
When I got to my apartment this afternoon, I subconsciously loaded up The Beatle’s White Album and played the song “I’m so tired.” The funny thing is I AM really tired today. How did my body know, not only how to manipulate my computer without thinking, but also how to sift through my mp3 collection and play the exact song that captures my state? I must be way too synchronized with my gadgets.
Click below to see a previous draft of this post: I was going to hype this moment a little too much.
At some point in the future, Philosophistry could be so completely reflective of who I am that a critical point is reached. This would be a point whereby me and my blog are perfectly synchronized. At this point, my mental and physical health can be observed in both the real world and through my blog. For example, right now I'm under physical duress thanks to weekend reverly and torrential rains. Likewise, visiting my blog over the past few days only shows basic parts of my site being updated, like the link bar above, the away message, and the artist bar. My last main post was also short and a posted a while ago. In tandem, the BlogFabric above has been stagnating a bit and the site's overall quality is less than excellent.
Synchronoy, like harmony, is an interesting phenomena to occur between objects. In the book Sync I've been learning how inanimate objects naturally obtain synchrony, such as pendulums keeping pace, binary stars having stable rotations, and water molecules freezing up simultaneously. It's even conjectured, that synchrony is the essence of self-assembling mechanisms, such as the spontaneous generation of life on Earth.
So to relate this to the web, if my blog moves in perfect step with myself, then we have achieved harmony. But if small perturbations in me or my blog are automatically reflected in the other medium, then synchrony has been achieved.
Blogging is part of a tradition of web extensions for human experience. Since 1990, new tools have been developed to act as surrogates of existing human faculties: Google as the surrogate brain, Instant Messaging as the surrogate mouth, and eBay as the surrogate hand of resource exchange. Blogging appears as the surrogate face of personal identity. Through every post you are saying to the world, "this is me, this is what I'm thinking, this is what I'm about." Blogging becomes an alternative or simulated existence for the person.
Eventually, the simulation could become too real. The simulation becomes a simulacrum, which according to Baudrillard, is a copy without an original. At this critical point, the blog's initial frame of reference, you, has disappeared, and author and content have become one.
// Like I said, I'm a little out of sorts, and hence, I apologize for this post's incoherence.
blog as self, blogging, synchrony
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Yesterday, The Other Philip, Mr. Greenspun, tries to answer the question "what is the point of blogging" and mentions Nietzsche, Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book. This was just a few days after I made a similar inuendo How can these stodgy professors compete who only know continental philosophy with a specialty in Hume and Nietzsche when the blogosphere is churning out mini-Nietzsches everyday? (link)
Nietzsche, blogging, synchrony
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I was watching Chariots of Fire and I heard, for the first time, someone use the word "rigor mortis." It was in the context of describing Eric Liddel and his potential inability to do well in the race... then, on that same day, my housemate mentioned that word as well. I kind of guessed that it meant, dead movement, or dead spirit, and I was right as he called it a "stiffening of the body."
dictionary.com's definition: "Muscular stiffening following death."
Pass it on...
I'm doing a little bit of renegade synchronicity. In the past 10 min. I've had this manic need to e-mail a bunch of people I never e-mail all with some positive words, questions about updates on their life, and a funny story. The story I've been including is the Whore of Mensa just because it was on my clipboard and because I genuinely think my audience will enjoy it. What turned into a few e-mails is now turning into an experiment on synchronicity. If I e-mail enough Stanford students who are in enough dorms and different equivalence classes, this story will ripple through the campus all at the same time. They may share it with others who will share it with others, and then people will go, "Woah, I just heard about the SAME EXACT thing from some one else."
Syn-chro-f'ing-nicity. That's today's tmesis. It's in reference to my previous post and how I coincidentally JUST read about thought origins in Nietzsche. In Book III of the Great Procipher's Lexis the Gay Science, he talks about the Origin of Knowledge and the Origin of Logic. It's almost like my current odyssey through his lexis arranged my neurons to match Nietzsche's state of mind. After our heads were synchronized, our neural networks worked in parallel and then ran into similar subsequent thinking. That's how I'm guessing synchronicity may work. Now imagine that this pattern multiplies out and that my discussions with people set their brains the same way and that they too also start to think the same thing. Or by me posting this on my blog and a hundred people reading about it, having similar thoughts, and then jumping to the next thoughts, further propagating it to their blogs or friends, we can see how the large groups of people can have synchronous thought. Synchronous thought becomes synchronous religion, ad infinitum, yada yada yada....

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