love in a hive mind August 22, 2006

Language programs our behaviour in such heavy ways; how we interrelate and decide one anothers’ fate is hedged about with possessives.

I’ve recently been involved in a couple of different kinds of governance discussions. In one, a group of decision makers is assembled, some of whom are engaged in philosophical disputations, others are rigorously attepting to make decisions. Given a majority, there is no real valid discussion. In the conversation there are a lot of assumptions about what “we need” which don’t stipulate who we are or what our problems are. We need different things depending on who talks. There’s a lot of “I think” in the conversation – exchange of opinions about things which can’t act on things – which aren’t presented in terms of immediate facts, near potential consequences. people talking about what We Need get it pointed out by a couple of others, maybe build a little circuit devoted to it in themselves.

Seven of Nine talks up the concept of a hive mind, of a borganisation – a seeming perfect vehicle for collective action. I read We, Borg then re-read bits of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Inside a hive mind, relations would be all different. “Governance structure” of a cellular network isn’t the right term; just mediation and exchange mechanisms; operations, not instructions. If this-I were inside a hive mind, i’d feel a very different kind of connection to the other-I people inside it with me.

Our words for describing relations are all possessive – emphasise difference between i and you ness, differing status, differing privileges, control ability. My brother, my friend, my staff, my wife. Of-me-ness shouldn’t be necessary. The constant stating of it can be un-learned. Action on any implicit assumption about rights, precedence, ability to tell one another what to do, can be unformed.

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.
Ralph Emerson, The Over-soul

In a hive mind there would be no such situation where “a blank I loves blankly a blank You“; love in a hive mind would be complete, or be more complete.

theosophical investigations June 30, 2006

Where the remainder pile in that bookshop is concerned, i have no free will. Books often come in pairs, but today I couldn’t leave without a set of three; God’s Last Words, The Book of J, and The Devil in the Shape of a Woman.

Why am i reading about how the Bible has been read? In part this goes back to my fascination with the combination of Taoism with misogyny+anti-technology elisions in Ecclesiastes. I knew i was groundless in understanding, missing connection to a world of biblical hermeneutics, without which i’d be underequipped to think this through. I took a look at the tradition and shied right away; no ten years in a theological seminary for me, looking for questions that i’m half-sure I won’t find, finding too much that I cannot accept. S’s mother, perhaps keen to reclaim her seed’s seed for Judaism, offered God Is A Verb and a syncretic approach not unlike S’s own pick-and-mix mysticism. I enjoyed it, didn’t fire with it, and dropped the thread for some time.

Recently T drove a spike through my mind, pile-driven with puritan sermons supporting a Word-literalist worldview unlike anything i have known a peer to express; a complete and perfectly-circular honesty of intent; a meta-framework for understanding what has been meant.

The King James is a great program; it makes my thoughts ring in syncopated metre. It jars me all the time with statements like “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (I was told that i was a witch once, by a person who otherwise called me very accurately from almost no context. This was meant in the “we are all witches” / “we are all christ” sense, but i found some “truth” (or at least “truthiness”) in the statement. (Not in the wiccan sense; i still think that’s mostly disingenuous schlock and self-involved creative anachronism.) Thus the third book I picked up; while i’m in the geopsychic hotspot of puritanism and its discontents, i might as well learn in-place about what happened here hundreds of years ago.) I’m more or less scared to get to the post-gnostic bits near the end, Paul of Tarsus‘ flashes of casual violence and offhand misogyny; how can one read past this, if one cannot draw a line in the text?

Yet if all of us have been for some time cursed; to be subordinating and subordinated; to be conflicted with desire; in communication only to be displaced; then i always want to know why, with the insistence of a six-year-old child; to help figure out how the curse is lifted. I don’t expect to find out myself, but am glad to have an extra reason to try, wanting to understand my friend.