Come taste the wine

Come hear the band Come blow your horn Start celebrating

I am a Premature Anti-Trump Technocracy writer because it appears evident a Mutt and Jeff strategy afoot. You’ve unwittingly been the victim of the good cop, bad cop negotiation strategy. In a good cop, bad cop negotiation, two individuals or parties, working as a team, extend a series of rewards and punishments with the goal of gaining an advantage over their counterpart. A well-known interrogation room technique in law enforcement, the good cop, bad cop negotiation strategy in the business world involves one “cop” acting in a “threatening, hostile, and abusive manner,” while the other adopts a “nonthreatening, friendly and sympathetic manner,” writes Curtis H. Martin in the Nonproliferation Review. The “nice” negotiator aims to gain the target’s trust and win a concession, lest the target be stuck with the unappealing offer of the tough negotiator. A good cop, bad cop negotiation poses considerable challenges in negotiation and bargaining. Un-American to the core given my birth here, under the laws of the land, whose parents -complying with these laws in 1957 - were permitted to birth I who entered the outside world one April morning somewhat premature. Today of course far far far worse with vaccines, drugs, Covid injections mandated God only knows what else under the law of the land, this land that most expressly does not belong to you and me. We have RFK Jr. as a shrill voice unable to be in Cabinet championing his idea of Medical Dystopia to Trump and likely to Elon too and Vance too. We await the next justification for mass vaccination, lock downs, crashing the economy, and good cop bad cop helps prepare the ground. In general there can be no political solution as governance is the core problem.

In my parlance call the great apparatus of Governance by the name Gargantua. Now Gargantua is not in his Right mind, but his LEFT. McGilchrist writes on this well.

Humans in the livery of King Gargantua are paid not to be thinking and feeling like humans. Elon Musk I do doubt thinks and feels like a human, and I shall use him strictly as image of our most modern "blonde beast" Technocratic Man. TM knows life was short once and now is becoming so again. TM knows cloning has many benefits for Space Exploration and Development. And organs to harvest etc. A clone is not human, not animal really but likely categorized as a lab invention. So Iain McGilchrist discusses how the Left Hemisphere (Gargantua in my words) usurps the Master though the Emissary. McGilchrist argues that the relationship between the hemispheres is asymmetrical. Although they are both essential to human functioning, the RH is the sphere that engages with the world of experience beyond the mind and provides the source of all meaning. Whilst the LH often has an essential role in brain processing, the processing usually follows a pattern of right-left-right (stimulus – explicit processing – contextualisation. For this reason McGilchrist claims that the RH has “ontological supremacy”.

McGilchrist also points out that our judgements and our willed actions are shown by scientific observation to occur intuitively before we develop any conscious cognitive processes to explain them. Gestures also unconsciously precede associated speech. Our LH ‘reasons’ appear to be rationalisations for judgements that have already been made by the RH and put into action by the body. This again suggests to him the primacy of the RH. The RH is also claimed to have primacy because it is the co-ordinator and adjudicator between the hemispheres. It can produce a dialectical synthesis between the processing of LH and RH, where the LH only engages in competitive opposition.

However, despite the “ontological supremacy” of the RH, McGilchrist also acknowledges that the LH has the edge in terms of power. It is better able to suppress the RH than the RH can suppress it, so the LH dominates in cases of conflict. The LH is also likely to gain more control because it develops systems of representation of the world that determine consistency of action over a period, whereas the RH just responds to experience. LH dominance is constantly reinforced by the dominance of language in our conscious experience.

The LH can also become increasingly dominant because it can enter a spiral of positive feedback. Whatever it does creates a represented world and a set of rules for that world, and if that world is not disrupted by major new difficulties, it can continue to be reinforced indefinitely by its own preference for positive feedback. The RH, on the other hand, is more likely to respond to negative feedback, so that if it is becoming too dominant and we are less effective as a result, it will be brought back more into balance with the LH more readily than the LH will.

Science right now is striding onwards to understand more about the complexity of life. From Michael Levin's lab at Tufts.

Embodied Minds: understanding diverse intelligence in evolved, designed, and hybrid complex systems

Each of us took the remarkable journey from matter to mind. Once we were quiescent egg cells; slowly, gradually, we became human beings capable of advanced metacognition. Our group studies the processes by which intelligence, in myriad conventional and unconventional embodiments, operates in the physical world. We combine developmental biophysics, computer science, and behavioral science to understand how cognition scales up: from the metabolic and physiological competencies of single cells, through the organ-building and repair capabilities of cellular collectives, to the classical behavioral repertoires of whole organisms and swarms. While looking for scale-invariant principles, current work focuses on interrogating non-neural cognition, in particular on the emergence of proto-cognition in cell collectives at both evolutionary and developmental timescales.

We work at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, we use a wide range of natural animal models and also create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. Our goal is to develop generative conceptual frameworks that help us detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs.

Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.

I spoke of Sinclair Lewis yesterday. We might speak of The Stand today. The famous 1978 novel by Stephen King. This post-apocalyptic horror/fantasy novel presents a world devastated by a deadly plague, killing 99% of the population. The survivors, drawn together by dreams of a charismatic and benevolent figure, gather in Boulder, Colorado to form a new society. However, a malevolent figure also emerges, attracting a following of his own and setting the stage for a classic battle between good and evil. The story delves into themes of community, morality, and the capacity for both destruction and regeneration within humanity.

Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity