The new direction for Skilluminati Research as the war project gets moved to Invisible Warfare.  It was ambitious when I started thinking along these lines last year, but things feel much more clear now that I’m returning to my old notebooks.

Interestingly, “social entrainment” as a key leads to chronobiology again!  So far in 2008 I have been awed by how much my “diverse” projects are turning out to be a single, coherent tapestry.  This is probably a sign of increasing self-delusion and dangerous bullshit to come.

Some early dowsing:

Abstract:

Entrainment is a theory of causality wherein different but proximate actants are tied to one another in complementary rhythms. Entrainment proposes a naturalism of interrelatedness. Manuel DeLanda has explored the logic of social entrainment. Opposing assumptions are found in Actor Network Theory. ANT merges the sociology of knowledge and an analysis of power into a theory of pragmatic causality. Social causality is in ANT (micro-) politically constructed. The goal of this paper is to examine entrainment as a generative theory of social construction wherein linkages of ideas, persons, actions, events and objects, unlike in ANT’s translation are not saturated by (principles of) social power. Illustrations of how entrainment and ANT hold up in practice are provided.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm

Infobody Biofeedback Modulation (IBM)

Collective phase entrainment by social force; the tactical formation of the social organism through the control of the economy of imagination and individualized, inner control by local peer pressure. An auto-calibrating distributed believesystem management allowing for necessary agitation and integration on the basis of horizontal conspiracies, co-dependent limited autonomous intelligence.

Most individual social entities are less than well equipped to complete complex tasks, but are functioning well in the context of a social body as a macro-organismic insect population. Individuals might not be able to follow a coherent thought but they are perfectly able to make highly complex calculations regarding your social status in respect to dress-codes, facial expression or nuances in language, by using instinct and being imbedded in an supraintelligent biosystem. This model is in widespread use, although a part of the game is to pretend it is not. The whole being more than the sum of its parts.

The hypothesis of conscious macrobes or social macro-organisms in which individual humans are cells and sub-organisms the organs, seems attractive once a naive belief in solid objects is abandoned. Social organisms are not any less solid than matter itself.

http://www.t0.or.at/0ntext/subprop.htm

Some Howard Bloom brainfood:

http://www.bigbangtango.net/website/G-U-T/Corollary.htm

I can’t quite tell why, but the story below about the monarch butterfly’s migratory calculator seems to tie together our quantum speculations with linguistics, physics, biology, mass moods, and mass psychology.

Monarch butterflies have an internal four-dimensional guidance mechanism that is extremely complex. It hooks together biological changes made by internal clocks and the position of the sun to squeeze meaning from a constantly shifting relationship between time and space, between time of day, the movement of the sun in the sky, and a sense of geography. It does this by coupling at least two different clocks-one that works on ultraviolet light and operates a “sun compass”; and the other that works on an entirely different wavelength, a photon-sampling at a different frequency, to keep a body-clock entrained to the time of day. And this day-and-minute timing, in turn, has to take into account that the sun changes position each day, changes position each minute, and changes its length of time in the sky each day. That’s a lot of variables to sum. And it’s apparently done by an interlocked group of analog mechanisms.

Time, space, photons, and linguistics. Fractals and genomes. Moods that reset the brain and behavior. How do they all fit? The butterflies are decoding their environment in an extraordinary way. They are parsing the second-to-second changes around them into components that are the rough equivalent of nouns and verbs, subjects, predicates, objects, and adjectives. This parsing is far more linguistic than it is numeric. Again, it’s analog computation, not digital computation. Yet the monarch does things that most formulae can’t.

One part of what the butterflies decode-the information they strain from daylight and night, from dawn, noon, and dusk-is the equivalent of one segment of a sentence. Another-the information they squeeze from the position of the sun, is another sentence part. Yet another, what they may distill from landscape markers or from stars, is yet another sentence part. Put them all together and you get a sentence. You get an immediate meaning. You also get a translation-from sensory input to motor output, from perception to behavior.

What does this have to do with Pavel Kurakin’s photons querying their environment and being queried by it? What does it have to do with the decision a Kurakin photon makes about where to go next in its flit across the chasm of Planck time?

What does it have to do with the nearly infinite series of decisions that photon makes as it travels thirteen billion light years from a nova at the edge of the cosmos to your eye?

The photon’s first form of long-range navigation is based, if Kurakin is right, on instant-by-instant decisions, more of them than any number we can count. How does that primal quark mega-range navigation iterate? How does it repeat? How does it fold over upon itself and become the butterfly’s flight from Canada to Mexico?

What has the butterfly inherited from the photon that makes this journey possible? How does the basic vocabulary of time, space, matter, and motion express itself in the photon? And what elements of that vocabulary remain alive in the butterfly?

I suspect that the chain of connections is fascinating, and tells a tale of the cosmos’ entire history, leaving out only a few tiny things, mammals, large brains, consciousness, and human beings.

Ps remember that even a tale is a linguistic pattern with a ceremonial shape that’s similar to that of a sentence-subject, verb, adverb, predicate, adjectives, object. Here’s how a saga or story is parsed:

· Introduction of characters (quarks, leptons, and bosons),
· development (motion),
· introduction of the premise, the problem to be solved, the obstacle to be overcome (evolution and the creation of the new?),
· more development (motion),
· crisis (the instant of Godel’s paradox, the moment before a quantum jump, the instant before a phase transition, a move to the next level of emergence)
· solution (the cosmos makes one of its creative jumps, its creative saltations)
· catachresis (the moment when all the elements thus far expose are seen in a different light-the jump to that next level of emergence in which electrons and proton-neutron bunches no longer look like slamming billiard balls hitting each other at hyper speed, but settle down, get to know each other better and become, surprise, surprise, atoms),
· and denouement (the wrapping up of loose ends, the beginning of development on the new phase plane’s level, and, in the case of the suspenseful serial of this cosmos, the beginning of the next epic tale).