Disaggregation, part three

this is a book article but it is also part of a ritual and an exploration; you can join here, but you may prefer to join at the beginning for proper context. we are talking about books introduced in part two. and we must talk a bit about ants.

1. writing as a pheromone trail
2. plural technology//plural sorcery
   1. writing and training of thoughts
3. we

writing as a pheromone trail

• wanna do the intro about ants?

• An ant colony is a system which performs certain behaviours, such as finding food sources and bringing them back to the ant colony. It is the classic example of a ‘superorganism’; evolutionarily, the individual ants are subsumed to the reproduction of the whole collective of sibling ants who share most of their genetic material, and thus it is adaptive for them to adopt strategies where a bunch of them like, die and stuff.

  Anyway, ants have a very elegant mechanism to find food. As ants wander around, they leave a trail of pheromones in the world. When they find food, they take some and walk back along their pheromone trail, which leads back to the colony - and also reinforces that pheromone trail, marking it as a route to food. Other passing ants may detect this trail and follow it to join in on the food source. This can be simulated on a computer; creative programmer Pezzza has a fascinating series of videos on simulating the behaviour of ants.

• the ants are doing a kind of stochastic search of a space. whole lot of problems can be seen in this light, including of course ‘stochastic gradient descent’ and ‘evolutionary algorithms’, but also things like ‘monte-carlo integration’, ‘metropolis light transport’…

  ok so now think about brains. they’re generating thoughts by all these different contextual mechanisms, stuff that cascades into a series of other thoughts. which train of thought you go down is semi-random but it is a patterned randomness. if thoughts are interesting, you’re likely to follow them again. and you can also induce other people to follow them…

  so we can think of the trains of thought generated by your brain as being like ants. the nectar they are looking for is… insight, challenge, emotional fulfilment, protection from danger, all the things that thoughts do; but overall it is ‘interest’. a bored mind has its ants running around aimlessly looking for something to think about. a focused mind has its ants running along a trail.

• Not sure that last part of the analogy holds up… it’s less ‘bring the food back to the nest’, and more ‘try to find the next step’.

• sure. not a perfect analogy.

  but in any case, as far as writing. let’s consider what happens when you write a book. you put a lot of effort into refining the pathways of thought that the reader will follow as they interact with the book. the reader will still be exploring the space around your path—and note that the deserialised thoughts in their head will have a different representation and exist in a different space than the ones in the author’s head.

  this means the purpose of writing is not originality exactly, but to find good pathways through the space and guide minds—your mind, and other minds—to follow them in their explorations. most effective when decoded into a somewhat similar space, of course. but the pathways generated by the pheromone trails create the contours of the spaces.

• So the door that Sash and Abraxa opened for Lilith…
• abraxa’s magic working in the book is a pheromone trail even though she is fictional. because jeanne has created such a compelling image of how she thinks, it is a strong pheromone trail. and jeanne is following the pheromone trails of other people, who may or may not also be fictional.
• In the endnotes of the book, Jeanne mentions talking to her therapist about Internal Family Systems theory, and The Far Side of Madness by John Weir Perry, and Maps to the Other Side by a Sascha Altman DuBrul. We have read neither of those, but those are some of the pheromone trails which shaped her thought-paths, right?
• the crucial thing though is that it interacts with actual experiences, not just other texts. that is what stops us getting stuck in a basin. the constant interaction with the wider world.

plural technology//plural sorcery

• so it’s time to talk about magic probably
• We kind of already are, huh. But for the readers’ sake, what are we using this word ‘magic’ to mean?

• for our purposes, the basic contention is that magic is a means to use symbolic methods to interact with invisible and abstract things. this is maybe a somewhat orthogonal concept to what is usually conceived of as magic. our concept of magic is entirely compatible with a materialist worldview, which other ideas aren’t.

  it owes something to the neoplatonist conception of programs-as-intention described by that biologist we encountered last year, michael levin, a body of theory which really dances at the edge of being crank stuff but hits on some genuinely fascinating novel creations; biobots and neural cellular automata and morphological compilers.

• OK. But lets start with something that can conventionally be called magic, to see if we can put across what we are getting at here. We can talk about sigil-based magic.
• ehehe queers love our sigils

• As Uminekoheads in the chat know, the Key of Solomon is one of a number of grimoires circulating in the European ‘Renaissance’, and it is followed a century or two later by another Lesser Key of Solomon. They describe rituals, demons whose powers can supposedly be called upon, and sigils to command them, all ordered into a great big list.

  These books can be reasonably criticised as being clunky appropriations of poorly understood Kabbalah; on a literary level they might be called repetitive and opaque and narrow in their aspirations and all sorts of stuff. They are popular today largely because they got picked up by a charismatic figures of the early 20th century occult movement, Crowley and that lot. Nowadays they are a well established established bit of visual iconography in the cultural stew, a go to representation of The Occult. You can get them printed on a bag.

  The notion of ‘sigils’ would later be picked up and emphasised by the chaos magic tradition, where it would be separated from a specific symbolic language; the practitioner is instead encouraged to create their own asemic script and inject it with personal meaning. Here the idea of magic working on the mind is made much more explicit; the magician is supposed to forget the meaning of the sigil, to allow the ‘thoughtform’ to do its work unconsciously.

• yes. we are in the concept-space-zone of “magical language”. so the celestial alphabet. the hebrew letters on the sigils. daoist fulu. ofuda. contracts with the devil.

• Creating sigils and magic circles and the like is an archetype for interaction with the world. You do something visible with symbols, and some invisible state changes as a result, causing a cascade of consequences. It turns out, sometimes that actually works, in a way you can meaningfully confirm.

  I think ‘you’ would probably say writing is magic, and it is the scaffolding for further magic. We teach all of our children to perform magic. We teach them to interface with a world of invisible powers: electric and magnetic fields, computer programs, countries, laws, money, gender, metaphor, social roles, minds. We teach them rituals to appease these powers and how to allow these structures to exist on the substrate of our bodies. (I won’t go over the ‘magic circle’ and the ‘egregore’ again here; enough has been written on that on this website already.)

• そうです。by training their brains to interact with such systems, by building them up on a group of people and allowing their brains to learn how they work through interaction, them we create the spaces of meaning that their ‘selves’ can exist in. ‘socialisation’, process by which we train the persona & processes of the surrounding society into their minds. that is how a glider propagates one step further.

  the fascists talk about trans existence as a ‘social contagion’. but the entirety of society, every thing that we are, propagates by the same sort of contagion. so like, the point of socialisation is not to just train one role, but to implement the whole social stack. which is just a sorta technomagical spin on like, the general concept of learning! but that’s what it is.

  sigils, then. we started with the most obvious things that ‘count’ as sigils, but the idea can get pretty damn abstract. like the solomon stuff is pretty oldschool. when you hear about grant morrison trying to make a hypersigil by writing comics… the ‘sigil’ is an entire creative work which is reckoned as an act of occultism. and you can say, like, that’s just mystique building, to get you to buy their comics. but mystique building is magic. it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (c.f., baru article 3)

• Right. The sigil stuff comes up in Jeanne’s book: Sash tells her friends that the developers of Mystic Knights are doing occult workings, making sigils by creating the games. Which is probably a remix of the Grant Morrison thing, right?

• mm. worth noting all this ritual is also technology: a learnable, imitable method to accomplish something. in this case, to perform transitions through the spaces of minds.

  so, gender transition is one such technology. it allowed us to escape from default personas and become a creature capable of touch and connection. we’ve come to think plurality is a technology too.

• What does that technology exist to accomplish?
• there are various answers but one is that it simply exists, and people are using it and entering into a space. (an abstract space, like a high-dimensional vector space with certain dynamics built on it.)
• And what is to be found in that space? Why should we go there?
• maybe when you’re inbetween too many spaces it helps us find any space at all to anchor to? maybe because we found our way there by accident, and now wish to be able to explore it more consciously; and we cannot come back so we must make sense of where we are.
• Here’s a theory. I don’t know that you will like this theory.
• i have some idea but speak it.
• We want to be plural because if we are plural we decisively belong to the field of weirdo trannies. We could try being an it/its awawa dollgirl or something but ‘plural system’ seems more compatible. In all these different personas we contextually inhabit in the way all humans do, we sometimes have to adapt to corpo-type panopticon spaces, and we want to make sure we do not forget our loyalty to the Wired, to the Abraxa and the Annie beings of this world.
• notably that theory does not mean we aren’t, or can’t be, plural?
• True. But it makes it sound less like a voyage of self-discovery and more like another desperate attempt to assimilate to a group.
• it doesn’t work. we wouldn’t be doing all this work to dissolve all concepts into atoms if we only wanted to fit in, we’d just pick some random conceptualisation and run with it. we do love and admire our plural friends but it is for the specific beings they are and not just because of what they represent in the plane of symbols.
• But you’re saying we’re built out of this plane of symbols, aren’t you?

• no. we are built out of system-dynamics. the symbols are just a means to create the interaction space.

  like, think about computer programs, right? it’s kind of hard to define what a program does except in relation to other things. because you can store state anywhere. a function transforms some bits and puts them somewhere and later a another function will read those bits and put some other bits somewhere else. on the local scale it means nothing. it’s only in aggregate, the big pattern that can only be seen ‘from the outside’, that we can see what the program is actually doing.

  we have been brought into resonances by the actual, direct contact with the systems inside our friends, whether they identify as plural or not. this is how the contextual personas emerge. don’t reduce it.

• I think that answers my fear.
• good. it is good to be able to switch perspectives. flip the chessboard.
• It is odd, thinking about it, that I identified Abraxa as a creature of the Wired. Because she is not that, not exactly. She makes her working by isolation from the Wired; by distancing herself from the contexts of regular society (the ‘System D’) to create a space of meaning where things could happen without exposure to the panopticon-light, the force that would bring her thoughts back into alignment with the rest.
• is the wired the internet, though?
• Hmm. No. It’s something else, isn’t it?
• we should probably check. does the reader know about lain?
• Of course the reader knows about Lain, right? Everyone knows about Lain. Even if it’s just like, that girl on the cover of the breakcore mix.
• you’re funny. i don’t think everyone does know about lain.

• OK. Sure. Serial Experiments Lain is an anime series; it is described as ‘cyberpunk’ but ultimately a work that sorta defies categorisation. It is full of richly resonant symbols. Yoshitoshi Abe’s designs with that distant-gaze expression that are empty and yet suggest all sorts of things behind; the deceptive simplicity of the drawings, the disconcerting wires and searing lighting; the inscrutable nonlinear plotting; the fact she actually canonically is plural and one of her is becoming god or something.

  Anyway. The Wired is full of strange creatures, people inhabiting nonhuman bauplans, secretive organisations. It is a vision of the internet of the late 90s, before anyone had any real experience with what was soon to unfold; back when the internet was a hole for strange people to hide in and not the mass of Everyone.

• The line between the strange-person hole and the overwhelming mass is pretty nebulous, isn’t it. Consider aoife’s words on the default persona. Consider that the writer of Lain went on to become a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
• who are you, person3 (purple)? where did you emerge from?
• I thought I was you, because I was responding to person1 (green), but then it didn’t seem like a very person2 thing to be thinking, so I realised I must be a third thing. Hello. I suppose I am trying to steer us away from potholes.
• Well, welcome to the party. If we three stick around, we will have to adopt names or something.
• do we? there is something comforting about being a nameless swarm of beings, any of which can be Bryn.

writing and training of thoughts

• Writing must be read to do anything, right?
• yes. absolutely. a serialisation that is never decoded is just bits. it is only meaningful by interaction with a larger system.
• Of course, writing is read by the author before anyone else. This is how we iterate. We lay down sentences, and that is a pheromone trail to guide us back to where we got to so we can explore further.
• we don’t just retrace the thoughts. by writing them down we can see them in a different spatial arrangement, recognise patterns, have stable structure.
• Right, damn, yeah. Writing is ordered and serialised, unlike memory. It’s laid out on a page; we can move our attention around the whole piece and come back. That stability makes it possible to approach it with an editor’s perspective; to revise and adjust, which is hard to do when everything’s floating in the associative fog of memory.
• right! writing is a technology, perhaps the most powerful technology that humans ever invented, because it is that constant transformation between fuzzy vibesy thoughtspace and serialised space that scaffolds us out into the space of thoughts.
• There are multiple layers of such transformations, aren’t there? Between images and words inside the brain, and between thought words and spoken or written words. Each one is encountered slightly differently, and we procede by mapping one into the other.
• just like how programming is mostly about transforming data into different structures!!!
• Shit, yeah.
• anyway, the processes, the things that we are made of, that are generating these contextual personas. those are different types of ant, aren’t they? different ways to extend and adjust the thought trail as we wander back and forth along it.
• Perhaps we could also compare it to processes of erosion and sedimentation.

• oho yeah that’s tasty too. longer-term shifts in the processes of thought.

  think about learning to play a musical instrument, right? or a language. any complex skill really. at first, stupid hard. you have to think about literally everything. but over time, the other parts of your brain learn to model the conscious thought process. you impress those pathways, you create new ants.

  which brings us back to plurality, tulpamancy and the like. the reason that pretending eventually becomes real. At first you have to think, ‘what would my tulpa think about this situation’. but over time, just like you develop a process for playing a musical instrument without conscious thought, your brain can take over modelling the tulpa without conscious thought along the lines of ‘what would the tulpa say’.

  the theory of plural systems talks about finding ways to achieve ‘intra-system’ communication, to recognise switches, to build a ‘headspace’. these things are creating the mechanisms for a plural system to exist within.

• So the answer to the ‘real’ vs. ‘iatrogenic roleplaying’ controversy that the wiki article spends so much ink on is, actually, both or neither. When you’re in the self-reference mines like this, the line between ‘roleplayed’ and ‘real’ is not actually a real one. This is perhaps an extension of the everything is roleplaying observation.

  Just like the self-exciting gender instability, it’s not just that something like plurality is a pre-existing thing that must be discovered. Nor is it a purely arbitrary fantasy that is copied as a fad. It is a deep fundamental shift to the mechanisms of thought; it is also something a set of practices that must be learned, just like mathematics must be learned.

• yes!! the fact that you have to build mathematics up in your brain does not mean that mathematics isn’t ‘real’.
• What does that mean for maintaining the line between fiction and reality? Because that line is very important. Getting mixed up leads you to a lot of very dangerous places, like persecuting real people for having the wrong sort of fantasy, or conversely getting so caught up in fantasy that you act on it in the real world.
• Pretty simple: the mechanisms that distinguish thoughts as belonging to the plane of reality or the plane of fantasy are things that need to maintained. You need to keep practicing recognising the distinction so that your ‘ants’ continue to push thought-paths in the direction of recognising it. If you spend a lot of time around kink people, that gets easier.
• So this plural stuff… what plane does that belong to?

• well, we have been thinking in these ways and so forth. we are fixated on this subject. it has already grown into something that is real about us. because things on the plane of thoughts and minds are invisible and shape themselves to the observer at the same time as being the observer, they are fundamentally quite mutable. we can reassess the evidence and conclude that we are plural and we will probably start acting in ways that are more plural as a result.

  but we can take care not to lose our model’s connection with the worlds outside our head, because feedback mechanisms are powerful, it is so easy to get lost in our own coils.

we

• Are we on Abraxa’s path? Sash’s path? Or Lilith’s path? Annie and Amy?

• no. we’re on some other path. but our we can follow their thought-paths when we need to.

  for now we have found a foothold in an economic system as Lilith did, even if in a weirdo niche like game development; we are not suppressing ourselves as sash spends most of the novel doing, but we certainly have in the past, and we relate hard to her proceduralisations and lists and fear of being evil. but we are drifting into stranger territories now. like Abraxa we have fallen through many different contexts and lives.

  as for annie and amy, they inhabit a horror novel; theirs is not a story that permits happy resolution. their ways of being are necessary to comprehend. they have shown us the way we relate to the biomass tower and the bugs and the sandpaper worlds of the Wired. they are beautiful.

  we love these girls, fictional or not. they represent something important.

• Truly. We would not have been on the edge of tears in the air above France if they didn’t have power in their fictional thoughts.
• yes. consider this also: Abraxa’s working does not fully fire off in the way she or the reader hopes, but it does something that might even be more important: it replicates the Sorceress, and the ways of her hosts, Abraxa and Sash and Lilith, the spaces they inhabit, and the thought-ways of people they remix and reflect, into the mind of the reader. they have made us understand why our projects matter. so her working is profoundly successful: it already brought together her three friends in our mind, in our hope, even if on the page it all falls apart once more…
• So this is why we are making the game?
• this is why we do any of it.