Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] simulation

Dear Avi,

Thanks you so much, will read again with great pleasure. Psychosis might well turn out to be a disorder of time and space. In psychosis time experience shifts from static to being literally frozen, and dynamic forming the terrible in which all things have equal meaning at once especiallt there for you, hitting the brain hard. Here a excerpt from one of my papers for my research in which I aim to create experiences with installation art, that simulate, or could be considered analogue to the subjective experience of psychosis. Simulating objective aspects of human experience is much easier than subjective aspects...In my view the experience of an art work is the only space that is laden with meaning created especially for the viewer.


Normally we know where our bodies stop
and where everyday objects begin, but in psychosis these borders become diffuse
(Torrey 2006 pp38). Kusters (2008) describes that in psychosis even ones sense of time and
space is altered. The experience of blurred borders
between body and space has been ascribed to installation pieces that work with
dark space, light space and mirrored space. Claire Bishop describes one of her
experiences of stepping in to a pitch-black installation as one of the few
chances we get to experience total, consuming darkness."Entering
such rooms can make one aware of one's body, but as a loss: one does not sense
one's boundaries, which are dispersed in the darkness, and one begins to
coincide with the space" (Bishop 2005 p82). What is interesting is that she refers
to the French psychiatrist Eugène Minowski's (1933) case study of schizophrenia
and his suggestion that the patient's sense of being 'penetrated' by and
dissolved in space may well be the overriding characteristic of human
experience of darkness in general:

"[dark space] does not
spread out before me but touches me directly, envelops me, embraces me, even penetrates
me completely, passes through me, so that one could almost say that while the
ego is permeable by darkness it is not permeable by light. The ego does not
affirm itself in relation to darkness but becomes confused with it, becomes one
with it." (Minowski 1933 pp.428, 405as cited in Bishop 2005 p84)

Jennifer


________________________________
From: Avi Rosen <avi@siglab.technion.ac.il>
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Wed, February 3, 2010 7:00:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] simulation

Hi Jennifer,

Tnx 4 ur reply. The concept of mental disorder in cyberspace is very interesting...
here is a quote from "Art at the Event Horizon"-
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=505

"The new (CYBER)reality creates a feeling of schizophrenia and dichotomous personality. According to Jameson, the individual cannot locate her/himself in space (Bonaventura Hotel), and experiences crises in her grasp of time and the stream of past, present, and future. Virilio describes how NASA scientists use data suits in order to activate a distant robot on Mars, this action places them simultaneously in two distant and dislocated places.[23] According to Baudrillard [24] cyberspace networks also create schizophrenia. For Jameson [25] it is the illusion of meaning. Virilio [26] relates to the phenomenon as super-natural, and even religious -- the data and information suits transform the person into a spectre, located in a number of places at the same time.
Virilio seeks a philosophical discussion comparing presence versus tele- presence, and presence versus teleportation.

Splitting or distortion characterizes a body falling beyond the event horizon of a black hole. The body lengthens greatly to form a one-dimensional string, and continues outside the event horizon over the infinity of the singularity, while time seemingly slows down and distance shortens. This is equivalent to the feeling of a hand wearing a data glove, activating a robot on Mars from afar; moreover, this feeling is also relevant to Virilio's explanation of a person who, when equipped with a data-suit, appears to be paralyzed in a wheelchair.
This is not comparable to schizophrenia, paralysis, or spectres and the supernatural. It is the same linear reality as before, experienced now in extreme conditions of high velocity and mass, travelling through a worm hole."

Avi.

-----Original Message-----
From: yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [mailto:yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] On Behalf Of Jennifer Kanary Nikolov(a)
Sent: ג 02 פברואר 2010 17:44
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] simulation


Avi, Thanks for sharing the link to this recent TedTalk by Henry
Markram, its a must see for
all!!!
I love how at the end he speculates how "The Universe evolved a brain to see itself.."

I do question the concept of mental disorder as disease as Henry describes. For me, as I
am interested in psychosis, and am thinking about it as a 'glitch' in a possible universe as a
quantum computer simulation (a thought that could easily be considered as psychotic), I wonder how, what is described as disease,
actually has an important function within brain evolution? Mutations
are crucial to change, right? I am curious to see weather mutations would arise within these brain simulations unexpectedly and if it might become apparent what their function is. Spontaneous psychosis in the simulations, perhaps the very ingredient for creativity, change, allowing for the possibility of having choices to make decisions about.... Although mental disorders can vary from extremely pleasant to extremely unpleasant in the experience, instead of trying to irradiate it, treat the disease, why not try to better understand the meaning of it. And here I mean go further than Foucaults idea of madness taking the place of Leprosy. The suffering often comes more from not being understood, not being able to communicate than from the actual experience. It's incredible to think about the numbers: 3 in 100 experience psychosis at some point in their lives....but now I am trailing off the topic of simulation.

j.


________________________________
From: Avi Rosen <avi@siglab.technion.ac.il>
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Mon, February 1, 2010 8:38:40 AM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] simulation

Tnx Roger,
It's interesting to compare between the simulation of star evolving, and the image of rose in 'brain in a supercomputer'
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html
Is it an algorithms running on electrical nets?
" On April 27, 1992, the sculptor Ezra Orion directed the performance "SUPER CATHEDRAL I", http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/108 aiming laser beams perpendicularly and simultaneously around the world up to the sky and the infinity of the universe. This action is the final detachment of sculpture from the physicality that had governed it from prehistory, towards immense energy fields at the speed of light. The laser beams left the Solar System in five hours; today they are 18 light years from Earth. The laser beams join the cathedral of radio waves broadcast from Earth, and their height is around 90 light years. Orion proposed a continuation of this project, to be called "SUPER CATHEDRAL 4″ aiming for a unique interstellar cosmic arrangement. According to the laws of Riemann's non-Euclidian geometry, eventually the laser beam will execute a Moebius-strip-like loop in space, and return to its origin: the artist's body and consciousness. The
transmitted galactic laser beam loop creates compression of space and time while uniting between space-time, subject (artist), and object (art)."

Avi.

-----Original Message-----
From: yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [mailto:yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] On Behalf Of roger malina
Sent: א 31 ינואר 2010 23:40
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] simulation

yasminers

in astronomy the two most succesful simulations are those
of the evolution of a star from birth in the gas between the stars
to its death after exhausting its nuclear fuel=there are numerous
stellar evolution simulations available on line ( google stellar evolution
simulation)=pretty amazing =just click and watch

and the other is evolution of structure in the universe

here for instance is how a star evolves in temperature and brightness
calculated from a stellar evolution model= this star had the mass of the sun
and ends as a white dwarf

http://rainman.astro.illinois.edu/ddr/stellar/cgi-bin/output/movie0416531.mpg

this kind of simulation takes into account all the nuclear physics we know
and the physics of radiation transfer and opacity. amazingly succesful fit.
(but a gigantic unresolved mystery)

here is a simulation of evolution of structure in the universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY24JAUsy5s
we have a really coherent description of the evolution of structure of
the universe (except for the fact that 97% of the content is dark matter
and dark energy, both of an unknown nature)

in both of these cases the simulations have status as 'tested hypotheses"

in both cases the simulation is presented as visual output-=in one
case a dynamic graph and the other a video

the fact that simulations have to be converted to visual output
(or sonified) introduces very strange biases in how the simulation
is displayed and interpreted-we tend to over emphasise structure even if its
a very small effect to guide the eye

the scientific method itself is changing, as simulations acquire
the status of explanations

roger
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