l;ate Night Nagging

Let's nag ourselves to sleep tonight.

The bills are unusually high, our employment situation is
quite hopeless, it will soon be time to go dishwashing again,
or something other of that humiliating order. That is: in the
company of strangers we wouldn't dream of calling dishwashing
a humiliating activity, we mean, look at us, but since we are
all alone here we might as well have it out in the open.

Our aim as Cathedralic Poultry engaged in the chicken run
of creativity can only be the encounter with ourselves.

The study of others, the Other, The Others or Whatever
is better done through traditional methods of science,
pseudo-science, never ending movie quizzes in Facebook
or the commercial exploitation of ephemeral knowledge
and social needs in the Arts. From these four fields (a certain
French philosopher with a bad name i can't remember names
another four but he is clearly mistaking playing movie quizzes
for politics, we can assure you there is nothing political about
playing these quizzes whatsoever) we may
derive money or pleasure or both.

What we may rarely get from them, those other activities we mean,
while being very rewarding in their own right is a certain feeling
for the eternal Deficit, a craving of sorts, the exquisite joy of
being able to torture yourself to near annihilation in the quest
for Beauty, or whatever you put at the end of your inevitably
delusional journey.

It's the oldest story known to the planet,
we find instructions for the procedure in Gilgamesh.
Try to find immortality, fall flat on your face, go back to 'Start' ,
you don't receive any bonus.

We should refrain however from using the term 'our true selves '
because well the what of what is seeing is identical to the what of
what is seen, as you can see here in an allegorical depiction
of a monadic soul in its rather shady zone of clarity, trying
to get a good look at itself.

Note that there is ample room for improvement, a further
stretchting of the self however does look a bit awkward, we
might get sucked in an utterly destructive jump into the abyss of
looking into the looking of looking without ever getting to the object
of our looking again. Take care, it doesn't take that much to happen
you don't even need to be bipolar or a true schizo or whatever.

There is, it seems some validity in the suggestion that exactly that
is happening to large parts of the population, soap-wise, reality tv-wise
gaming-wise, although the performance of belief is a more positive
look at staring at a non-existant suspension of disbelief blabla is
my academic title still holding blabla ...as you can see that kind
of speculation does sound a bit unwise too, qua speculation
we mean, er, purely speculatively speaking of course.

Paradoxically, exactly that tempting jump inward might be required
to trigger consciousness in an artificially intelligent environment. Sure,
mere speculation, again but can't you just see the questions popping up
here, the what & where & the who preceding the inevitable
what the heck for. Because, referring to our Cathedral's First Restraint of
Recursiveness, namely that first level recursion is in general a Bad Idea, but
second level recursion is Pretty Much OK, so if you have a system
evolving from the concatenated produce of one kind of consciousness
(ok let's assume for once there are more kinds of consciousness
that could be known to any one kind, that would be quite extraordinary, hihi)
the initial init procedure for those thinking machines would darn well be suitable
for the evolving machines as well.

Anyway, let's forget about the plot for our novel for a moment ( the novel of course
is the plot as it unfolds into reality, so this may well be the closest you ever get
to reading 'Anke Veld' , the most famous net novel of all time) and focus on the poor
sods, the Poultry that we Really are.
But then. much to our dismay, we see that 'finally' the 'artistic' drive may well be
exactly that what is required, in that supreme fiction of emergence. Darn.

It may well be exactly this tempting possibility that makes us go through the
motions nonetheless, in spite of all the failures, the burning of our predecessors
at the stakes of whomever is in power (usually around 1600 somewhere)
the bad health and tragedy inflicted by our fellow-precursors on our fellow-precursors
and all this blind blind blind ego stuff looking for other ego's to eat alive, in spite
of all that sick ugly mess we always seem to get stuck in.

Exactly that, and of divine simplicity you might add,
now that you're here anyway,
might make us into what we are:
two functions diving after a third that is still rendering,somewhere...

'Two Functions diving after a third (Still Rendering)", dv 2007 Maries Watercolours on paper