Another Incarnation

So I'm reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I've been thinking about the Dalai Lama, and the two things in my headspace have produced some interesting ideas about reincarnation.

The thing about the Dalai Lama is that reincarnation is a project that is accomplished through years of study. After being picked as the new incarnation, a Lama goes through years of study of the lives of the previous Lamas, learning just what it is he's been up to all these generations (14 now, which is quite a lot of years of history and memories to absorb while also living your own life). Whatever the case is for the infant chosen, the Dalai Lama becomes the Dalai Lama by reading his history as his own history. By appropriating the lives of those who have come before as his own previous lives, the Dalai Lama actually becomes a part of that liniage, and is in fact a continuation of a single entity. If a nation can exist for thousands of years through the lives of many generations, if a nation is a real entity, and hey, if you can exist for decades though the lives of many generations of your own cells, which exist through generations of various molocules, the Dalai Lama is a person that has lived for 14 generations now. In this sense, he is really re-incarnated. Which is knd of neat, really.

Where Joyce comes in is that his novels are such rich pictures of Joyce himself that reading them seems to me to be a little like studying up on the previous Dalai Lama. By reading his novels, we become, bit by bit, a re-incarnation of Joyce. He lives on through our absorption of his thoughts into our own. But this isn't true of just Joyce, he's just what got me thinking about it. It's true of everyone we read, and the music we listen to, and the movies we watch, and the people we interact with, and (Joyce illustrates this wonderfully) this is true for those things as well: they are conglomoratrions, tapestries woven from so many lives that came before them, intermingled with the lives that directly motivated their creation, intermingled with the lives of their viewers and listeners.

The mad man who believes himself to be Napolean Bonaparte is only mad because he thinks that he is more Napolean than anyone else. We are interpenetrated by thousands of lives of other people, living and dead, who were in turn blended with so many lives themselves. We are made of other people and we make up other people.

This also got me thinking that our creations really are our children in a similar way. What we make takes on a life of its own (as a re-incarnation of us, seperate but not seperate as the case might be) as it moves through one mind and into another, bouncing through so many heads as it changes and grows and echos again.



We are the things we create, we are the things we consume, we are the people we know, we are the places we go, we are the movements and the gestures, we are the raindrops on our face and the stars and the ocean and so many sunrises and sunsets, we are our dreams and we are the stories we tell, we are a history, we are a world.

We are another incarnation of so many things.
And so many things are another incarnation of us.

mmhmm.

You expanded

some. This is my first run through you, theres a LOT more work to be done here.
Incidentally I have made some improvements to IT as well, but I'm not sure if it's substantial enough to post yet.
I'll think about it.

in the meantime:



you

YOU is Mind encountering mind. Intra-mind in that this will always be A mind as defined, and inter as we have plurality of minds.

Conversation
every interaction between 2 minds is first and foremost conversation
give and take of signals/symbols
exchange
is impossible to avoid:
each makes up part of the environment for the other, and each is a system of effects/affects of the environment
effect/affect
minds are effects of effects, are affected by their environment
active affect, being-towards, is an effect first.
the reciprocal passive effect is still conversation, but without a you-symbol
So much magic in the active affect
the impossibility of predicting outcome
underlying trust (impossible to avoid, effect/affectwise)
the active affect is an attempt to effect: it always involves a you-model which is always incomplete
good conversation increases the complexity of the you model (and then also the self model if its any good)
(negative possibility of mistaking the you-model for you
(only with fairly complex you-model, little interaction, or very controlled circumstances) )
conversation is building a new mind
the exchange is the working of the mind
environment becomes shared
a we symbol (self symbol for that mind) forms
from interplay of you symbol and self symbol
initially
but interaction of we symbols and you symbols and self symbols results in central, unowned we
GOSH side notes: Beeees! and flowers! polination and also Fruit bearing and equilibrium of all sorts. (at symbol level anyway)
[[symbol level equilibrium is love (the bee loves the flower and vice versa)]]
/Confrontation
is a not just a side note
as a form of conversation
is active affect (in order to be true confrontation, otherwise its competition)
(which is happenstance/result of trust/mistrust)
parrallel with mistrust, just as conversation is parallel with trust
though all conversation is a complex of trust & mistrust
No Value Judgments Here.
arms race, though now its a symbol race rather than signal race (which is what trust/mistrust is)
so it involves a reversal & possibility of destruction
but also creation (through arms race, and as confrontation, as conversation means the building o a new mind)
(especially if neither is wholly destroyed)
[[so: why not just side note?
Sex: starts as a virus. Or the appropriation of a virus.
which would start at signal level (as the primary is environment)
but when a primary makes use of the virus, then its a symbol (complex of signals)
So (and of course) sex is a result of the trust/mistrust arms race.
which makes it confrontation which is conversation
a child is a we-self-symbol here. flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
SO WE START AS WE (which is still, of course, unique and NOT a sum)
We/you/I

Question here is: how specific to humans should I be? what claims am I making? what is going on here?
[something neat]

As the product of conversation circumscribed by two, a baby starts as we
at conception it is evenly divided (informationwise) but it tilts more towards mother in mammels in womb
Maybe look at different kinds of birth/parent situations?
as soon as born though often earlier (if read stories, talked to etc), the baby is a you.
no self-symbol yet
but parents (normally) encourage it
the conversation continues with the child. There is love (hopefully)
At some point, we notice ourselves (our symbolset gets complicated enough to have a self symbol)
Now we are have an I
but it is alienated
mirror view, etc
the I shows up. There is a self. But it is always incomplete.
Self as object
Self as relation to others and/or relation to the world (by the nature of the self-symbol) (as a you for I)
[[language gets fucking rediculously tricky here. "I as you for I" means something, but there will need to be
careful, careful navigation of these waters]]
Then self as body
Then self as mind
id/ego/id-ego
id IS first, and so first self symbol is a bundle of desires and fears and impressions
not a project of any sort
self-symbol without self-consciousness
the freedom of children to be what they are (not acting yet)
Soon though (very soon more often than not) we begin to understand how other people see us
so ego. the self that we see through others eyes
which fairly quickly takes over the whole self symbol (because of its complexity)
The id-ego struckture
If id is unselfconscious and the ego is selfconscious, the id becomes unconscious
what escapes the ego symbol we think of as id
everything that we are that is not part of our (publicly defined) self model
so but then we can know that the ego is incomplete and add an id symbol
which makes for a bigger self model, the id-ego struckture
which still (necessarily) leaves things out
self understanding limits
because our model is always simpler than we are, it cannot predict what we will do
and so we are in conversation with ourselves. This is why the self symbol is You.
and so the self symbol, and self consciousness, is NOT I.
strange loop/wolfram
This is mathematically true, etc
conditions of self - > structure of self
this self symbol is given by the environment (usu. parents)
is historically structured then
is the result of a conversation
is an active part of that conversation
which has a VAST range (the homonculous is you)
derrida's trace: differing differed, universality of that
So but symbols
and that's not what we are

so then, what am I?