Re: Magic 104 the empathic channel

[jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)]

Larry Spence responds to me:
> [Me:]
> >I think our society, today, is one big *trauma*, and a good part of the
> >reason is that we've all been intimidated into disbelieving our hearts,
> >on the grounds that any notion of 'spirituality' is outmoded sentimental
> >superstition.
>  [Him:]
> Personally, I like to blame Reagan/Bush, television, and laziness. %)  Hey,
> I live in the heart of the Bible Belt, and plenty of people around here will
> tell you they're "spiritual," yet we have a lot of poverty and intolerance.
> So I don't think that a widespread belief in the supernatural is necessarily
> going to fix anything.

Reagan and Bush and television and laziness were all *creatures of our 
ignorance*!!!  If we'd been paying attention at all, we would have noticed how 
each of these was presenting a seductive front while draining our resources 
dry...  It's because they intimidate us into imagining that our *spiritual 
resources* of responsibility and mutual respect (among others) are 
economically irrelevant and consequently unreal!  Organized religion does
exactly the same...

Your (distorted) paraphrase "belief in the supernatural" makes it sound like I 
want people to buy Ouija-boards and obey channelers-- what I want is to *win 
general agreement* that *what we feel in our hearts* as kind and good and 
healthful and responsible is *real* and *counts*, as a general rule, and to go 
beyond the sort of Asimov-Drukman-Trump scornful-materialism that argues, 
more-or-less, "My bad vibes are unassailable because science disproves vibes." 
(Asimov was a shameless egotist-- did everyone run across Jack Sarfatti's orgy 
of namedropping, crossposted to 20 different newsgroups last week?  He's a 
'paranormal-physicist' whose heart is still befogged by that old school...  
His sort of psychic-sensationalism is completely unappealing to me, a travesty 
on real emotion.)

> Certainly the defects on your personal copy of the media are psychological
> cues for the stuff that was happening to you.  But what evidence is there
> that you are causing any permanent change in the media?  Why would you think
> this, as opposed to simply "those sounds help remind me of <...>" ?

I tried to answer this one in advance-- it couldn't differentiate *your* 
copy's personal imprints from the defects everybody's *shared*.. ("Sorry, 
Del")  Because you don't normally *compare* yours to everyone else's.

I think it's related to the concept of *personal space*-- psychologically, 
we're very sensitive to our personal territory, always needing to mark it 
subtly with some sort of *imprint* of ourselves.  I saw a Nova once where an 
architect observed people in *city plazas*, always adjusting the placement of 
their chairs, even just very slightly, before they sat down!  (He recommended 
that plazas ought always have chairs that can be adjusted, to indulge this 
'superstitious whim'. ;^)

I'll also bring in at this point the whole *biological* mystery of 
individuality, which is critical in immunology because all diseases are 
(supposedly) failures of the immune system to isolate non-self invaders.  And 
this is bound to be related to this whole urge-to-mark-space-as-mine.  Or 
consider how comfortable we are with our own saliva, so long as it stays in 
our mouths, but if you spit into a clean glass, it's *really* gross to 
consider drinking it back up.  Even in that trivial gesture, we've completely 
redefined it as non-self, really dramatically!

This whole area is conspicuously *incomplete* in terms of scientific
theory.

> For me at least, the fact that the CD will (very likely) produce the exact
> same sounds as it did 10 years before will _increase_ the sense of deja vu.

Notice that you're stating *as fact* what you expect to perceive ten years 
from now.  Rather prejudicial, I'd say. (Your "very likely" doesn't modify the 
prediction about your feelings, but the prediction about the audio-data-
integrity, as I read it.)  This is the Asimov-problem in a very pure form: 
we've been conditioned to value *his generation's* models of reality more than 
*our own immediate experience*.

> I think Psychology 101 already has it covered.

My, you found Psych 101 *intellectually satisfying*???  How embarrassing for 
you!  Didn't you ever try using their vocabulary to, say, describe why you 
value Kate's art???  It's coarse to the point of *counterproductive*, if you 
take it seriously.  Psych 101 is the clearest demonstration of ignorance!

> What happens if several people are listening to a single copy of a brand-new
> tape (assume they're unable to see each others' responses)?  

It's not a fair test to condemn my argument on the grounds that the 
information-channel is not 100% clear, or even 10%, probably.  MY experience, 
though, is that under the ideal conditions of a soft medium that you imprint 
on repeatedly in a time of intense emotion, abandoned for a longish period, 
and then returned to after the emotion has faded, you may well expect stronger 
sentiments from hearing that particular tape than a similar copy, and a hard 
medium like CDs doesn't allow this effect.

To address your question, first think about how different it feels to hear a 
song on the radio, at the same instant as thousands of others (in the context 
as well of the 'cultural authorization' that radio-play supplies). ***THINK 
ABOUT YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE***  Don't limit yourself to what you've been told 
your experience is 'allowed' to be.  (Imagine you're trying to look so 
directly at the immediate experience of hearing the song, that you could 
*write a poem* about it.  If you don't appreciate how poetry shatters 
conditioning, I can't explain it to you.)

I can't really say I'd expect to gain much value from listening to someone 
else's tapes, unless maybe they were someone I really cared about, to where I 
was willing to make a great effort to empathically 'get inside their head'.  
It's not like a Polaroid!

> If they have conflicting responses (e.g., to a tape of _TSW_), what is the
> imprint on the tape?

I can *imagine*, at least, if I were trying to get inside the previous owner's 
head, empathically, that I might sense that they didn't really vibe with a 
particular song.  So I'm listening along to the tape of TSW my friend has laid 
on me, and "Reaching Out" comes on, and I sense *less empathic closeness* to 
my friend, sensed thru this 'astral' dimension.  But my own reactions to RO 
are going to be hard to see past, too, so it's not likely to be clearcut, very 
often.  (These are *hard* questions that must not be *trivialized*.  I like
what William Blake said: Everything possible to be imagined is an image of
truth.)

> Do the individual emotional imprints get multiplexed onto the one tape?  How
> many channels of emotional information can a single tape hold?  

Again, if you're listener #3, it would be critical whether #2 had bothered to 
listen for #1's reactions, and the most you might hope to hear is #1-as-heard-
by-#2.  This is all artificial and hypothetical, though.  There are simpler 
examples where the phenomenon makes better intuitive sense, if you seriously
care to try and understand what I'm trying to say.

> Can you detect whether the prerecorded tape you bought was a re-shrinkwrap
> returned by someone who played it once and really hated it? %)

Losing the smilie (:^), I suspect that *any* product you consider buying has 
an echo of the vibes of those who manufactured it, and that that's a lot of 
what marketing is about, is putting the brightest face you can on your 
product.  Disgruntled employees who spit in the soup, or lazy ones who neglect 
to pick all the pebbles out of the navy beans, is just an 'amplification' of 
the more-general problem.

Notice, people, how strange and improbable these arguments sound, how tempting 
it is to just *deny* them... but if you look without prejudice, they're 
*perfectly plausible* both from the point of view of our daily, direct, 
experiencing, and also, equally, plausible in terms of what 'Known Science' 
should allow.  The kneejerk 'scientism' that pretends they're proven 
impossible is *pure* egotism.

Why do Americans commonly believe that Known Science excludes any sort of 
subtle perception?  When was that proved?  How can we assume we've adequately 
inventoried the existing sense-channels?  (The Rhine-type ESP tests about 
guessing glyphs on cards are irrelevant, it seems to me, because they weren't 
about feelings and emotions, but about visual images, which is a sort of ESP 
*I've* certainly never experienced, while subtle sensing of feelings and 
emotions is an everyday, every *moment* thing, if you just have the self-
confidence to notice it.)

jb

> Keywords: sandstorm scene, deep hurting

oh, sorry to pry open your feeble intellectual capabilities ;^)
you can go back to sleep now...