.

You've got Bakker going on about blind brain theory, whereas this is where the general public are AT when it comes to the brain.

It shows how wacked the grasp is - oh, if you can regenerate your head, you're absolutely cool. I mean, talk extreme dualism - as long as the drivers cab comes back, the driver just hops back in!

For a start, information in your head is NOT genetically encoded! It's stored as strengths between synapses in the tendrils that connect them. Unless you have a record of this - like a stored copy of the brain, that ain't coming back. Deadpool loses his head and it regens - he'd come back as a kind of baby. He wouldn't even know how to speak!

Even if you took the idea you can healing factor back this memory - how the heck does that work? It resets your mind? So how do you think? Your thinking adjusts the strengths between synapses - if you cannot modify those strengths (because they keep 'healing' back to what they were before), you just cannot think! The healing factor would effectively KILL you, for the way you'd be locked in a mental blue screen of death.

And artists are at this level of thinking about how the brain works?

It reminds me of an Aeon Flux episode where she gets cloned...and the clone has all her memories. The thing was I raised this and my friend was insistent she'd get the memories. I had to really outline the difference between genetic information and information stored in the brain between synapses.

Need some popular stuff that starts to iron out the practicalities of the situation.

The sematically unabiguous frame

Originally from here, I'll strip it of being about a particular individual and instead describe a particular mindset. Hopefully this mindset is purely a work of fiction on my part!

To this mind, there are no semantically ambiguous words. When he sees a word or phrase which could be interpreted in two or more ways, he sees only one interpretation (his). Seriously I’m betting he couldn’t give any example of a ambiguous sentence – to him everything is ‘obvious’ and ‘clear cut’. How long is a piece of string? This mind will tell you. You can’t even appeal to ambiguity in words and try to establish between parties a definition both use in the same way – because he doesn’t recognise ambiguity occurring in the first place. It’s like one of those optical illusions where a few lines make it look like a triangle is there, because you're mind completes the form of a triangle. But you’re aware you’re doing it. This mind isn’t. Indeed I wonder if, even over that image he’d be going “For gods sake, it’s a triangle!”.

He then ‘catches out’ others ‘switching’ use of a definition. When it’s just a matter of them not using his definition, to which is like that idea of him being a slave of his interpreter, unable to see the wording could be interpreted another way.

Even that ‘catching out’ isn’t that big a deal or bad boo boo if the second party recognises alternative interpretations are possible and will work with the first party towards a definition they both use the same way.

But we’re stuck at the ridiculous ‘switching’ stage, where he treats his own interpretation as some sort of wonderful revelation of how the other person is wrong. Like someone looking at the woman illusion and cackling about how the other person is wrong and switching their definition in the age of the lady they saw.

Of course if just a handful of examples of ambiguously worded sentences that could be interpreted in two ways or more were given by the suspected mind in question, that puts a hole in the hypothesis this applies to them. Hopefully you'd get such examples!

Pedestal-ation by Absence?

Looking at an article here - I'll preface (and prime, a lil') by saying when one party acts childish, that isn't some sort of excuse for another party to give violent threats.

Plus I'm just focusing on the bit about the author Watts.

Requires Only That You Hate is regularly showered with hatred for her thoughts on science fiction and fantasy–she was called a rabid animal by Peter Watts, a luminary in our field, who received very little public condemnation for his statements. (A rabid animal! Because she thought a book was sexist! I thought humorless feminists were the ones who took things too seriously!)

Now I'm just focusing on this point. Even if I proved something wrong with it, that does NOT prove the other points to be wrong.

I 'spose what gets me when I start adding to the heap, is the absence of permission.

Lets take it for a moment that 'rabid animal' isn't a childish slur but actually worse. Okay, so he can't say that...what can he say, in childish response?

It's the absence of permission for any sort of response that makes me suspect a 'on a pedistal' type of sexism. That if a woman, pushes a cream pie into someones face, she is above having a cream pie then pushed into her own face as well? Even if 'rabid animal' is just too much, what is an okay cream pie to use? On that, nothing is said and...that leads to a pedestal.

Yes, this is all amongst abhorrent death threats and rape threats. But it's exactly in threatening situations where were reflexive responce is to start to give up/take away liberties in the name of security - ie, start putting certain peoples on pedistals. We really have to watch out for that.


Plus the "doesn't mean male authors get to unload loaded slurs at them" bothers me, in that why is the sentence only aimed at what men don't get to do?

Ultimately what strikes me is in the power of what is un-said.

Screen shots for the game - titled: Bio Hackers

The bio hacker game is building up, and imaginatively named 'Bio Hackers', for now atleast. It's deliberately very much text based right now. So if that burns your eyes, look awaeeeee! If you're used to games built by big companies, you might wonder how anything without spiff graphics everywhere can be a game - well, there are alot of text based browser games on the net with quite a following. And basically you're spoiled - get over it a bit! Also the random chat in the shoutbox is smudged because it's all test stuff and upon reflecting on it, I realised anyone else reading it might get strange ideas! Click to enlarge.

This is kind of your main area, which would branch off to various stuff you can buy or sell.

This one is the conflict area where you basically pick a fight. This particular game is based on the idea of social conflict - ie, you're not beating the other guy to death, you're out posing him, out styling him. It'd be funny if that sounded more pretentious than killing for power.

Finally it's the combat, which is very basic and essentially there to watch the moment happen. Again, there are alot of browser games which have non interaction combat in them, with quite a few players.

Come to think of it, I might put the shout/chat box underneath that as well!

So that's the progress so far!