<p>Part II<br>ATTEMPTING A CALCULUS OF INTENTION</p>
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<em>Calculus of intention was a concept developed over many years by the cybernetic wizard, Warren McCulloch. He was in the business of brain circuits. McCulloch felt that dialogue breakdowns occured largely because we lacked a logic that could handle triadic relationships. Here is his description of the problem of the calculus of intention.</em><br>
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<em>The relations we need are triadic, not diadic. Once you give me triadic relations, I can make N-adic relations; but out of diadic relations I can't go anywhere. I can build strings and I can build circles, and there it ends.</em><br>
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<em>The great problem of the nervous system is the one concerning its core, the so-called reticular formation ... This reticular core is that things that decided whether you'd better run of whether you'd better fight, whether you should wait, whether you should sleep, whether you should make love. This is its business and it has never relinquished that business. It is a structure incredibly simple when you look at it, but the problem of organization of many components, each of which is a living thing, each of which in some sense, senses the world, each of which tells others what it has sensed, and somehow a couple million of these cells get themselves organised enough to commit the whole organism. We do not yet have any theory that is capable of handling such a structure.</em><br>
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<em>Communication: Theory and Research </em>ed Thayer, Lee, Thomas, Springfield, 1967. McCulloch's commentary on "Logical Structure of the Mind."</p>
<p><em>Calculus of intention was a concept developed over many years by the cybernetic wizard, Warren McCulloch. He was in the business of brain circuits. McCulloch felt that dialogue breakdowns occured largely because we lacked a logic that could handle triadic relationships. Here is his description of the problem of the calculus of intention.</em></p>
<p><em>The relations we need are triadic, not diadic. Once you give me triadic relations, I can make N-adic relations; but out of diadic relations I can't go anywhere. I can build strings and I can build circles, and there it ends.</em></p>
<p><em>The great problem of the nervous system is the one concerning its core, the so-called reticular formation ... This reticular core is that things that decided whether you'd better run of whether you'd better fight, whether you should wait, whether you should sleep, whether you should make love. This is its business and it has never relinquished that business. It is a structure incredibly simple when you look at it, but the problem of organization of many components, each of which is a living thing, each of which in some sense, senses the world, each of which tells others what it has sensed, and somehow a couple million of these cells get themselves organised enough to commit the whole organism. We do not yet have any theory that is capable of handling such a structure.</em></p>
<p><em>Communication: Theory and Research </em>ed Thayer, Lee, Thomas, Springfield, 1967. McCulloch's commentary on "Logical Structure of the Mind."</p>
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<p>I have not made a thorough study of McCulloch. It would take years. I do not know if what follows satisfies that criterion he established for such a calculus. I have maintained a certain organization of ignorance relative to formal cybernetics and formal topology. In fact, what follow would not, it seems, satisfy the kind of discreteness, one-two-three, that McCulloch seemed to want. However, such discreteness may not be necessary.</p>
<p>My approach stems from work with McLuhan that preoccpied me with the problem of how to maintain congruence between our intentions and our extensions. McLuhan talked of orchestration of media and sense ratios. Neither cut it. Orchestras just aren't around and sense ratios or <em>sensus communis </em>is a medieval model, essentially a simile of meta touch. Gibson's book on the senses considered as percetual systems is richer in description of the process. It includes McLuhan's personal probing ability as an active part of the perceptual system.</p>
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<p><em>Programming and MetaProgramming</em>,
<br>Lilly, pp. 42-43</p>
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<p>Relative to video infolding it is near impossible to describe in words even using klein worm graphs what I'm talking about. The following will mean little to anyone except those who have had some experience of taping with themselves at different levels.</p>
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<p><b>Taping something new with yourself is a part contained.</b></p>
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<p><b>To watch another's edited tape is to share in the way he thinks about the relation between his various perceptions in a real time mode. This enters the realm of his intention.</b></p>
<p><b>If you are editing some of your tape along with tape somebody else shot and he is doing the same thing using some of your tape then it is possible to see how one's perceptions relate to another's intentions and vice versa.</b></p>
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<p>Relative to sharing perceptual systems it is somewhat easier to talk about since there are parallels with photography and film.</p>
<p>The most explicit experience of this mode of perceptual sharing came in the early days of Raindance when Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Michael Shamberg and myself "shot" twelve rolls of tape on earth day. Both in replay that evening (we laughed our heads off digging each others tape while the old perceptual imperialist, Walter Cronkite, explained Earth Day for us) and in the edits that followed each of us got a good idea of how each saw and thought about the events vis-a-vis the others.</p>
<p>Relative to soft control systems using plastic membranes I am thinking mostly of the soft cybernetic work being done by Warren Brody, Avery Johnson and Bill Carrigan. The sense of the sacred and the transcendental that surrounds some of the inflatable subculture is to me a kind of pseudomythology. Conciousness might be better invested in designing self-referencing structures where awareness is imminent in the structure and its relation to the users; not by being invested in a religious way to a "special" structure that does not relate intelligently to the users.</p>
<p>A Klein Worm couch is a suggestion of a possible way of moving in that direction. It could be built of strong polyurethane, filled with air, perhaps by a constant flow from a pump. People might interrelate kinetically through the changes in the air pressure. Design of the actual couch could be arrived at experimentally by combinations and transformations of the structures described above.</p>
