Self Consciousness, Class Consciousness, Social Efference
[https://www.reddit.com/r/GhostTraffic/s/8yrWxKK0rS]
is it fair to say we expirence their expirence? yes, insofar as many if the ways we expirence ourselves are indirect.
are these indirect expirences equivalent to efference copies, copies of commands, or simulations of expected expirences, which the nervous system uses to calibrate the impact of it's own actions on itself and the world around it? I think some degree of equivalent exits. does that make the clerk and thief organs in a desiring machine, a resentment machine? is the thief regulated by the expectations, resentments, surveillance of the clerk? of course. the clerk is activating a phantom of pleasure and loss and moral incitement belonging to the pettie bourgeois class, and by acting on them reproduces that class by undermining and punishing thieves. does consciousness result from the chatter between efference and inference? if the self is a ghost on the wind, clipping and contouring in static the space between those broadcasts issued by senses, executive faculities, self chatter, working memory, and imagination, than we might be likewise speak of a self conscious esprit decors among groups, families, classes and society itself.
these ghost would not be without a body, for it would dwell in a multitude of bodies. they would be very equivalent to consciousness of a monocorp—a one bodied entity—in that whether you say a given feeling, (sadness, resentment, the need to take a piss, the catharsis when you do take a piss) is located in a single set of brain cells or emerges from the complexity of the entire nervous system as a whole, it is either way happening amongst biological hardware. we may assume that society sized ghosts avail themselves of this biological hardware, just as much as we make use of the teselating connection-opportunities which occurs between our individual cells, our nervous system and it's emergent dynamics, the wide ranges of expirences promoted by literature machines, pissing machines, politics machines, resentment machines. of course there is a ghost in the machine—what else do you think could live in this partially-integrated space of efference-inference chatter which makes a machine remain dynamic while still connected to it's surrounding machines and to itself.
when we deny ourselves something, we are partaking in the limits and enforcement of an edict, an edict like all edicts issued by a ghost. when we decline to steal we are enforcing all the dictates of a private property machine. when we force ourselves to go to work and to labor for a wage we are cooking a free lunch for the hungry ghosts of capital, and when we listen to them lecture about the gratitude we owe to wagemasters and our job creators, the sense of injustice and furry and humiliation and pathos and guilt and habituation does not just dissipate into an entopic black box; those feelings, that information, gets registered and resided and ghosts are interpolated to make (non)sense out of all the hungry contradictions.
self harm is a ritual for recalibrating eference, inference, and reference machines. I have noticed when around my family members I kill myself daily, actively negate and un-act all sorts of things — gestures, tones of voice, subjects, attitudes — which I prefer to act on but which i hate to let near the toxic dynamics between them and me, so instead I fashion myself into an un-self, make myself a ghost for enforcing boundaries and attitudes and affects, a translucent ghostly lens through which other, more insulated ghosts can watch and make suggestions but still maintain an a degree of separation, a fragile but real non-interpolation, non-involvement, non-complicity, non-enrollment.
such ghosts are invoked not without costs, however, and those costs may translate themselves in a roundabout loop of many machines, dislocating one equilibrium after another, like “the Gygies Device, called Canner Device,” which turns the names of friends into enemies and enimies into friends, stiring up (or storing up) paranoia, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, until the only way to sort the mess of feelings and phantoms and distrustful agency is to make a radical act, to cut through instinct and locate one's volition against a hard edge of pain.
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