BIOLUMINESCENCE

For those who still believe the surrealist group in Stockholm lacks humor, we here present some excerpts from a recent philosophical debate within the group. The combattants are NN, CA and JE, and your editor here were among those who entirely failed to follow these out of context speculations borrowed from the highly specialised fields of neurophysiology, physics, consciousness philosophy, and some evolutionary biology and gnostic demonology. Chronology and authorship of parts is already quite difficult to reconstruct since most parts are insertions into earlier emails. So, just as obviously as this selection was made largely for entertaining and ridiculing purposes, the editor has been fooled himself since obviously some grand poetic thought experiments lie dormant waiting to unfold themselves in there, and one or other of the collective spirits of the group remain responsible for the madness of the unity of this strange brew.


Tuning in on living in another medium, could that be the core? A medium which doesn’t yet exist, which yet is but a graduated dislocation along a scale in one experiment or another. And o how easy it would be to reduce this thought to a mere metaphor-

It’s all about the extended network, the world, and in that case the energy utilised to nurture the organism carrying around an advanced brain, just as the population it is a part of and the biotope they inhabitate, plus all kinds of substrates and energetic processes, must all be accounted for in the grand total sum. It is difficult to create a private economy here!

Then if we in some fourierian intoxication would like to push the human system beyond its current compromises, for example by evolving bioluminescence, then we need more energy than a contained system can provide, we need the direct injection of the combustion engine, a transformator system which takes the detour over certain biological obstacles, perhaps matter as such, why not death if it happens to be in the way, obstacles which are nothing to fourierian verve.

In my worldview consciousness is physical, there are no discrete transfers in its locations, while it is actually located everywhere; where the nervous system ends other aspects pick up (yet unclear but just because too little research has been devoted to it).

Nervous movements in the brain are just as qualitatively distinct from the appearance of phenomena as the aerial vibrations mediating the sound of thunder are from the physical occurences in the aerial ocean, and in that way it is stupid to localise consciousness in the brain rather than localising consciousness in the occurrence in the air. Consciousness are where things happen, I have both Heidegger and Deleuze on my side in this question!

Last but not least, entropy only describes the appearance between starting point and endpoint, and not the way inbetween. The latter would be the task of kinetics, that is how fast processes are. So speaking about shift of medium in order to avoid entropy is not to speak about time as concretion, which is the same as speaking about abstract archetypical conditions, eternal states.

A glowworm probably has what we might call with a semi-archaic vocabulary the energy budget of a spirit.

This type of transcendence is reached mainly with meditation or drugs and is mostly a kind of experienced state which we can be impressed by or which we can ridicule.

The transcendental is the syntheses and the translations making up the happenings of the network so to speak. The process constituting the subject from one second to the other.

It's possible that energy consumption could be reduced more than what evolution already spontaneously managed, but in that case it must be remembered that the openness, which our involuted brain was involuted for, may get lost in the process.

I hadn’t thought about that, it makes me worried. So we should tiptoe carefully here, so the cake slice isn’t further narrowed? But if it becomes the question of an atrophying regress according to a zero sum principle, so that the reduced complexity of the brain is counterweighted by other archibraic innovations? Or if the openness is just turned in other directions than we discern now? In that case nostalghia will be unfitting, look a death urge of alchemical/hermetical kind, not without worry of course, but still.

I find it difficult to see the experienced mental autonomy and the more or less wild activity of the imagination as possible in a networkless and energy-parsimonious vacuum.

On the contrary, our mental autonomy has increased keeping pace with the involution of the brain having occurred paralell with the development of cybernetic networks, from an evolutionary viewpoint.

Talking about evolution is talking about transcendence in the concrete!

So instead of celebrating bioluminescence I hail the cosmic power differentiating matter, creating and annihilating structures, gives time a direction and slowly disintegrates all information in the universe: friction.