Humanity, for example
2006 03 19
Formerly I called this basic existential set Humana. First, I didn't distinguish it, not out loud, not at Macroinformation: I just added Sentiens to Bateson's category of Creatura. I want to distinguish the world of awareness from the world of ahem instinct: and I further subdivide to emphasize the necessary fuzziness of borders, and, importantly, to avoid human chauvinism. I wish to divorce my thinking from any assumption about human exclusivity: the same as I wish to avoid assumptions that life began first on earth. I don't say it didn't; I say we don't know: and there's no reason, other than parochial vanity, to assume it.Persona may have any number of "moons" made of green cheese.
Pleroma may have none.
Pleroma may have none.
Green cheese moons may be abundant in Pleroma/Creatura/Sentiens (Scientia / Dementia).
Dementia: the set of mental things that have no possible correspondence in Pleroma or that part of Creatura without self-awareness)
2006 05 24
Persona is the universe in which we have ideas about our nature, our individuality, our importance ... Platonic Forms ... or absence thereof.In Pleroma, "we" "are" matter/energy. It's in Creatura that we are alive. Still, in Pleroma we can burn, get radiated, blow up ... So what? so can anything.
It's in Creatura that we "want" to stay alive, not get burned, blown up.
Only in Sentiens are we aware that we may in future get burned, blown up.
Only in Persona do we think it's "wrong" that we should get burned, blown up.
...
While I work on this I enclose the note as I first scribbled it:
Oh, there are trials galore: just in Creatura. But for Persona to be valid, not just illusion, shouldn't there be some review process? If the shaman gang up and convict Newton of blasphemy shouldn't some god step in and demonstrate that the shaman had no idea what they were dealing with, were not proper members of Persona?
I believe that Persona is just beginning to get established: as a subdivision of Sentiens: which is just beginning to get established. We're living in the attic of a house whose ground floor is not yet installed.
Now the concept of macroinformation fully applies.
Persona Scrapbook
2009 03 03
Last evening I bailed out of a DVD with Sissy Spacek as a pregnant mother who's been dealt thalidomide being treated as a non-person by male establishments who have no reason to consult her: just give her an illegal abortion, send her back to the other children, and go about their business. Sissy Spacek is a wonderful actress, great to look at across the decades, and she wasn't the only thing in the movie with eye-appeal (Carla Gugino, for example!) But the movie's sexual politics were so obvious, so limited to its own concerns, so far from real penetration .... that I bailed: but not without still thinking about it: after decades and decades of thinking about it: after being impoverished and finally arrested and officially censored for trying to do something about it: by offering a cheap cybernetic data base for all voluntary public information.In 1970 lots of groups were talking about "consciousness raising": blacks, women, fruit pickers ... I was handing out Free Learning Exchange information, inviting the public to help me create a free marketplace for learning resources, teachers who could be fired as well as hired (with the teachers, all individually, privately contracted, having the right to expel any student at any time for any reason) ... I talked from my soap box of raising consciousness for all groups, potentially for all individuals.
This movie which bored and annoyed me more than it stimulated me was good, even subtle, in how it first showed the protagonist's husband and doctor making decisions that vitally concerned her without informing her let alone consulting her. The husband and the doctor here were both bestowing personhood on themselves (granting themselves the right to make decisions, including illegal decisions) while denying any similar right to her. She's annoyed, her husband doesn't see why. Good. Applause here: except the movie showed no awareness of how very common that behavior remains, including among women! Women now exempt themselves (from being exempted) and the society at large half-agrees; but neither women nor the society recognize the range of other unconsciousnesses I was referring to thirty-nine years ago. The society routinely makes decisions without consulting of informing those concerned.
For example, in a scene shortly before the scene in the doctor's office where doc and hubby withdraw to another room to discuss abortion and to make the decision free from interference by the wife and mother, the protagonist is emceeing her TV show for kids. A little girl has drawn a giraffe. "And what makes it a giraffe?" asks the monitor. "It's yellow," answers the cute little blond girl, and it's got a big long neck ... and great big brown balls." "Oh, brown spots" (!) corrects our ideal mom: and she wouldn't have kept her TV job long if she hadn't. The movie protests the non-personhood of adult women, but goes along with the non-personhood of the children.
Don't mistake me: I'm not arguing for children getting equal time; I'm pointing out that even those who object to getting dismissed dismiss them.
No issue is more important within Sentiens than determining the limits of Persona: and then taking responsibility for those limits! In other words, if we grant personhood to women, but still deny it to philosophers we choose not to agree with or listen to, watch out: the philosopher may have been trying to warn your about the cliff in the dark.
If society continues to torture and starve creative, honest thought, mislabeling it wild, whose fault is it when we all choke and fall down dead?
I challenge you to find a single instance of any of my schools or universities understanding a single original thing I said from 1962 onward. (There were examples before, but there are no counter-examples since!)
In other words, we are responsible for our actions, our decisions, our awareness, our non-actions ... whether we know it or not.
As sentience forms a spectrum between sane and pathological poles, I observe that human sentience' claims about personhood are imperfect and perhaps essentially so. We have classes of individuals we deny personhood to and rituals for stripping personhood from selected individuals.
A geek was the guy at the freak show who'd stand for humiliation: swallowing live goldfish, for example. The geek was commonly some alcoholic, some kind of junky, who'd do anything for another dose of his drug. But society can treat anyone it choses like a geek. The victim can be a genius, or saint. The victim doesn't have to be a junky at all. The Christian story has Roman justice turning a god into a geek. Socrates Athens turned an elderly philosopher into a geek. A church supposedly respecting that god turned the scientist become astronomer named Galileo into a geek. (I was turned into a geek long before the FBI arrested me!)
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