Haven't read this, but it was mentioned in this interesting interview with Kobo Abe. But look at this god damn cover:

HA

I've been dipping in and out of a bunch of books recently! Last night took me into Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine from 1967. I've read bits of a few of Koestler's books; I don't know much about his intentions or broader perception, but I tend to like his casual tone while challenging widely-held conventions.

Here are a few bits I highlighted while reading, as he goes through how strange it is that the dominant form of psychological research in the early 20th century was dedicated to ignoring consciousness. It's still relevant-feeling now because of the widespread application of Pavlovian/Behaviorist ideas and mechanisms throughout our world, particularly in software/game development and their deliberate lean into psychological manipulation.

By far the most powerful school in academic psychology, which at the same time determined the climate in all other sciences of life, was, and still is, a pseudoscience called Behaviourism. Its doctrines have invaded psychology like a virus which first causes convulsions, then slowly paralyses the victim.

On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviourists proceeded to purge psychology of all 'intangibles and unapproachables'. The terms 'consciousness', 'mind', 'imagination' and 'purpose', together with a score of others, were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. In Watson's own words, the Behaviourist must exclude 'from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined'.

Psychology used to be defined in dictionaries as the science of the mind; Behaviourism did away with the concept of mind and put in its place the conditioned-reflex chain.

In his standard work Science and Human Behaviour the hopeful student of psychology is firmly told from the very outset that 'mind' and 'ideas' are non-existent entities, 'invented for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them'. [5] By the same logic, the physicist may, of course, reject the existence of radio waves, becanse they are propagated through a so-called 'field' which lacks the properties of ordinary physical media. In fact, few of the theories and concepts of modern physics would survive an ideological purge on Behaviourist principles — for the simple reason that the scientific outlook of Behaviourism is modelled on the mechanistic physics of the nineteenth century.

The attempt to reduce the complex activities of humanity to the hypothetical 'atoms of behaviour' found in lower mammals produced next to nothing that is relevant — just as the chemical analysis of bricks and mortar will tell you next to nothing about the architecture of a building. Yet throughout the dark ages of psychology most of the work done in the laboratories consisted of analysing bricks and mortar in the hope that by patient effort somehow one day it would tell you what a cathedral looked like.

The unique attributes of humanity, verbal communication and written records, science, art, and so forth, are considered to differ only in degree, not in kind, from the learning achievements of the lower animals — once more epitomised, for Hull as for Skinner, in the bar-pressing activities of the rat. Pavlov counted the number of drops which his dogs salivated through their artificial fistulae, and distilled them into a philosophy of man; Professors Skinner, Hull and their followers took an equally heroic short cut from the rat in the box to the human condition.

Skinner did not intend to write a parody.* He means it seriously.

lol

Both are engaged in question-begging on a heroic scale, apparently driven by an almost fanatical urge to deny, at all costs, the existence of properties which account for the humanity of the human and the rattiness of the rat.

[...] the crude slot-machine model, in its modernised, more sophisticated versions, has had a profounder influence on them — and on our whole culture — than they realise. It has permeated our attitudes to philosophy, social science, education, psychiatry. Even orthodoxy recognises today the limitations and shortcomings of Pavlov's experiments; but in the imagination of the masses, the dog on the laboratory table, predictably salivating at the sound of a gong, has become a paradigm of existence, a kind of anti-Promethean myth; and the word 'conditioning', with its rigid deterministic connotations, has become a key-formula for explaining why we are what we are, and for explaining away moral responsibility.

At first its intention was merely to exclude consciousness, images and other non-public phenomena as objects of study from the field of psychology; but later on this came to imply that the excluded phenomena did not exist.

This is one of the most frustrating things to me about the reductive scientific worldview, which persists here almost 60 years later. Thinking exists, it happens, you're doing it right now. What it is, exactly, is up for discussion, but it's trash semi-intellectualizing to assert that the sum of human (and other animal!) consciousness can be reduced to on-off electricity in a salt barrier, as one smarmier-than-thou scientist asserted to me a few years ago. Those things might be observable, but they don't add up to anything approaching the whole!

Werner Heisenberg, one of the greatest living physical scientists, has laconically declared: 'Nature is unpredictable'; it seems rather absurd to deny the living organism even that degree of unpredictability which quantum physics accords to inanimate nature.

It is impossible to arrive at a diagnosis of humanity's predicament — and by implication at a therapy — by starting from a psychology which denies the existence of mind, and lives on specious analogies derived from the bar-pressing activities of rats. The record of fifty years of ratomorphic psychology is comparable in its sterile pedantry to that of scholasticism in its period of decline, when it had fallen to counting angels on pin-heads — although this sounds a more attractive pastime than counting the number of bar-pressings in the box.

And finally, a side note as he acknowledges he's made some of these points in earlier books:

It is embarrassing to have to repeat, over and again, that two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture.

!!

I just wanna write these down so that I can stop cursing them silently!

The page you're on isn't synced to other devices until you close the book on the current device.

This is SO WEIRD, and frustrates me all the time. I have an iPhone and an iPad, and I read books on both. Let's say I'm on page 20 when I start reading on my phone. Around page 40, I lock the phone or switch to another app without tapping the "back arrow" in the upper left, because why would I do that? So, at some point, whether a few minutes or hours later, if pick up the ipad and open the book there? What page should I be on? Invariably, no matter how much time has passed, the ipad thinks I'm still on page 20. Even worse: it now sets the "synced position" to page 20, because that's the most recent page iCloud has seen me reading!

This happens especially when I've been reading the same book in both places, because the text is "open" in both. But... it's such a tiny bit of metadata. When I pick up the iPad with the book already "open," why in hell doesn't it check the server and move to page 40? If I manually close the book before I put down the iPad (why would I do this), and manually close the book before I put down my iPhone (again, this isn't how these devices are used), then the next time I open the book on either device, it will open to the most recent page.

Anyway! This frustrates me!

Dragging my finger to highlight a passage requires character-precision at the end of a partial line.

I can start dragging and then move down the right side of the screen to highlight all the lines in between... except for the last line of a paragraph. It just... doesn't highlight. If I move a bit farther down, it highlights to the end of the next paragraph's first line. Wha....? So then I remember that I have to move my finger to the letters at the end of the paragraph, and that having my finger past those characters means they don't get highlighted. I just... what the fuck? I'm pretty sure it used to work the sensible way.

I hold the controversial opinion that software should be developed by people who actually use that software, which increasingly doesn't feel like the case with Apple's apps. Further, it should incorporate external feedback and research, which also doesn't seem to be in style over there. Even further, the same people should be working on the same app for more than 9-12 months, so their experience can be carried into the next round of iterations. Reports from inside Apple suggest this is hardly ever the case; engineers get shuffled around to different projects every year or so. Which helps explain why their apps get totally rebuilt with fewer features every couple of years!

Hhhhhhhhhhngh! These are two very small examples of a thousand other instances of this kind of, "nobody took the time to understand how this should really work," all the way across Apple's software. Not to mention all the ways the software is just straight up broken, or being redesigned to do less and take up more visual space. I remain impressed with their hardware, but my Apple software frustration level is really getting dire.

I'm not familiar with the publication and am not a Christian, but I saw this paragraph linked on kottke.org and appreciate its stark framing:

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

Our cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system makes this obvious.

And there are some great passages addressing the incredibly-obtuse ways people treat the word "socialism":

Moreover, just because a totalitarian regime happens to call itself socialist—or, for that matter, a republic, or a union of republics, or a people’s republic, or a people’s democratic republic—we are under no obligation to take it at its word. What we call “democratic socialism” in the United States is difficult to distinguish from the social-democratic traditions of post-war Western Europe, and there we find little evidence that a democracy becomes a dictatorship simply by providing such staples of basic social welfare as universal health care. At least, it is hard not to notice that the social-democratic governments of Europe have always gained power only by being voted into office, and have always relinquished it peacefully when voted out again. None of them has ever made war on free markets, even in attempting (often all too hesitantly) to impose prudent and ethically salutary regulations on business. Rather than gulags, death camps, secret police, arrests without warrant, summary executions, enormous propaganda machines, killing fields, and the like, their political achievements have been more in the line of the milk-allowances given to British children in the post-war years, various national health services, free eyeglasses and orthodonture for children, school lunches, public pensions for the elderly and the disabled, humane public housing, adequate unemployment insurance, sane labor protections, and so forth, all of which have been accomplished without irreparable harm to economies or treasuries.

I suppose a social-democratic state could begin to gravitate toward true authoritarianism, in the way that any political arrangement can lead to just about any other. The Third Reich, after all, was born out of a functioning parliamentary democracy. The 2016 U.S. election proved that, even in a long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or anything, no matter how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if enough citizens are sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious. In just the past few years, we have seen bland American neoconservatism rapidly evolving into populist, racist, openly fascist, mystical nationalism. Anything is possible.

All this being true, the classical social democrat or democratic socialist might be forgiven for thinking that Americans are curiously deluded regarding their own supposed inalienable liberties. He or she might contend, at any rate, that a state that uses its power chiefly to dilute consumer and environmental protections in the interests of large corporations and private investors, while withholding even the most basic civil goods that taxpayers have a right to expect (such as a well-maintained infrastructure or decent public transport), is no smaller—and certainly no less invasive and dictatorial—than one that is actually obliged by the popular will and the social contract to deliver services in exchange for the taxes it collects. He or she might think that a government whose engorged military budget is squandered on wasteful (because profitable) redundancy, but whose public services are minimal at best, presides over a far more controlled economy—and a far more coercive redistribution of wealth—than does a government forced to return public funds to its citizens in the forms of substantial civic benefits. He or she might even have the temerity to see social democracy, properly practiced, not as an enlargement of the state’s prerogatives, but quite the opposite: a democratic seizure of power from both state and corporate entities, as well as a greater democratic control over public policy, taxation, production, and trade.

After all, though we often speak as if the centralized state and corporate “free” enterprise were antagonists, they are in fact mutually sustaining. [...] Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life.

Finally, again as someone raised "Baptist" but firmly opposed to American Christianity in all its forms, I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.

The full article: Three Cheers for Socialism

The Dear Hunter — Wait

"I stood in lines to bow my head. I'd fold my hands and speak in tongues, to whisper worries to the dead. But I could tell no apparition heard a single word I said. But I'd still call my fear in to the air... then I said, wait."

this

band

kicks

ass

rubblebucket — formless and new

"And I'm still stuck wondering which stairs to take, and how to take them without making big mistakes. But it's worth the blood to still be lost; to still be free, it's worth the cost. And I won't go back to before."

for a long time, like a lot of us, I’ve had the compulsive desire to just see… more stuff. read twitter, look at newsfeeds, all of it. just show me new things, it doesn’t matter what they are. curiosity, obsession, avarice, boredom. whatever the reasons.

lately though when I open up one of these networked floodgates, I’m just… disgusted, immediately. worse, I’m not even interested. I don’t want to see any of it. there’s plenty I’m interested in elsewhere, so I think it’s
a positive shift, but… it’s strange, to have no desire where there used to be a bottomless pit of readiness to receive and be piqued.

I’ve been decaffeinating. trying to be calmer. reading books. working as steadily as I can. in general, trying to slow my mind. it still roars away from me regularly, but it’s working. maybe it’s that. on the other hand, I’ve been feeling kind of empty, generally devoid of desire. but it’s also been easier for me to say that I want something, functionally anyway, and to move toward it.

I don’t know. right now, the only thing I’m hungry for is peace. and I don’t feel hunger for it, just… a clear need. there’s no room for the chaos of too many voices shouting thoughtlessly, or of yet another news article about an interesting technology that won’t be useful to anyone in our lifetimes. that’s too cynical. it just… doesn’t feel important or meaningful for me to keep up with the torrent right now. I just want to secure my own space in this burning world and make room enough to live as peacefully as I can.

bill wurtz — "i'm a princess"

I guess it would take me all day to explain why this is the most important song I've heard all year, and I don't even have all of tonight...! so I'll just type some of the words from the song, even though "it's more than words."

"I'm ridiculous and feeling very particular about my world."

"tell it to me once before I'm gone. respect me. I'm a princess. all the soldiers that surround me and make sure I'm lonely: do they daydream? dream that it's okay?"

"tell it to me once before I'm gone."

"there's got to be more. there's got to be so much more! but I don't know what it's there for. I don't know what we're here for."

"sometimes I think of it when I sleep, and I'm dreaming about my friends in need."

and most importantly, the ending.

the velvet teen — parallel universes

kings of convenience — parallel lines