Alma/Personal Logs

illusion of explanatory depth

eusocial insects

Bernd Heinrich studied insects before he studied ravens [1]. I try not to have heros but he is one of my heros. I got pretty depressed because I had to leave New Caledonia but then I remembered him. And insects have social behavior too. And they would change in a city that changes. And he loves running too.

What does it mean to see ants who don't bite and then disappear. confidence intervals? looking for flavors. prime flavors? count the ones on friends. sweet? salt? food trail? "soldiers and workers work together to create a living situation favorable for the brood"[2]. Graphs that show up and then vanish?

Why do birds ant? "The insects secrete liquids containing chemicals such as formic acid, which can act as an insecticide, miticide, fungicide, or bactericide. Alternatively, anting could make the insects edible by removing the distasteful acid, or, possibly supplement the bird's own preen oil." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anting_(bird_activity)] Also, birds anting or bathing are adorable. Why do people find things adorable? APPLES WOA

what does it mean for something to be in your head and not real. what if not real is really real. After that conversation, I decided maybe it isn't that bad. Maybe I don't need to be so afraid of falling apart.

what decisions do you make when something might not be real? what if the ants aren't real but you don't know? make a place for them. let it be okay. don't crush them.

what does it mean for someone not to see what you see? maybe it means you are crazy. but maybe it means they see other things. where I see ants, what does someone else see?

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.

language

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

choice blindness

• 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.

Rilke

Imagine a kid who reads the bible over and over and finds meaning retroactively, over and over throughout the years. layering meanings based on life experience. Take that flavor and then translate it to an adult who got gobsmacked by woo. Random shit is her bible. She comes back and forth to a poem over and over. adding notes when something happens that seems to apply. Sometimes she knows it's a mistake but can't help it.

Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke from _Sonnets to Orpheus_ translated by M. D. Herter Norton

12

Will transformation. O be enraptured with flame,
wherein a thing eludes you that is boastful with changes;
that projecting spirit, which masters the earthly,
loves in the swing of the figure nothing so much as the point of inflection.

What shuts itself into remaining already IS starkness;
does it think itself safe in the shelter of inconspicuous gray?
Beware, from afar a hardest comes warning the hard.
Woe--,an absent hammer lifts!

Who pours himself forth as a spring, him Cognizance knows;
and she leads him enchanted through the realm of serene creation,
that often ends with beginning and with ending begins.

Every happy space they wander wondering through
is child or grandchild of parting. And the transformed Daphne, since feeling
laurel-like, wants you to change yourself into wind.

16

You, my friend, are lonely, because...
WE, with words and finger-pointings,
gradually make the world our own,
perhaps its weakest, most precarious part.

Who points with fingers to a smell? --
Yet of the powers that threaten us
you feel many .... You know the dead,
and you shrink away from the magic spell.

See, now we two together must bear
piece-work and parts as though it were the whole.
Helping you will be hard. Above all, do not

plant me in your heart. I should grow too fast.
But I will guide MY master's hand and say:
here. This is Esau in his pelt.

maybe these are warnings and but exhortations. maybe I'm supposed to see both at the same time. (refer to Icelandic spar. it diffracts words into multiple paths. does this mean I need to learn QM?) Does this mean I need to learn German?

am I shrinking away when I shouldn't?

wtf does Esau even mean? deception or inheritance? which is it.

wtf these whatever poets. what kind was Rilke?

fuck, do I have to be lonely and keep people from planting me in their heart?

do not mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon (from some dude somewhere in some koan?)

what does one do with the weakest parts? break them or strengthen them?

omg it's coming true. This guy really was a prophet. Smell? that happened weeks after and I didn't even realize it until now.

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.