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sense action feedback

only works if you can control the camera

the blade is also a camera

QUOTE

from chapter 4, From White Noise to Consciousness

in explaining sensation/sentience/feeling, and sensation in animals in particular

"....there must be something about the way that animals deal with the world that makes a crucial difference...

"in animal evolution, along with the sheer elaboration of sensing and acting, there's the evolution of new kinds of connection between these activities, especially collections that loop, that involve feedback. for an organism like you or me, here are some familiar facts. what you'll do next is effected by what you're now sensing and what you sense next is effected by what you'll now do. you read and turn the page and turning the page will effect what you see. sensing and acting each effect the other. we know this explicitly and can talk about it but their intertwining also effects in more fundamental ways how things feel in quite a raw sense of "feel."

"consider the case of Tactile Vision Substitution Systems, TVSS a technology for the blind. a video camera is attached to a pad that sits on the blind person's skin for example on their back. optical images are picked up by the camera are transformed into a form of energy, vibrations or electrical stimulation that can be felt on the skin. after some training with this device the wearer starts to report that the camera gives them an experience of objects located in space, not just a pattern of touches on their skin. if you're wearing such a system and a dog walks past for example the video system will make a moving pattern of presses or vibrations on your back but under some circumstances this will not be expirenced as vibrations on your back. instead you'll expirence an object moving out in front of you. this happens though only when the wearer is able to control the camera, to act and influence the incoming stream of stimulation. the user of the device has to be able to move the camera closer, change it's angle, and so on. the simple way to do this is to attach the camera to the person's body. then the wearer can make objects loom and come and go from the visual field.

"subjective expirence is intimately tied here to the interaction between behavior and sensory input. the moment to moment feedback between sensing and acting effects how sensory input itself feels.

"though the idea that our actions effect what we percieve seems routine and familiar philosophers through many centuries did not treat it as especially important. in philosophy this is the territory of unorthodoxies, of works beside rather than the main development of ideas. that is true even in recent years. instead a huge amount of work has looked at a small piece of the total picture. it has looked at the link between what comes in through the senses and the thoughts or beliefs that result. little was usually said about the link to action and even less about the way action effects what you sense next.

"some philosophers have always disliked this obsession with sensory input, with receptivity seen in theories of the mind. but their response was to reject the importance of input in a wholesale way and to try to tell a story about the self determining organism, about the subject as source imposing itself on the world. this is a kind of overcompensation as if philosophers are only able to concentrate on one side at a time. it's a big thing, apparently not easily achieved, to accept that there is traffic, a to and fro.

"in everyday experience there are two causal arcs. there's a sensory-motor arc linking our senses to our actions and a motor-to-sensory arc as well. why turn the page? because doing so will influence what you see next. The second arc is not as tightly controlled as the first because it extends into an external public space rather than remaining inside the skin. perhaps as you turn the page someone grabs the book or grabs you. The sense-to-motor and motor to sense pathways are not on a par but another neglected junior partner at the effect of action on what we sense next is surely important. this after all is why we do what we do, to control what we will encounter. philosophers often use the metaphor of a stream of experience. expirence they say is something like a river in which we are immersed. this image is quite misleading though as the flow in a river is almost entirely outside our control. we might change our location in the river swimming from one spot to another and that gives us some control over what we'll encounter but in real life we can usually do much more than that. we can reshape the things themselves that we interact with. rivers are rather resident to such efforts when we're alone in the middle of them.

"what you sense next has two sources. what you just did, and what the larger world beyond you is up to. two arrows lead into the senses. they have different contexts and sometimes one is more important than the other but they are both almost always there. loops that link actions back to the senses are not only present in us, they are also present in very simple forms of life. but they become more marked in animals especially because animals can do more. the evolution of muscle derived from fiberlike elements inside cells created a new means by which life impresses itself on the world. all living things effect their environment by making and transforming chemicals and also by growing and sometimes by moving but it is muscle that gives rise to rapid coherent action on large spatial scales. it makes possible the manipulation of objects, the deliberate and rapid transformation of what is around us. the evolution of animals is effected by these looping casual paths in a number of ways. often there loops lead to a problem as an animal attempts to work out what's going on around it. some fish for example send out electric pulses for communication with other fish and also electrically sense other things going on around them. the self produced pulses will effect their own senses though and it may be difficult for the fish to distinguish between the pulses it has

made from electrical disturbances that are due to external things.

"to deal with this problem whenever a fish emits a pulse it also sends a copy of the command around to the sensing system, enabling that system to counteract the affect of the pulse it has produced. the fish is tracking and registering the distinction between self and other, between the effects of it's senses on its own actions and the effects of events going on around it."

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in chapter 6 these copies are called efference and are closely tied to self consciousness, working memory, executive facilities, executive broadcast, internal monologue and spatial visual work spaces.

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beginning of chapter 6, 1 minute in:

[re Hume's search for the self]

"these sensations comprise him: nothing more."

what are you comprised of?

for my part the framing is a bit too tidy. It appears that nothing exists except that which we (can) percieve. (Camile). if I go looking for sensations of the self, the self will necessarily appear to me as sensations. from Freuds unconscious to Chomsky's atoms of language, it seems that there's necessarily a framework, a deep grammar, a context. Godfrey-Smith writes elsewhere of embodied consciousness, of the way an animal's body "encodes information about it's environment," creates "limits and opportunities," "part of knowing how to walk is having the right kind of body." likewise, part of knowing how to feel sad, angry, urgency, grief, rebellious, means having the right kind of body, and by extension, the right kind of body state. why should it be enough simply to have the necessary equipment, when the whole point of that equipment is to encode a range of states.

biochemical, psycho-narational, social, the coding is all of these, and it's misleading to ask where the one begins and the other ends, because they all end in death. let us go further: the biochemical scream of pain and the opera of red, the ongoing story of cause and effect, sin and guilt, Stigmata and holiness, and the social situations of isolation, underemployment, scarification, both public and secret performatnces of self discipline, these comprise a holy Trinity, an integrated but non-totalizing situation. the body is/becomes/does becoming-manuscript, -reader, -writer, -first draft, short hand gloss, heuristic tradition, *gut* reaction, *eye* witness, sovereign officiant, restless assembly, neurochemical factory which if not necessarily run a workplace democracy, it is nonetheless a workplace replete with loops and feedback and jockying for relative position which comprise the activity of politics and constitute/compose the self involved unfolding, evolving homeostatis which we call a state, a nation-state, a state of mind, a state of life, a state of affairs.

we do not yet know what a body can do, but we can make progress on this question. In this essay, I attempt to riddle ... dilemma of the social and biomedical models and the politics which produced them.

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sensory

QUESTIONS

what can self cutting do

(notebook)🧾

(how does self laceration contribute to the self knowing, sensory feedback, efference, etc of the body, the state, society, polity, polis anatomic, and commuting to the greater than the sun of it's parts ecosystem of meanings and machinations?

why does Thatcher exempt families

why does shmitt distinguish between war and civil war

One hand washes/cuts the other.)

how is choice, action, freedom, made possible, put into motion, through cutting

what is the relationship between pain and autonomy, self governing