Can AI Care about Us?

PKD: How Do You See the Invisible?

In order to see beyond yourself, you have to get outside of yourself. Hegel talked about the self-alienation of making yourself into an object for yourself. The subject must become a subject of its own inquiry, so it must somehow objectify or exteriorize itself. But from what perspective other that the interior first-person can one observe the objectified self? The material sciences operate on the faith that third-person objective observation is possible when the observation is purified of as much of the observer as possible. Without the interference of the observer in "scientific" observation, all the motivated bias of the observer is eliminated, but there's no one left there to report back any findings. The phenomenological intention is both the projection and the screen of whatever appears to us as the world. The world that appears is then necessarily motivated or biased by the intentions of the intention. PKD often puts himself in his narratives as both the observer and the observed. In "Valis," he is both the author PKD and the character "Horse-lover Fat." He demonstrates how these two positions of "from-within" and "from-without" separate from each other when they are trying to see the self from somewhere outside of itself like an author imagining his protagonist's person. But he also shows that observation, or any sort of knowing, requires the mediation of a located, embodied self in an intentional, first-person world. In "Valis," a four year old prophetess heals PKD and Horse-lover Fat of their self-division. Now that the author is fully embedded in his story from what perspective is it told? Nick Land didn't invent "hyperstition," but he did invent the locution. HP Love craft's "Necronomicon" may be an excellent example of how fictional objects realized in a virtual possibility space can cross over into the material plane, but it follows the recursive loops of the imaginal into the physical and back again ever since the split between body and soul was introduced into human thought by the virtual possibility space of the subjunctive in human language. The material sciences have collapsed the body / mind division into a purely physical monadology in which virtuality is an immeasurable mode of matter. However, the modal relation between the qualitative mode of matter exemplified by experience and thoughts on the one hand and matter's measurable quantities, usually thought of as physical on the other, has been asserted without explanation. The sciences equate physical states and mental state without a physical substrate while promising that one will eventually be discovered. In such physicalism, possibility is also somehow physically real, which is why the endless multiplicities of possible worlds have been physically realized but in hidden dimensions that cannot be scientifically verified, but maybe, someday. PKD's search for gnosis looks a lot like madness at times, but he is able to present this madness as a kind of insight into the nature of the Universe because his depiction of it is from the position of the observer who too removed from his subject, but removed enough, through the process of authorial self-alienation, to laugh about the absurd, hermeneutic circle he must ride to uncover this hidden knowledge. But the honesty of Dick's fiction is that in trying to get a glimpse of himself, our human situation is revealed as it hides more deeply in unknowing. https://youtu.be/i-JVmVgD9lg https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Redo, Can Radio Be Re-enchanted? James Reeves of Midnight Radio

This is a redone episode. You may have to erase the previous download and then reload the new episode to get the correct audio file. The new format is more compact, so less time with more invaluable, perhaps to the point of uselessness, untimely meditations. Freud's notion of the "unheimlich," which was translated into English as "Uncanny," might have more literally been translated as "un-homely," which suggests the eerie sensation of the familiar warping into the unfamiliar. "Uncanny" comes from old Scottish meaning not known or safe or prudent. The uncanny for Freud was something previously known becoming unknowable, so that it was the haunting presence of the past but not the past as intentionally remembered. When nostalgia for the past is the promise of a return to a halcyon Eden when everything was in its right place, then it is the stuff of fascist regimes. But when nostalgia accidentally returns what had been carefully repressed by the primary naivete of innocence, then it becomes unintentional and uncanny. James's nostalgia for the late radio of his youth growing up in the Detroit area isn't nostalgic because it includes what algorithmic radio has repressed. His Midnight Radio project is an open platform where anything can happen because it includes the otherness than algorithms cover-over with averages. Some folks turn on the radio to hear what is familiar and comforting, but others turn it on to encounter the novel as the failure of the familiar. The mystics speak of the "Far-Near," which is when elsewhere speaks locally.  Indeed, we are prediction machines whose intentions are to reduce uncertainty, but their is some uncanny drive in us, which Freud morbidly named the "Death Drive," for the irreducible ambiguity of the Other because it is the unpredictability, or the "deterritorialization," of otherness that makes all things new. Radio used to be a place where the far could be brought near. James's Midnight Radio lets elsewhere speak in the clearing that he has made in himself for the Other, so let the otherness in us recognized and the otherness in him, which is the solidarity of twoness rather than of the One. https://youtu.be/wevx36qH2bM https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Deciding to Stay Sick: Backrooms

What about when we choose our disease? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother. Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are. Check us out at the Desire of Horror podcast by following the link below: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19326558 https://youtu.be/QDc0TWDH8ns https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

When Isn't Nostalgia Poison? BOC: Inferno

Nostalgia is poison. So why do I like BOC so much? BOC's nostalgia isn't saccharine but complicated.  When remembering is blocked by a nostalgic concept, the past becomes a projection of the rememberer's wish-fulfillment fantasy. The general structure of this sort of fantasy projection is that of the fascist who imagines a past greatness, or a lost Eden, that never was to recover the past from a decadent present. It is a well worn and now all too obvious observation that "Make America Great Again," is a totalitarian dog whistle. But there is a sort of remembering that also enjoys imagining the past, but which includes those parts of the past that the nostalgic concept tries to screen out. The nostalgic concept can be rehabilitated when it is used to present the pass by way of contrast to how the nostalgic concept presents it. This dialectical way of remembering takes the concept and contrasts it with what it tries to repress about the past. BOC's uses of nostalgia are like this latter sort of dialectical remembering that includes the otherness that was previously suppressed by the screen memory of the concept, so that their uses of nostalgic musical concepts and samples highlight the menacing dissonance of their dips back into the "innocence" of childhood. I am reminded of Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" when I think about how BOC does this. Malick created the most convincing depiction of childhood ever to be laid down on film because he allowed the cloudy nostalgia of his subject matter to by vitiated by the lurking, cloudy threat of violence and transgression. James and I are back at again. You're going to want to hear this one. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Can AI Care about Us?

James and I discuss Under The Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. We get into whether AI can have an intention other than the ones given to it by our Human intentions. And we wonder whether AI can have the conscious intention to save humanity from itself as a result of the purity of its love for humanity, a purity unlike the yin-yang(y) love-hate of humans that will ultimately be our undoing. Kawakami's AI claims to love human beings in the Positivistic sense of without any negativity; whereas, human love is always tinged with hate. Both James and I agree that love without hate isn't human love, just as human intention is both undermined and generated by the counter-intention of the death drive. But James feels that AI may someday have a different kind of consciousness because it has a different kind of singular intention, singular as in unique as well as in the oneness of a purified positivity, which seems to agree with Kawakami's take on AI. Kawakami's AI fails to keep human beings alive because it fails to cleanse human intention of its negativity. I hold that without this negativity there is no love and no intention of any kind. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]