I've continued my readings on the non-computational theory of consciousness. The Emperor's New Mind was closer to home for me as I've studied Lambda Calculus at postgrad level and am more familiar with the mathematical ideas. That chapter on Turing machines was a pleasant brain trainer. I've currently just finished the section on real numbers, including complex numbers and the construction of the Mandelbrot set. I sense Dover Books is calling in the background, a traditional publisher of some very useful mathematics resources. I'm planning to segue from these Physics books into some more books on Metaphysics and Phenomenology, aiming for a tentative understanding of a unified theory quantum science of mind.
When I've done some more reading along these lines, I'd like to return to Heisenberg, and David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. I also have some readings by Karl Popper to achieve, as I needed to check some matters of falsifiability. I gather the idea these quantum theories of mind are very controversial in the academic field. I take it they're confused with the New Age mysticism angle, which is a shame in my eyes, as I sense them as distinct in rigour and methodology from the esoteric hippie pseudoscience and duplicitous evangelical fundamentalism of Martin Gardner's cranks (although Martin Gardner himself was incorrect about the context for the rise of Hitler, in the opening chapter of Fads and Fallacies), and instead sensible in their frameworks, much as they are currently theoretical and with inconclusive empirical results on account of testing difficulties arising from our lack of understanding at this frontier of knowledge, and from the limitations of our technology, laborious observations under mechanical introscopy remaining a slow process. Perhaps I will re-read Thomas Kuhn as well.
I consoled myself with some Friedrich Hölderlin poems, reading the German aloud to practice, and 60 or so of Nietzsche's letters, which I found more enthused than I was imagining, a propulsive fury driving him, tempered sadly by the increasing notes of a ravaging loneliness, and the lack of an audience for his work, a hostile, mocking silence over long years that undid him in the end. I like to sample from Nietzsche's favourites and his passionate recommendations for music, science and broader high culture, much as I select from Goethe's intellectual choices as chronicled by Johann Peter Eckermann.
I also read the Emperor Julian's arguments Against the Galileans, and some of Celsus' fragments, and Plutarch's work On Sparta, the latter of which I particularly enjoyed. I noticed King Agesilaus commenting on a mouse he observed pulled from its hole that immediately turned and bit its captor and then escaped, inquiring of his companion "When the tiniest creature defends itself like this against aggressors, what ought men to do, do you reckon?" Oddly, I had made an identical remark to my friend in the past, using the same analogy.
I was also inspired by his statement, when asked why Sparta lacked fortification walls, that the citizens under arms were "the Spartans' walls" and that "cities shouldn't be fortified with stones or timbers, but with the valour of their inhabitants." I paused a while to reflect and evaluate my own habits when I read that, according to the son of Leotychidas II, the Eurypontid king, Spartans kept their laws about bravery unwritten without setting them down and handing them to young men to read on the grounds that "it's better for them to get used to acts of bravery rather than to study written documents".
It's a shame we live in near enough the opposite of Lycurgus' traditional patriarchal society, much as Sparta does seem to have deviated from that original order for stretches, betrayed by disgruntled political bureaucrats and a couple of weaker kings.
Inspired somewhat by concern over the 'amoral familism', brutal wretchedness, and mercantile self-interest of the dead community in Harwich’s Parkeston district, I looked again for reference in Edward C. Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. I noted that the impoverished inhabitants of the post-war South Italian town reviewed in that book favoured regular physical punishments of their children, and, although distrusting of official Christian offices, still inculcated them with fear, and the fear of death, and generally considered children to be by nature naughty. The adult inhabitants, including their political representatives and council, remained selfish to the core, and were eternally reluctant to contribute to their community with projects, with money, or with offers of voluntary 641 labour, or to help their neighbours in any way. They were reluctant to organise or to plan for the future. It sounded like a nightmare, although disturbingly not that unfamiliar in some sense.
I'm growing tired of Zero Hedge - one of the few sites I regularly check online, a mere 4 other webpages, at most, (westsdarkesthour.com, bullionbypost.com, my bank, and then my email). Today's article, and the comments particularly (of which I read all), perturbed me.
The comments barely touched the issue, derailing instead into evangelical judgements, worries over demonic possession, constant attempts to assume the problem solely in terms of 'leftists'/'Democrats'/reassignment surgery, or fluoride/5G/gluten/MK-Ultra, or calling for harsher punishments, or irreverent indifference, or just praising psychiatric drugs, or indeed saying that nothing can be done. I didn't see a single idea in the article or the comments that touched on the family, or the reasons for madness, or indeed any adult compassion, instead getting the vibe that there was a sense of the worrying danger, and the inconvenience, or just something to be ridiculed. I expected by context and written stylistics that this was American commenters, not that the UK is any different in this regard. Quite a few were in favour of removing any ability to refuse official care treatment.
I'm sure they're not stupid enough to be unaware of what that horrific 'care treatment' means and entails, but there is something subhuman to their comprehension, a literal anti-compassion, a dissolution and degeneration of European racial soul.
The article took the detached, 'family members are sacrosanct' perspective, sensationally quoting a Pennsylvanian mother worrying that her adult son might conduct a mass killing "Will my loved one do such a thing? I know the possibility is there ... We all know it. It is an uncontrollable condition caused by their mind not functioning right ... Must this fear always be there?”
Perhaps so, yes, as cultic hysterical anxiety seems to dictate the reasoning on much of this shooter phenomenon, and indeed much of mental health stigma itself, a politicised cognitive bias, and a blinker on realistic thought.
Also, the article itself reads: "About half of them have anosognosia, or lack of insight into their illness. That is, they don't understand that they have a mental illness, refuse to take medication, and won’t go for treatment." I was left with my usual sense of frustration over this. I wish they wouldn't publish such ignorance. Psychiatrists will name you as in possession of anosognosia, of possessing a ‘lack of insight’, if you disagree with them, or resist (or resist being sectioned), or argue back to defend yourself, or raise a fuss over bodily sovereignty, or complain about their toxic corporate drugs and their results, or embarrass them, and, as with the diagnosis Borderline Personality Disorder, at times simply because they don’t like you.
It’s like the article’s lines are lifted from Wikipedia, as if by a lazy schoolboy. I'm annoyed that, in any meaningful sense, I never see one of the many commentors on any of these sites go against psychiatric orthodoxy, if they even have any interest or patience with the topic at all. Alice Miller level awareness is extremely uncommon, and, beyond her psychohistory even, a standard trauma model is obliterated, drowned under the fanatic tears and self-righteous demagoguery and pulpit moralizing, and 'the latest study', and too many brainwashed people unable to admit, even to themselves only, that they are wrong, or that they might have missed something, bereft of the intellectual curiosity that enables critical thought, taking the first answer that comes to them, unreflective, continuing instead to bolster a full spectrum system of psychiatric lies and exceedingly poor treatment. Without a secure, compassionate model for the aetiological understanding of distress and madness, a model stripped of current taboo and dispassion, and then a comprehensive societal education process that conveys this model, all subsequent care initiatives are meaningless.
This country's media and political establishment is totally obsessed with shooters and terrorists, to some fundamental hysteria, a sunless plateau, and in their own meticulous groupthink and self-serving convenience, and making all and sundry into terrorists by repeat sensationalism and propagandistic behavioural science, and the massed editing of English Law, shamelessly extended and corrupted to obscene reaches of power and control in the constant application of new, nit-picking legislation, hastily flung through a distracted parliament, and never by democratic involvement on the part of the public citizens - much as, given the underlying ignorance from parental interjection that shapes their dogmatic attitudes, that's somehow a small bonus - these fanatical voters and ideologues.
Much as I acknowledged to myself at the start of the year that I had crossed that familiar perceptual Rubicon and was now resting in compound loneliness under the silent canopy of an invigorating inverse paradigm; offering a cerebral mitigation only, for the time being, I had no idea how far my already traumatised mind would collapse over the ensuing months.
Some mental health workers came around not so long ago for one of their terrible check-ins. I was appalled when one recommended Solution Focused Brief Therapy to me. Looking into that a little more, it seems that superficial positivity approach makes no effort (bar cursory politeness, what the Wikipedia entry defines as "communicating empathy") to approach the past-life of a client, or to validate their problems at all, insisting instead on a solution-centric approach, brushing it all under the rug, as if they need their client fixed up as soon as possible, so as to get back to work, more super-strength band-aids for a broken heart, and as if their rushed botch-job would work in the long-term.
I disagree with therapy at the best of times, having also noted the work of Jeffrey Masson on that topic. This cold development sounds particularly atrocious. I'm far too polite and patient with them. Despite holding my own, and routinely arguing against their vacuous pig-headedness, I'm usually quite mellow, polite though not agreeable, and they have the power to enforce themselves regardless.
Firmly bound in one of R.D. Laing's knots of cognitive dissonance, a double-bind as by Gregory Bateson, damned if I do and damned if I don't, a lazy binary, finding – or indeed having – myself understood by the world as nothing but mad, and mad full time, this former full encapsulation a full, only conclusion of its own, and naught else, no other meaning available, considered only in their superficial genetic paradigm of broken brains, or, as a secondary alternative, malevolent as per the approach of other State authorities, and indeed my parents in some sense, and my often egregious girlfriend, I really don't have many options when it comes to hope.
At least I can still see words, and hear music, and have some semblance of manual dexterity, even if my vocal cords have become superfluous.
That's my notes for the day.
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