From: rezabe37@iscssun.uni.edu (Heath Rezabek) Subject: AUTOLOGY: vivisection Date: Wed, 20 Apr 1994 02:17:41 -0500 (CDT) as .rez became acclimated to virtual culture, his formerly theorhetical approach to identity crystallized into something else; something stronger and stranger. memes comprised the space of the net. memes became his reference points. in an environment in which notion-navigation became synonymous with existence. certain structures came alive, as alive as anything. he had questions about freedom, free will. did he decide which memes to explicate or did his memes explicate him? memetix and the net made an odd combined substance. because it by nature forced the issue of identity and free will. he had chosen the nickname "rez" because it had been the only such name given /to/ him by others. he did not feel secure in creating one from scratch. or rather, he felt compelled to discover why others had called him this by adopting and inhabiting it voluntarily. at some point -- perhaps after reading "Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky -- he began to consider memetics, identity, and consciousness in terms of the "fundamental units" which constituted them. in his observation of memes, he found it difficult to define where a "single" meme ended and a "cluster" of memes began. likewise, in groups of fellows, he found the shifting and ebbing and morphing of a group from two to three to five to a group of two and of three respectively and so forth to pose similar questions. Minsky, in Society of Mind, suggested that such fuzzy structures could be modelled as clusters or units, depending on the participant's PoV in relation to them. he, of course, was applying the ideas to individual minds; .rez chose first to apply these ideas to memetix. for Minsky, a "unit" could be seen from the outside as a single, solitary Agent within a system. from such a PoV, that single Agent would have a very perceptible task and role to play in relation to its fellow Agents, but it could be seen that, by itself, it would almost be less-than-sentient. now, when entrained in a system with other Agents, the cluster could be seen [from the inside] as an Agency. thus, a mental trait or task was an Agency in which specialized Agents were in complement. What, then, of the single Agent? was that the horizon of being? was the single Agent an individible structure or unit? Minsky was of the mind that no, in fact; an Agent could not only be examined more closely, but it could also be examined from "within" -- in which case it became quite apparently an Agency; each single Agent was made up of smaller sub-Agents which did various things; the result was the full Agent [or, from the inside, the Agency.] .rez eventually found that a very similar idea had been set forth by Arthur Koesteler in the gnotion of a Holon. a Holon was a self-similar structure which had two potential tendencies: the Integrative capacity and the Assertive capacity. in its Integrative aspect, a Holon was analogous to an Agency -- seen from the inside as a collaboration of constituents. when granted its Assertive capacity, a Holon was akin to a sinlge Agent, seen from outside, fulfilling a specific task within a given system -- a system which was, in itself, another Holon in its Integrative aspect. this was also akin to what .rez knew of set theory; in these models, the Set was the fundamental unit. every Element within a Set was by default another Set. what did this have to do with freedom or free will? a model allowing Holons, memes, Agents and Agencies slowly became slightly disturbing to .rez in its implications. although these approaches or interpretations were never made explicit, .rez could vaguely see that an individual human being could be modelled similarly. he, in other words, could be an Agent within a system -- say, an e.list or virtual community -- or he could be an Agency. yet the only person capable of truly percieving the Agency of .rez could only ever be .rez himself. similarly, the only people capable of seeing the [by default limiting] specialization or single-mindedness of .rez within the larger groups which contained him could only ever be his fellows. .rez got to the point at which he could infer that other of his fellows must be in a similar situation, and could make allowances for that. still, a fundamental question came to his attention. if he could be clearly seen from his own PoV as an Agency, or an Integrative Holon of a potential [always in flux] system of memes, then he was certain that others could see him as an Agent, or Assertive Holon who tended to dogmatically and repetitively assert a limited and specialized set of memes. they could never possibly see the memes which struggled in static flux for control of his attentions and intentions. and, because he was so keenly aware of them, he could never quite be sure whether it was "him" who was speaking or thinking or feeling or loving or wishing or hoping or struggling or laughing or crying, or whether it was perhaps his memes. the question boiled down to that of identity and freedom: was he, In The End, a congregation of memes, no more or less? this question led him to make various attempts at defining what exactly a meme was, but he found again and again that the best he could seem to do was to identify the scopes and roles, the inclusions and exclusions, of the memes which iterated out a static flux within him. "a fundamental agent of communicative resonance" was the one he ultimately came up with as a personal definition. .rez already knew from experience that names and words did in fact make a functional difference in the way one interacts and is treated, regardless of the reality of the situation -- or the difficulty in /determining/ the reality of the situation. at some point he decided to make a definitional move which would allow him to keep open several different operational definitions at once. in that moment, free agent .rez was born fully into virtuality. he would leave the explication of the pun to those with whome he interacted. the term "free agent" could have several meanings. it could mean that .rez operated primarily for the benefit of himself, but also that he was perpetually open to entertaining and giving his energies to any course of action he deemed appropriate for him. for .rez, however, the second meaning was the more important. he was an Agent to all around him, with all of the problems and assumptions that could possibly entail. but he was also -- by label -- FREE. because .rez had found the possibility or impossibility of free will to be undecideable, he opted to assert by label that which he felt most compelled to become -- Free. free to integrate, free to assert. his ultimate judge would be his own conscience and sense of priority, as influenced by those around him whose opinions he respected and admired. as time went by, and as he began to become more free in his assertion of this or that idea or approach as his own favored one, he became aware that those he cared about gained respect and trust or lost the same through their perception of his virtual "actions," and whether or not they seemed resonant with his claimed intentions. again, the net was very subtle; for .rez, and for many others he conversed with, memetic navigation and identity were strikingly kindred. rather late, he discovered that people had been making implicit or explicit connections between his nickname and the gnotion of "resonance" as a gnotion of communication. several times people would say that they "rez-o-nated" with this or that meme which .rez had explicated publically. he could not tell whether this disturbed him or not. a part of him shook its intention "no..!," but a part of him cried in joy for the human drive to communicate, and for the times when it actually worked. on that night, as he sat in scrytch, he slowly realized that he no longer felt like a .rez -- or more specifically, he no longer felt that such a "visible" avatar / persona was necessary or productive to the work he felt compelled to do. he began to feel slower and plainer perhaps. he began to feel less like an avatar and more like a new kind of plain old human, an unwitting memetic fusion of biology and technology. not quite a cyborg as he had felt for several years, but much more cyborganic; like an almost-reluctant member of a disoriented new species. this idea sickened him with its hope and its pompousity, its vision and its gaping blind spot. he had at one point seen this potential species -- one that had through memetics become as self-conscious of consciousness as they were self-aware of awareness -- labelled as "homo noeticus." he was reminded of his nickname, and how thankful he was that he had not made up the name himself. he was very, very afraid. he had just begun to wonder whether memetics held as conditional pre-requisite the existence of fundamentally separate sentiences between which memetic transfer -- the only evidence of a meme there can be -- could occur. this idea itched, because he longed for reconsiliation, if not re-union. with something fundamental that humanity [he felt] had all but lost sight of; the "point" of throwing co-solitary energy and passion into an endless work. he had, over the past year, slowly become conscious of such things as pretension, assumption, pomposity, lack of humility, and the fact that he held as unsustainable goal the presence of being and mindfulness necessary for true resonance to occur. he could not abide his own pretense any longer, yet he could not deny that he was voluntarily adapting to a memetic environment which now moved far too fluidly to allow for true points of reference. all he could do was proceed as mindfully as he was equipped to, and realize that the only standards he had to -- or could ever -- live up to were his own. he was a human, no more or less. he sat and scrytched, "i am a human, no more and no less." even as he typed out the words he realized that the condition of being human included the compulsion to adapt, adapt, perpetually adapt, and the drive to create environments which swung closer and closer to the fundamental resonance he felt at his core but which he gnew he could never fully comprehend. to finish the work is to die; neither his sentience nore his biomass were through with him yet. "i choose for the n'th time to adapt, to go onward. i have fought entropy with quick passion, and now i will integrate that with the slow gnowledge that i will find others like me." he typed it, saved it, sent it, and began again again.