Reading Thoughts and Notes
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

• The world, reality, is a tangled web, a tensor with infinite tensors, with heterogeneous densities and heterogeneous values
• Meaning are relations between objects and subjects, directions between tangles in a web of reality
• The arguments between communists and libertarians are the same had by those of cells on the verge of forming higher reproductive organisms. If what is good for the defined group is better than the individual choices then, in their own interest, the cells should cede their liberty. But, as with communism this leaves the new organism prey to any power hungry deviant. So the next step is distributed detection of wills to power, and selection for populations that have self-regulating traits.
  • Cancer is notoriously difficult to reverse, but the immune system nonetheless has T-cells and other mechanisms
    • https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2017/10/how-does-the-immune-system-work-when-it-comes-to-cancer-its-complicated
  • Communism cannot work without selection for individuals who express altruistic phenotypes, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070148910
• Synthetic biology endeavors to make self-perpetuating memories, but the cost of perpetuation is that you lose the guarantees of what is perpetuated because it can mutate itself. You can only seed it and model it, and hope to remove the stochasticity of the rest of the world, but ultimately this fails and at some point you will not recognize what it has become, unless modeling too is a dynamic, on-going process. But then there are less guarantees from the start.

Summary
Squid lives deep in the sea. Head footed. Opposite of human. Phenotypically and phylogenetically departed from humans a very long time ago. Mollusk. Shed its shell. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis attempts to find fresh perspectives on the human condition through a fabled perspective of an outsider. How we might find ourselves in the life of an opposite is the foundation of this fresh perspective. Flusser imagines the world of a being evolved for three dimensions, for pressure, for cerebral development rather than digestive development, and a world utterly inseparable from sex, where every passing stimuli is orgasmic by nature. Flusser critiques art, information, politics, objectivity, and more from this odd orientation. For example, our politics, he says, are necessarily the study of changing existing establishments. For vampyroteuthis, the existing establishment is biologically tyrannical fraternity – vampyroteuthes are born and genetically commanded to traverse life with their siblings. Their politics, then are anarchic; its uptopia our hell. Flusser then uses this viewpoint to more clearly outline our own politics as its opposite – apparently predisposed to individuality, our politcs are defined by learning to love our fellow humans, against our nature.

Compelling Points

• Because the world is sensed inseparably from their sex organs, the world of vampyroteuthis is orgasmic
• The ethics and morality of vampyroteuthis is highly sexualized and inseparable from reproduction in a more apparent way than our own
• We live in a 2D world, our brains are hemispheric, clinging to a plane, that of vampyroteuthis is spherical
  • Karl Friston – the model recapitulates the world in structure
• “The coordination of the hand and the eye has divided the world into separate ontological realms.”
• Life chose between sexual or digestive orientations (and vampyroteuthis prefers )
  • Usually binary choices are fallacious dichotomies but this one makes sense to me. To live there are two choices: invest energy in division or invest in maintenance. Without one of those investments, the individual dissolves into entropy.
  • Still fallacious to claim mutual exclusivity, can do both, but it seems in general specializing helps fitness
  • Humans specialize in manipulating the world for digestion and vampyroteuthis for sex. Since digestive energy is more scarce to us than sexual partners but the converse is true of vamp. these priorities seem intuitive
    • Cultivation of wheat, agriculture, war, flux of borders (and their degradation through globalization), money everything in relation to the ease of securing food. A society of sex might endeavor on many of the same activities, but I suspect a supermarket would look much different… And more wars would center around gender and social politics rather than that of energy.
  • Art is a collective memory through the manipulation of objects
    • As we record knowledge in objects, we create more objects to be understood and recorded through objects

Implications
What are we missing? How much are we missing? Is it a good thing that we miss it? If we inundate our senses we cannot model the world. Could we be missing an entire realm in which human-like intelligence could exist; are vampyroteuthis aliens? Are they humans that have diverged so far that we cannot communicate with them, but might they predict and manipulate their worlds better than we ours?

Implications of being able to rely on the rate of degradation of objects being less than the span of our lives We are tenuously held together carbon and water blobs that live on land: we live where the rate of change of many of our surroundings is much less than the rate of change of our selves. That to which this property does not hold we regard as invisible. We cannot objectify the air so we do not see it. Our brain learns to ignore from consciousness the feeling of the air passing through our nostrils. When we look at the water we must look at whole oceans. Whole lakes. Find the contours of the bodies and only then can we see them. Because we have relied on the permanence of our objects we neglect to encode information in forms that perpetuate themselves. Our libraries of Alexandria burn down. However, I reject that only in the information age has our art (which we are really just using as an alternative term to knowledge it seems) become ‘vampyroteuthic’. We have always unconsciously encoded information in self-perpetuating ways; as long as we have lived close to each other we have needed to tell stories, make religions to keep us together. These are ephemeral, yet it is their flexibility, ephemerality that gives them the ability to propagate themselves in disparate minds. And thus they (though what ‘they’ is changes) are perpetual.

If we believe in potentials, or that if we rerun history it would turn out differently, we concede in the limits of our own knowledge. We would reject determinism, and that all can be predicted given an illusive, perfect model. On one hand, maybe this is useful for the scientific method which relies on rejecting old theories on the basis of new information, predicated on the idea that we have only partial observability and that thus our observed world is stochastic. But maybe it is also limiting. The idea that there are laws that can be discovered that perfectly model the world motivates searching for ever more predictive models. An explanation like a soul which does not conform to determinism does not beg for better models, it rolls over on its back, subordinate to randomness and unknowing.

“Do we have the capacity to begin again?” Does this notion not arbitrarily truncate and individuate time? We can only begin again if the understanding of “begin” does not contain newness. We are always already oriented. We can resume, but we cannot erase the history from which we “begin”.

What is hell? Hold up a mirror to ourselves, upside down, hell is the unknown AND unknowable. Hell lives where information does not exist. Where compression does not exist. Where stimuli does not rediscover itself in patterns. Where the ripples of the environment do not invoke familiar ripples. Hell is when we look at the vampyroteuthis and we see nothing of ourselves. Hell is pure random.

We are always vessels for something else reproducing. What would it look like if we were vessels purely for ourselves? What would it mean to purely reproduce ourselves? A whole human? Would each of our cells begin to divide, spindles begin to form, new membranes begin to separate themselves around new organs, new hands begin to sprout from our wrists, our arms begin to bloat, we grow insufferably heavy, vision blurs, doubles, then reforms – the brain too undergoes cytokinesis. Thoughts intrude, double, warp, flex, wrap themselves around the world in foreign knots until one day they snap. And you are as you remember again, but changed. And now there is another, it is you because it is similar. It is similar in a way that a child is not. You love it profoundly, in a way that we do not love our children even. You know it in a way that you could never know your child and feel its motions and vibrations at a buzzing molecular speed beyond the scope of empathy. Over time the telepathic empathy begins to diverge. Whether it is it or you that has changed, both to be sure. And the wave is now an unrecognizable history of dissipated water molecules, crashing into histories of former waves in an ocean of old and new and now. You begin to feel heavy again.

How do you reproduce if we are leaky, non bounded entities embedded in the world, never apart from it? There is some function of sameness between spaces at a given time, and the self arises above some semi-arbitrary but evolutionarily contrived threshold of recognizing objects and boundaries where this sameness function most rapidly changes.

I think the idea that we can live on through our actions and through our objects’ interactions with the environment is an odd thought — does it rely on other living beings being preset to experience the interactions with your artifacts? Does this world of object immortality exist in vampyroteuthis’s world? Does a wave live forever? Does a wave exist or rather is the wave a particular tangle of this unendingly dimensional environment? How is a wave any different than a slab of stone, except for timescale of change? To us, the stone is “permanent” because its form would be recognizable to us longer than our life, but the wave which dissipates into an unrecognizable form of the broader ocean more quickly than the stone turns to sand on a beach To have immortality you must have life, death, reproduction, similarity and difference, knots of the world that are the same color and pattern of other fabrics when you zoom in, when you examine the emissions around them.