Alma/Personal Logs

language, human cognition

she has an undergrad degree in psychology, focusing on cognitive and biopyschology. she became more narrowly focused in grad school on animal cognition and intelligence. Her insights in to human behavior are less grounded than insights in to behavioral ecology and, in particular, corvids. she does shallow lit searches in psychology about humans because it is interesting to her but imagine a well-educated person losing touch with this topic but coming back to it recently in the past six or so months due to being confronted with humanity again.

in her notebooks: jargon? vocabulary? missing words. colonized language. colonized minds. anger and acceptance? with a new annotation followed some other day perhaps caused by some conversation: WTF ZACH fuck you magic blah blah blah you don't know followed by DOIs if she's being lazy and tired of scrawling, or by full titles with DOIs if she is not.

• The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism: For decades, some psychologists have claimed that bilinguals have better mental control. Their work is now being called into question.
• Does Speaking in a Second Language Make You Think More, or Feel Less?
• Our Moral Choices Are Foreign to Us
• Your Morals Depend on Language
• She almost applied to the Choice Blindness group at Lund University but fell in love at almost first site when meeting people at the corvid cognition station and in particular, None, an experimental subject who lives in an aviary. but here are some papers from the choice blindness group. She shallowly follows their research
  • Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey
  • @ChoiceBlindness Our new paper in PNAS. We show how moral decisions can be biased by exploiting gaze patterns

misreadings

Alma often reads meaning in to things that don't actually relate as a common mistake in her practice. She often carries books with her in her duffel bag or pockets. the books have bookmarks, paper inserts with notes, and underlining with annotations. (This makes her player cringe). She has confirmation bias when she finds snippets and meaning in things that fit with what she imagines to be better than the doctrine of her tradition.

but I'm sure sometimes she accidentally stumbles on a real truth, but who knows, really? I mean, really?

Robinson Jeffers

In pencil under his name: called an occidental? pantheist.

Flight of Swans
Robinson Jeffers

One who sees giant Orion, the torches of winter midnight,
Enormously walking above the ocean in the west of heaven;
And watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight
Waver like a spent rocket, wavering towards new discoveries,
Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;
And watches the long coast mountain vibrate from bronze to green,
Bronze to green, year after year, and all the streams
Dry and flooded, dry and flooded, in the racing seasons;
And knows that exactly this and not another is the world,
The ideal is phantoms for bait, the spirit is a flicker on a grave;--
May serve, with a certain detachment, the fugitive human race,
Or his own people, or his own household; but hardly himself;
And will not wind himself into hopes nor sicken with despairs.
He has found the peace and adored the God; he handles in autumn
The germs of far-future spring.
                                                            Sad sons of the stormy fall,
No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you
To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,
Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,
Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,
But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

• interspersed throughout this page are underlines and arrows to notes and comments, for examples
  • Swans, like what you really see in nature not what stories say
  • which age? time parabola! not just circles. all the cycles and shapes and paths? WHY CIRCLES
  • inflict and endure - does this mean no escape and no choice for death. is it just?
  • diamond sutra?
  • no escape from jhor? NO maybe we are saved with nature and swans and the living world

There are more notes but the player doesn't want to go on and on here. Imagine a kid who missed a well rounded humanities education cramming for a very final exam and not applying a sophisticated well-informed sensibility to things due to a lack of grounding.

some reverse chronological things

• Alma contacts her mentor to to catch up and mention that, no shit, she met a Raven. Oh btw, What is the unmaking? Also, we will experiment with Time and Space. (nothing could possibly go wrong)
  • No word from None, but she learned from Jim that this thing is basically like Gozer. Hmm, ok. She can grasp that. From her point of view it's like the heat death of the universe.