#222: What Is Synthesis? What Is Control?, pt. 6

Would you recommend reading Blake's Jerusalem prior to reading Suicide Bridge ("you must read X in order to read Y" definitely risks an endless rabbithole where nothing is read, but the bit I've read about Suicide Bridge makes me think I'd miss a lot being largely unfamiliar with Blake, though I might just be misunderstanding what the work is).

David

Looking forward to it. It took 10 years of remove from reading "music journalism" and seeing you champion that album for me to realize that you just might be right.

Clay

(it hasn't come together yet, cos the potential co-host has too much real work to do, but there's also a chance that I'm gonna start a separate podcast just for music)

Michael S. Judge

I don't know if I have enough to say about them apart from technical musicall talk that would blow by 80% of the audience, but I will say say: definitively, without any serious doubt, AMPUTECHTURE is the best Mars Volta record

Michael S. Judge

I am formally requesting a Mars Volta episode

Clay

I look forward to that episode. Please have your brother on for that one! His ep on Shutter Island is one of my favourites.

DeadPrince

“Brennschluss” = Burnout ie, the moment at which all fuel has been consumed.

Arielle Curtin

Your discussion makes me think also of Frankenstein’s monster. Imitation of life. Why I oppose the death penalty and the hubris of man. Not sure I buy that a tube of metal becomes “alive” on the downward trajectory with no artificial thrust but guess I will have to finally read Gravity’s Rajnbow.

Arielle Curtin

The whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” thing is a deeply unfortunate verbal formulation that’s really misunderstood. I don’t think Marx was arguing for authoritarian socialism. It makes more sense if you understand it as juxtaposed to what Marx rightly saw as the extant dictatorship of the bourgeois—namely the ways the horizons of 19th century social and political economy were delimited and constrained by the exigencies of capital. In other words, capitalism “dictated” the formal and ideological structures inherent even in putatively democratic political formations. So the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t necessitates big brother or goose steeping red guards, it just means (at least I think there’s good reason to think that Marx meant) that any socialist society would dictate the material and political forms organizing society. It’s not incompatible with genuine democracy to say “look, we’re not going to debate if things like private property or profit are on the table in a system designed to benefit and empower labor. They just aren’t on the menu in our new society.” I think opponents, and unfortunately practitioners, of socialist projects just took the whole dictatorship thing and read it as necessitating dictators. Thus concludes this pedantic interlude. You can find me drooling on your local street corner until I’m bludgeoned to incoherence with a ream of Socialist Workers by a Trotskyite or nunchucked to death by disciples of Lyndon Larouche. You’re welcome.

Heath Iverson

Iain's pre-LONDON ORBITAL writing is totally different from anything after that – he was basically forced into "creative nonfiction" to earn a living, and he's great at it, but his poetry and fiction are wildly separate beasts. LUD HEAT & SUICIDE BRIDGE are 1974 and 1978 respectively, and unless you knew his style very very well, you wouldn't think they were the same writer. I'm not into Alan Moore much either, or graphic novels as a whole for that matter, couldn't make myself care about WATCHMEN, thought V FOR VENDETTA was actively bad ... but for some reason, subject matter, Iain's involvement, whatever, FROM HELL is fucking amazing. Eddie Campbell's art is a huge part of it too. That's probably the only graphic novel I'll ever periodically re-read.

Michael S. Judge

I didn’t know Sinclair ever wrote about Brakhage!!! I guess I’m not surprised though, I read some of his non-fiction, psychogeographical stuff—GHOST MILK and LONDON IS ORBITAL when undertaking an ill advised PhD dissertation on British ecology and avant-garde film (don’t go to college, kids). I still have a bad taste in my mouth around a some of the stuff I read back then, Sinclair included (though LONDON ORBITAL was also iterated as a pretty cool experimental film by Sinclair). Lately I’ve been reading WG Sebald, who’s put me in the mood for more despairing, spooky meditations on British landscapes/architecture and was thinking about revisiting Sinclair. Now with a Death Corner endorsement, I guess I don’t have a choice. I used to walk by a Hawksmoor building that housed the Oxford University Press as part of my daily commute and always felt the place radiated evil (more than the already high background evil of Oxford in general). That’s all I know about the dude. Is FROM HELL good? I’m “meh” on Alan Moore.

Heath Iverson

Looking forward to this mike 😉

M

When he's at his best he's one of the best. I occasionally trying to find a way where I can explain to someone his extended bit about how one of the only films he watched all year was SCOOBY-DOO ON ZOMBIE ISLAND because that's all his young child wants to watch, and he seamlessly slides into someone complaining about "the sorry state of jungle canyon rope bridges" "BECAUSE OF THATCHER, INNIT" but I think if I tried I'd be asked to leave the restaurant. Matt at Ghost Stories used a S. Lee clip where he very cleanly dismantled the "political correctness run amok" trope among UK churls as basically being about very comfortable and well-off British people getting annoyed at the idea of treating other people with dignity and respect.

Rohmer Simpson

I think you're right on Trump probably winning again. In a race between two fascists, it doesn't even matter. That said, he is so perfectly repellent and stupid, that I don't think he can lose. Does it even require discussion?

TurtlesAlltheWayDown

I am but a humble Merkani and do not know of such decadent European delights (never heard of Stewart Lee)

Michael S. Judge

Was your intro at all influenced by Stewart Lee's great Lady Di / Life-Sized Inflatable E.T. bit? https://youtu.be/U1H913UqQ6w?si=8_rTSWxGmDuHl0MW

Rohmer Simpson

i can 100% see how that would be associated and frankly the book probably hits on a lot of things youve talked about with pynchon, weaving, looms etc shit that i feel like if you actually read it it would cause a self enclosed loop where reality would collapse in on itself

otherstuffandthings

It's a good thing there are thousands of human cultures with built in mechanisms to respect the slower moving relatives and to force humans to slow down enough to start to relate to slow moving relatives on their terms. Unfortunately some culture is doing it's best to exterminatr those cultures and their techniques and those humans who carry them.

Jack

The term "military advisors" is itself a lexical grotequerie. For instance Kennedy didn't send soldiers to Vietnam he sent a few thousand advisers. Meaning American military members that killed people and got killed in warfare. Not soldiers tho. Advisers.

William Engels

The point about a V-2 becoming "alive" at the point when its pre-programmed ascent sequence ends, IE at the point when it goes beyond its mathematical control, reminds me of some details from the book Command And Control about nuclear warheads. TL;DR the US has lost or damaged dozens of nuclear warheads in various mishaps, many of which involve the bomb catching fire and in some cases the bomb was even armed. In such a circumstance the control wiring of the warhead can melt, temporarily changing the electrical circuitry into forms that were never intended. Like circuitbending old digital audio equipment except with an inferno instead of jumper wires and a nuclear bomb instead of a speak-n-spell. It's pure chance that none of these warheads detonated. But that image of a trigger mechanism melting through unplanned unpredictable circuit architectures while hooked up to a live nuclear bomb in a spill of burning rocket fuel has stayed with me.

Karl Childers

I’m completely on board, as a fellow lapsed Catholic! Can’t wait for that episode.

Jake

Gotcha. I was just curious. I realize it’s also basic animism, which—as the host of The Emerald podcast likes to say—is normative human consciousness.

Brian

Re the reverse delay, do you mean like cathedral by Van Halen? I used to play with the volume pedal on the ole pod 2.0 pedalboard to get that effect though I think they have a specific reverse delay feature. As a dumb shred head, I don’t need much in the way of sonic sculpting, just gain gain a boost to tighten up the low end and reverb and maybe delay and if you’re feeling like zakk wylde playing live, some chorus or the rotovibe pedal. Maybe a pitch shifter to play like dimebag. I’m too old for this Tim Henson Polyphia type playing. Boomer bends for me, man.

NYCM&AHole

Talking something analogous to "processing speed," though, lower is not necessarily "worse," and the phenomena that occur in central frequency band for a given organism will almost certainly be understood WORSE by something that "thinks" much faster

Michael S. Judge

Buddy, I'm trying, I'm trying

Michael S. Judge

I'm going to do a show about this soon, but some people (not saying you're one of them) have managed to construe my saying "I am not an orthodox Marxist" – and my criticism of the "dicatorship of the proletariat" stage in the orthodox concept of class strugle as a pretty obvious juncture at which deeply reactionary ideas & elements can enter the "revolutionary" process – as "I, Michael S. Judge, reject Karl Marx in all his forms and deeds," which a) is completely untrue, and b) is not actually even possible, as I tried to make clear in talking about Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud in pt. 5 of this series. But more about this soon. For now, and for a deeply simplistic summary that will no doubt be read as maliciously as what I'm trying to clarify (again, not by you, but god knows by somebody): first part, Marx was 99.99% right, but Marx alone is not enough. Second part, the world Marx was 99.99% right about is now one sphere, if a central one, in a concatenation of unimaginably larger echeloned spheres that Marx neither could nor did imagine, and we don't do ourselves or the rest of the world any favors by pretending that Holy Writ is singly and exclusively sufficient. We lapsed Catholics still don't go in for Sola Scriptura.

Michael S. Judge

You can spend a life just learning the differences between how different analog delays manage the feedback loop of input > output > input > output ad infinitum. The EHX Memory Boy and the original, mega-glitchy Stereo Memory Man are the best for that eroding freakout breakdown, but other devices can do great stuff – I just found a rare old Moog Minifooger MF Delay, and when you crank up the Feedback, it doesn't go into total self-oscillation and runaway signal, it keeps repeating everything forever but at the same volume, so you get this huge black oily cloud of broken petrochemical sound. A really good digital delay-modeling engine like a Boss DD-200 can do that too; one of my very favorite sounds, something I use all the time for a kind of pad under lead parts, is the Reverse delay setting at a very low Mix percentage, and the Parameter pot allows you to clip off all the attack on the reversed repeats, so you just get the "middle" of the sound without the hard cutoff at the end (i.e. the reversed beginning). You can let that bad boy run forever, and it creates a kind of inverse Oort Cloud of frozen-but-melting sounds that don't get in the way of your playing, they just give it a ghostly house to move inside.

Michael S. Judge

I've read some Spinoza, and I've read lots of Deleuze ON Spinoza, but that was not a truth whereat I arrived via philosophy.

Michael S. Judge

One time a friend of mine met Ken Russell and asked him if he was still happy with all his work, if, given the chance, he would've done everything the same, and Ken said, "OHHH, my dear boy, YESSSS!" ... Which I mention because this is my reaction to anything Brakhage, and especially that movie: ohhhh, my dear boy, yessssss. Brakhage is a hero of mine, and I'm embarrassed to say "hero" in virtually all circumstances, so gauge ye thusly. And among the million other reasons you (and everyone) should read Iain Sinclair's LUD HEAT + SUICIDE BRIDGE, the two greatest book-length poems since Charles Olson died, one is that LUD HEAT – I think; it could be in SUICIDE BRIDGE, which is even better, and you can find both those books collected in one volume – contains what you might call a prose-poem essay about Brakhage and THE ACT OF SEEING ... in particular that will snatch your wig, serve you cunt, eat and leave no crumbs, and so forth. I cannot say it too many times: everybody read those two books. Goddamn it. Read them. (And they're dug into my brain so deeply that I didn't even realize this as I said it, but if you do read ’em, you'll get some clues as to why I mentioned ecclesiastical architect Nicholas Hawksmoor in the opening bit about Our Keir – matter of fact, if you know Alan Moore's FROM HELL, he took *tons* of that from Iain and LUD HEAT, as well as Iain's first novel, WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS.)

Michael S. Judge

We need to revive the alchemical worldview.

William Engels

You probably don't need me to say this, but "They're not killing anyone, they're just advising on hostage rescue the same way they could've done over the internet from Ft. Bragg" is a pile of shit my mouth isn't nearly big enough to swallow

Michael S. Judge

The "check one check two" part is just the FINAL check, to make sure that everything's still working & at the right volume. All the complicated parts, EQ and mixing and stereo spread and compression and whatever other post-processing may be necessary, happens hours before that (if you're at the kind of gig where the artist can afford such niceties).

Michael S. Judge

My honest answer is that I should read it, but I associate that book 100% with a high school friend of mine who got way too into LSD, kinda disappeared for a while, and has allegedy been involved in some real bad shit, and I'm honestly afraid to go back to anything too redolent of that period when I was starting to lose my mind for real, to move beyond things like suicidal depression and OCD and into the fever swamp of schizoid psychosis and C-PTSD (same years, like 2003-2011)

Michael S. Judge

Ya totally with you. I think the consciousness is in the hardware. As far as I'm concerned these Nazi programmers are just torturing the poor creatures. Completely with you on those guys wanting to make their sick worldview objective by computeruzing it. There are also much more harmonious ways of relating with mineral consciousness than making computer golems imo.

Jack

SHUTTER ISLAND is one of the most underrated 4th Reich "texts," and it got made and publicized in the way such texts often do – by posing as genre work, such that it couldn't really be about OUR world. Look how many times Pynchon's done that, or how Philip K. Dick did it, or how Burroughs did it, or really most of the best film noir made recently enough that "film noir" is presumptively safe, because it's either just an imaginary past or a past too distant to affect us. Gotta do a show about that someday

Michael S. Judge

re Jack: computers will be more thermodynamically efficient for some tasks (arithmetic) and less efficient for other tasks (visual recognition) because of the adaptations stored in the structure of the human nervous system. Our visual cortex and retina are highly patterned in advance around object/tool/face detection and so we're insanely fast at that. Arithmetic is something we didn't evolve to do so transistors smoke us every time. re MSJ: acc to Heidegger something can only exhibit an authentic (unpatterned/non-inherited) care-structure (and therefore possess desire, in the ordinary psychological sense) if it is a being-towards-death. In non Conty jargon: until something knows that it can and will die, it's incapable of having a will or a desire as such. Definitely agree that programmed machines escape our designs, but here I'm afraid we're falling into the Cartesian trap of looking for some animist spark unique to humans that doesn't exist in the rest of the cosmos. Part of why I like panpsychism/process philosophy/Whitehead/Spinoza is that everybody and everything is invited to the party.

William Engels

Been looking at photos and Google Earth and shit for a decade, and it's still right on the borderline of seeming too predictably nightmarish to be real, too on-the-nose, too much like a film set. The path from "It couldn't be Hell in exactly this way" to "There are millions, perhaps billions, of people who really live like that" is one that can be verbally traveled in a few seconds, but to get it into your skull, like TRULY flickering in the brain-cache, is something not many people can manage. I think that's part of why Gaza is hitting so many people so hard, and I don't even mean this as a criticism of well-meaning humans who are aware of vast and systemic human suffering: they knew it was like this, but they didn't KNOW it was like this, and now it's gotten under their scalps and into the coral-reef bone for the first time.

Michael S. Judge

I don't rule out that the components of a computer have some sort of life, or inwardness, or cognition, or whatever you like. I DO deny that any such life suddenly combines into a vital or cognitive whole as Der Komputer, just because WE conceive of it that way, in order to sate some desire in the form of "a computer," or that we're capable of reconstructing a pseudo-human intelligence from computer code. The code itself is a relic of reified humanity, all of it purposively directed by people who want to turn their own fixations and bigotries into "objective" answers that emerge from the machine. To say that another way: sure, there can be vitality/cognition/etc. inside a computer. If it's there, it's NOT the software we wrote for the fuckin' thing, and it's certainly not a process that begins with human beings – usually some variety of Nazis – having a purpose in mind, and ending with the same human beings saying "See? Computer says so."

Michael S. Judge

This makes sense. Curious about this one too. Ignoring embodied energy (which I usually don't but for now) does it take more energy for me myself or a computer to make the same calculation? I'm assuming the computer takes more energy cuz it does it faster. But Idk maybe you do?

Jack

Mercs is no brainer. Special forces I wonder what their marching orders and RoE are

William Engels

Also a panpsychist. My complete and total guess is that the most notable change experience between a computer and person's awareness is the time resolution. The human nervous system operates very roughly in the 100Hz band, and action potentials propagate at between 1 and 3k mph. A CPU/GPU by contrast operates in GHz ranges. Extending the metaphor, trees and rhizomes and so forth have even slower propagation/integration of information and likely can't perceive changes occurring above a certain speed

William Engels

I really dig how you said calculus is like a translational gkyoh system that allows you to go from analog to digital. Georgescu-Roegen calls this same phenomenon Arithmomorphism and it is featured heavily in his critique of the statistical dynamics interpretation of the Entropy Law. And ultimately his critique of Western scientism. I just love the word Arithmomorphism for this.

Jack

Most humans throughout time have known that rocks have intelligence and wisdom. We're just living in a weird time in a weird place in which most people forgot.

Jack

Someone I know who's ex special forces said Gaza is crawling with American mercs more than anything and special forces are there too. He said they were in there from pretty much day one.

Jack

As some who tends towards animism or panpsychism or whatever I have a wondering about AI. I do not think that the human experience/consciousness is reducible to nervous system synapses. I do not like fungal or plant consciousness is reducible to the mycorhizome. I think they're important parts that enable some degree of intelligence (and wisdom?) but not consciousness itself. That said, I wonder what is the experience of a LLM or really big algorithm (RBA). I don't see any reason why, if I believe a stone has consciousness, that a computer made of stones would not be? If some amount of mammal intelligence does emerge from synapses, and insect intelligence from hive mind, and some amount of plant and fungal intelligence emerges from mycelial and rhizal connections, I don't totally see why some intelligence couldn't emerge from networked silicon synapses. I do think a lot of what they're calling ai right now is hype and marketing and propaganda. And of course, if they do synthesize an AI,they will lose control over it. Inshallah the wisdom of the stones lives on in silicon semiconductors.

Jack

Yup

William Engels

“When I set a house on fire - erection Once a liver, now she's a dier - erection When I dig a hole in the ground - erection When I hear that hard rock sound - erection”— Тербонегро

MW

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-special-forces-in-israel/#:~:text=What%20are%20American%20soldiers%20doing,Defense%20official%20revealed%20last%20week.

Michael S. Judge

I think Israel is in a very special situation, dumb-bosses-wise, of having pretty much openly been an ethnofascist apartheid state for decades, and if that'll generate one thing (other than dead Palestinians), it's people who know how to say "Sir! Yes, sir!" to absolutely anything. Plus I think it's pretty clear by now that the Vaunted Israeli War Machine of the Six Day War era has been living on a diet of American weapons and bullshit nostalgia, cos they have enough bombs to drop them continuously until the next USA resupply, but they're pretty fucking bad at the actual war part of the war. Every day produces another video of Al Qassem Brigade sticking a landmine to the side of a tank while its crew is busy telling an Arab child that she looks 18

Michael S. Judge

every road leads back to fucking langley

Kamran Husain

I was talking with my dad, who started working on computer systems in the early 70s, and the stuff he was working on was something trying to translate data into targets for airstrikes. His job was very much to get the data to say what his bosses told him the data should say. We are were talking about discs the size of manhole covers, a computer that could barely operate a text-based Star Trek game, and a guy who did this a couple days a week while surfing 10 hours a day the rest of the time. It was interesting that ... he was incredibly dismissive of any idea that any sort of computer system could generate live, short-term actionable, targets for airstrikes. It was even more interesting that ... he thinks that, in reference to the lavender system, there is no way that the people deciding where the bombs fell would be dumb enough to actually use AI to target stuff. As someone who also has a fair amount of experience with bosses ... telling me what data needs to say ahead of time ... god I just can't even imagine the layers of absolute bull that go into this stuff.

Raznl

I’ve been to those slums in Mumbai 😵‍💫 Wild shit

Riles Kiley

Sodium Amytol is also what they drug Sarah Connor with in Terminator, and Leo’s character in Shutter Island.

DeadPrince

Hell yeah that explanation rocked

John Waaben

back at you big dog

K

very interested in your thoughts on GEB by Douglas Hoffstadter. the delay loop killing itself by playing or reaching? its own resonant frequency, makes me think of his comment that Bach self referencing himself at the end of his fugue kills him. Reading the book really just makes me think of your poscast tbh

otherstuffandthings

who else out here ruining relationships because "you can't go one day without mentioning the Nazis" 🔥🔥🔥

K

That Hawking was fucking flawless. Holy shit

Warren Commission Test Skull

hypervigil

I always thought mic check was just “two two two - check two two” but that’s because I only see it at concerts.

NYCM&AHole

I can't believe Luciano Pavarotti had time to swing by the death/corner studio

foul tarnished

You mentioned US special forces in Gaza - source? I'm ready to believe it I'm just wondering where you're getting it.

William Engels

This series is exceptional. I dig it the most, man. As always, my gratitude and awe for you is unmatched. Thank you!

Jonathan Schultz

MJ, have you seen Brakhage’ “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes”? He’s hip to your own etymological recovery of the linkage between the so called objective vision of the world sliced into mortified flesh and autopsy/death. It’s also interesting to think that the presocratics already knew that the idea of discrete “instants” was absurd (Zeno’s paradox) and it took the centuries until Bergson and the Durre for western philosophy to unfuck itself from the folly of calculus, which Deleuze’s thinking on cinema beautifully elaborated on.

Heath Iverson

When you say “rocks have intelligence” it makes me think you’ve read Spinoza. Have you?

Brian

Also a discussion about harmonic resonance could’ve also referenced the opera singer breaking glass cliche but yes same for rockets (or airframes) vibrating themselves to pieces

NYCM&AHole

My favorite part of the delay pedal is the pitch shift when you change the rate.

NYCM&AHole

Schluss means the end. “Mach Schluss” means “put an end to it.” Brennschluss means the end of the [rocket] burn. Also I think the V2 rockets were controlled by gyroscope wich were used to stabilize the rotation, etc and I’m not sure that died after the burn.

NYCM&AHole

Like the show is great but then all the gear discussion even when used in content is like whipped cream and a cherry on an ice cream sundae

NYCM&AHole

Thrilled that you’re continuing this series. Truly some of your best work imo

Oatmeal

The gear discussion makes me want to play more tube amp through a speaker (it’s not the same with the torpedo captor x or your other attenuator or reactive load of choice), but the small children at home remind me that it’s boss katana go or amplitube or the pedalboard with an IR loader on it

NYCM&AHole

What a banger of an episode. Pynchon/Calculus/Guitar Pedals? Now that's what I call Synthesis! Couple of books I recommend on applying calculus: https://www.dspguide.com/ - Free book, I read it online and have since bought a print copy. Great general study. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/AKPetersBook.htm - Non-free book. Excellent descriptions of both the physical space being modeled and the general feedback/feedforward circuits used to do the modeling. He's also got some free courses around that are worthwhile if you want to get your hands dirty. Includes ponytail. Congratulations, an American-Irishman found the end of the rainbow, and it's at the tip of a rocket. ps: You should tag episodes 203 and 205 with "synthesis and control"

glenn mohre

This episode also makes me feel bad about using Helix Native for my guitar rig.

Jake

I vaguely remember an episode where you said you haven’t read much Marx directly, but the entire discussion about calculus reminded me of dialectical materialism’s critique of bourgeois idealism. Even if you don’t accept dialectical materialism, the arguments are quite similar.

Jake

Thanks for serving operatic c*nt to we, your loyal listeners

Shivvy

I've been scared to listen to your recent shows because I'm too fragile to look into the face of genocide right now, but the funereal hell of the English reality, those fucking spokesmen for the proudly incurious "woorkin class" the Gallaghers bringing out the corpse of the stillborn "britpop" "phenomena" again for another round of this gruesome Kabuki show is a sight I can't turn away from. Hope you spare some time for this cursed isle in the ep, and especially, oasis hate

Divad Kong