REVIEWS
Saturday January 7, 2023

Disney Quest Memories, Crazy Quarters Arcade, Barcade Detroit, and the Tragedy of The Grid in Lansing: Reviews

I've been playing arcade games for about as long as I can remember. My mom used to have a Namco collection on a computer at work, and I treasured being able to go visit her and play games while she was busy. My parents then bought the 90s reimaginings of Pac-Man and Dig Dug (Adventures in Time and Dig Dug Deeper, respectively), and we all played the Activision Space Invaders as a family. Some years passed, I played all sorts of contemporary games, and I came to identify with my gaming side quite a bit. We also went to Disney World a lot as a family. Put those two together, and once I found Disney Quest in Downtown Disney, it was over. That was my favorite place. Five floors of arcade games??? Holy cow! There would be days where I would go there, and the rest of my family would go do something else. It was so worth it. I was introduced to classic upon classic there. Robotron 2084, Berserk, Gorf, Bubble Bobble, Tron: Deadly Discs, Super Pac-Man, the Donkey Kong board hack with new levels, etc etc. Actually being able to see all of the games I loved from various collections too, like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Ms. Pac-Man, and so on, was also just beyond neat. Playing Asteroids with the vector screen blows every other version of it out of the water. Feeling the native controls and seeing the cabinet art is just the premium experience.

Alas, Disney Quest was shut down in favor of some NBA Cafe that I believe doesn't exist anymore. Squandered. Another favored place became the main arcade in Cedar Point in Ohio -- they had a super-cool variety of games too. I didn't get to go to Cedar Point as much as Disney World though, and I haven't been there in many years, but I cross my fingers that they still have the good stuff.

No, it wasn't until I turned 21 that I found my new favorite place: The Grid in Old Town Lansing. What they had going in 2017 was magical. So many arcade cabinets packed into those two floors, and dozens upon dozens of neat beers on tap. They had Robotron. They had Space Invaders. They had Pong!! Dig Dug, Ms. Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Burger Time, Centipede, and soooo many more. They had a game called Turbo, which was new to me and ended up becoming one of my favorites. It was so exciting. It was an arcade wonderland!! And the BEST PART: They put high scores on a big board in the bar, and you could get $2 off a draft beer for getting your name up there. I loved it so much. I could walk in there and get, on average, 6-8 entries on that board. Super Mario Bros was a perpetual gimme, Space Invaders usually was too, often times Robotron, and then the rest depended on who else was coming in and playing the machines. Truly though, it was the best. It being so close to my home, it was a dream come true. A Disney Quest experience in my own hometown!

And then they took out half of the arcade cabinets. They still had lots of good games, sure, but it was a big blow to the vibe. And then they took out more. Most of my favorites? Gone. Drink prices? Raised multiple times. Staff? Increasingly less engaged in the games and cold to the patrons. Cabinet quality? Worse and worse, with the remaining favorites of mine often falling into disrepair. It was tragic. They're still open, but they're a husk of what they used to be. It frustrates me whenever I think about it. I don't know what goes through the owners' minds, but I wish they would reinvest in the arcade portion of their business again. They had a beautiful thing, and they squandered it.

All of this to say, it's taken me some time to find outlying replacements. I have two favorites in Michigan now, and the first one I'd like to talk about is Barcade in Detroit. They also have a high score system, but rather than being wiped every month like The Grid, the scores stay in place until someone else beats them. I held the high score for Asteroids for almost a year, being displaced last week (I am actively planning my redemption trip). Their selection of games is solid, such as Tapper, Missile Command, Asteroids, Bubble Bobble, and Crazy Taxi, and their machines are well-serviced. They serve drinks *and* food, and it's all quite tasty. I definitely prefer going when you can hear the arcade sounds more than the music, but either way, it's a great package and a solid joint. If it wasn't so far away, I'd be there all the time.

The same goes for Crazy Quarters Arcade in Bay City. I would be there all the time if I could. They don't have a bar, nor a high score system for their arcade machines. But what they do have is a wonderful selection of games, and a wonderful vibe in the building. They have my fave Robotron with big booming sound and immaculate joysticks. They have a Gorf cabinet! I have not seen that anywhere else in Michigan!! They have Asteroids, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong Jr, Frogger, Punch-Out, Crazy Taxi, and so much more. They have what I would assume is a pretty rare Crystal Castles from Atari too, and I've had fun playing that machine for the first time. They have a whole basement full of pinball too for those that enjoy. I'm certainly content enough just grinding out my favorite arcade games upstairs though. I talked with the manager Mark for a time, and he was very nice. I really enjoy how much care they put into their machines, as playing each and every one of them is a joy.

I may not have a great arcade close to home anymore, but I can at least take solace in knowing there are other options within my state. I love the arcade experience. I love getting high scores. I love interfacing with a game as a complete unit -- its own screen, its own controller, its own artwork, and its own sound system. For all of those arcade owners out there that likewise care about preserving those experiences and providing them to the public, I appreciate you.

Friday November 11, 2022

Review of Death Stranding

I've had a hard time collecting my thoughts on Death Stranding. It's an experience that I hold close to me like Sam treasures BB. I started playing it on my birthday in 2019, and finished the main story for the second time on my birthday today, in 2022. I have never been moved by a video game like this one before. The Mother series certainly made a heavy mark on me as well, but this game is altogether different. Metal Gear Solid is the only series that comes close in my mind, but Death Stranding has moved itself in a bold and inspiring new direction that I can only hope pulls more games with it.

To think that a video game would instill within me a level of hope for the future, to provide me with a dim lighting towards what a path forward out of this icky mess we find ourselves in may look like; Death Stranding is a unique experience. A game about making connections and building bridges. A game about deliverance. A game about overcoming the seemingly inevitable destruction of our society and rebuilding. And doing so by delivering packages, in our thankless Amazon day and age, is endlessly intriguing. I have derived so much enjoyment from walking, climbing, biking, and trucking across America in this game. Taking the time to deliver non-essential items from one person to another while taking in the magnitude of our lands (even in this compressed version of the continent) has a certain perpetual charm to it for me. There's something almost defiant about this being the main gameplay, and I know many people have been turned off of the game due to the nature of the gameplay loop. But, as with all Kojima productions, there's so much more depth than the base gameplay experience. Knowing this, and enjoying how the game plays anyway, has made Death Stranding a memorable and truly special video game for me.

There's so much emotion, beauty, and nuance to this game. Sure, the story is plenty convoluted in parts, but that also appeals to me. It gives you plenty to sink your teeth into and ponder. It's made me think about the state of our society in newer and deeper ways, and has made me imagine what a better social media and games landscape could look like. It's made me imagine different ways of bringing the people of the USA together, of bridging our differences and quelching the different brands of hatred we hold within ourselves. It's made me proud to be a bridge-builder. It led me to read The Postman by David Brin, a very good book that further stimulated my thoughts on the USA and what the future will hold for us all. There's so much to think about, so much more love to give to others, and frankly, still more packages to be delivered :)

I aspire to make games with the types of positive messages that Death Stranding espouses. I aspire to be a fascilitator for that level of positive connection and communion among others, in all sorts of ways. I suppose I already have at different points in my life, and that makes Death Stranding a natural fit for me. I am appreciative of Hideo Kojima for making this game, and I can only hope it's the spark for a bigger movement of positivity and connection to come.

Tuesday November 8, 2022

King Gizzard Red Rocks Night Three Marathon Set Review

1.5 hours 15 minutes 1.5 hours

We hiked from Morrison up through Trading Post Trail, and planted ourselves in line at the Upper North Entrance. After waiting around 3 hours, we got in and waited an hour and change in the merch line. It was silly to wait that long for merch, but we sunk cost fallacied it hard after standing there awhile. We did eventually get some merch though, and we sat down (and then stood) for the show of our lives.

I had enjoyed the views while hiking up, certainly, and the red rocks were quite large and imposing. The overlook from the top of Upper North was impressive too. That said, I was not prepared for the view come nightfall. Standing there, dancing there, watching the concert, experiencing the music, I at one point had to look up and out beyond the stage and into the lights of the cities. In crystal clear clarity, I could see the depth of my field of vision clear to the horizon. The ever-undulating twinkles of light from human activity were captivating, transfixing, borderline hypnotizing, and blended in with the stars in such a way that made it seem like a big galactic continuity. As King Gizzard rattled our bones through the rocks and sang about vomiting cyborgs and our impending doom on this planet, I was bearing witness to an immaculate human-made beauty stretching out as far as my eyes could see. Never have I had the privilege of such a view. And the soundtrack!!

I have seen King Gizzard four times now, and they truly have gotten better at performing each time. They were in excellent spirits for Red Rocks Night Three, as it was the final night of their first post-Covid US tour. They were having fun up on stage, and you could feel the vibe of finality in the cool November mountain air. They whipped out some fantastic songs, given that they had already played six hours worth of their music at the previous two Red Rocks shows that they weren't going to repeat, and they played so tight! Joey remarked after Venusian 2 that it was the fastest they had ever played it, and they weren't kidding. The energy was frenetic, and contagious, and transcendent.

I certainly appreciated Joey having a greater presence at the front of the band, and he certainly earned it in spades. His solo on Work This Time was the skankiest, most face-melting guitar work I have ever had the luxury of witnessing first-hand. I no lie felt new areas of my nose unlock as I stood their watching, nostrils curling up as an involuntary reaction to the glory my ears were receiving. I kept shaking my head in disbelief. What a thing to witness!! What an amazing solo!! And they kept going, and going, and going for what felt like forever (in the best way possible), and eventually somehow it was intermission.

After casting myself into the wave of bathroom-goers, I made it back to my seat with a minute to spare, handily denoted by the Timeland countdown timer on the stage screen. We counted it down together, and then Gizzard launched into Head On/Pill. Whew nelly! If the cloud of smoke over the crowd wasn't big enough already... The second half of their performance went by a lot faster for whatever reason, but it was just as stacked as the first half. Seeing Leah Senior do her voiceover work for Altered Beast was so very cool, and kind of the ultimate way of experiencing Murder of the Universe live. And then, just like that, one more ten-minute jam later, the concert was over.

It was such a rush, and really did feel like King Gizzard was zapping us with otherworldly energy. They owned that stage and the crowd, and gave the mountains around Denver three hours of weirdo Australian music for the third time. I wouldn't trade the experience of that show for the world, and could not have asked for a better first Red Rocks experience. They knocked it out of the park! They've gotten so amazing as a band, and I'm so glad I've been able to see them as much as I have. I can't wait to see what all they cook up next.

Monday November 7, 2022

Ms. Pac-Man 40th Anniversary Arcade Cabinet at my Air BnB Review

This free machine was tucked away in the corner of the Air BnB that I stayed at in Lakewood, Colorado. It had the following 10 games:

Of these games, I set the high score on:

Of those, Ms. Pac-Man was a personal best. I had a lot of fun giving a whack at the game every day, studying bits of strategy online and applying them to my organically-accrued heuristics. The machine had the original artwork for the cabinet, and the only area I found it lacking was in the sound department. There was a headphone jack easily accessible to give one options, as well as a volume toggle, but any way the sound was played, it was lacking the bassiness of the original cabinet. Nevertheless, the gameplay was a blast. I quickly found out how to change the settings for the games, and switched Ms. Pac-Man to "fast" mode. It's such a slog playing at the original speed these days. Fast mode is just so much more exhilirating! It makes getting through those first few levels a lot less arduous too, since you can clear the mazes that much quicker.

It's a fun balance trying to progress through the levels. It's easy enough to get a perfect score up to about the third level, but once the Power Pellet times start dwindling, decisions have to be made and priorities need to be sorted. Getting all four ghosts for every Power Pellet while it's technically possible seems sweet, and I would love to make that happen for the first ~12 levels or however long one can do it, but the random elements added to the ghost AI in Ms. Pac-Man make actually pulling that off not very feasible. I'm best at getting all 16 possible ghost gobbles on levels 1-3, 6, and 10, and act opportunistically on other levels. I try to resolve myself to being happy with just 3 ghosts per Power Pellet after level 3, as I'm not yet hardwired enough to avoid goofing myself. And in regards to goofing, the pursuit of fruit has definitely led to many a bungle on my end. I find myself meandering for the cherries and strawberries, but for anything above an apple point-value-wise, I have to stop myself from scrambling with tunnel vision towards it.

Beyond the ghost and fruit consumption though, keeping the ghosts at bay while clearing out all of the individual Pac-Pellet is its own endeavor. Even the early levels can get me if I don't respect the ghosts' zones and natures. I have to not let them get to my head, while also respecting everything they're capable of. Things seem to work out better the more I'm locked in to "being" Ms. Pac-Man in the mazes, rather than being stuck in some wandering thought clouds with a layer of separation between me and the cabinet. I keep coming back to David Sudnow's Pilgrim in the Microworld; there's an optimal level of engagement to have without being hyper-fixated on the actual performance. Hopping on that flow state is crucial in a good run, and not getting too upset at dying for the 17th time on level 2 because I was thinking about how cool the King Gizzard Red Rocks night 3 concert was. But either way.

This machine was my first exposure to King & Balloon as well as Rompers. They're both goofy games with a level of appeal to them. Rompers is from the late 80s, and has some cute 16-bit graphics and plenty of unique levels to navigate in a blend of puzzle and action. I enjoyed it, but I really dug King & Balloon. I had no idea of its existence, and I'm not exactly sure why it was never repackaged more often in the Namco collections. It's a Space Invaders clone like Galaxian, Gorf, Phoenix, etc, but the things in the sky are balloons that are trying to take a king residing below ground. Thus, you don't actually control the king -- rather, you're placed in control of a pair of king's men firing at the balloons. The neat trick to this is that your lives aren't determined by your player-character's death -- the king has plenty of men to defend him. Instead, lives are only lost when a balloon manages to take the king all the way to the top of the screen.

The player's bullets function like Space Invaders and Galaxian, where you can only fire once while your bullet remains on screen. It's a bit less frustrating than those two games though, as you can die over and over again without per say losing. Sometimes the balloons will swirl together into a bigger striped combo balloon, and shooting that down yields lucrative bonus points. There are threevoice samples in the game, both from the king, saying "Help!" when picked up by a balloon, "Thank You!" when saved, and "Bye Bye!" when taken to the top of the screen. The latter honestly sounds a lot like Mario, to the point that I wonder if there was any level of inspiration derived. The game is certainly more historically impressive for having the voice samples, beating Berserk by a number of months. Nevertheless! King & Balloon is the goofiest Space Invaders clone I have encountered to date, and I thoroughly enjoyed my opportunity to play it.

*note: My buddy beat my Galaxian score at the 11th hour, achieveing 5,610

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

The Soul of an Octopus and Further Pondering of Consciousness

Having just finished The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, I've developed further questions as to how we classify what our fellow, non-human lifeforms on this planet experience as their existence.

The book was wonderful. It had a flowing, emotional style that I really resonated with. It was a breath of fresh air after my string of more clinical, objective nonfiction reading. This book is still very much nonfiction, and is certainly still filled with factual information, but took the time to wax prosaically on the subjective nature of feelings. The author spent a lot of time detailing her feelings about her relationships she developed with different octopuses (turns out it's not "octopi"), as well as the relationships she developed with the people along the way in her cephalopod journeys. You can feel the immense compassion and empathy she possesses, and the high regard she has for others' individual experiences. This extends to humans, octopuses, other aquatic creatures at the aquarium where a sizable portion of the book takes place, her dog, et cetera. She very much affords personality to beings that she notices it in, while doing her best not to over-anthropomorphize. Rather, she posits many, many questions as to how other beings' existences feel compared to ours. Of course, these questions are by and large focused on octopuses for this book. Their body composition is vastly different than our own, with their tentacles having so much sensory and processing capabilities that we could not possibly hope to fathom within our own appendages. That said, we share a large amount of neurotransmitters with them, and they certainly display a large degree of intelligence. The book provides ample evidence, both anecdotally and scientifically, that to be an octopus is a thoroughly complex experience. Remembering people they've interacted with, even after having not seen or felt them for months at a time, and pairing unique behaviors and interactions to individual humans seems very relatable. These interactions certainly weren't remembered purely as a Pavlovian link to food sources either. By all accounts, it goes much deeper than that.

And just how deep does it go? Such an age-old question, and still impossible to state definitively. Of course, I have read and already referenced in a prior review the book Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, and it explores a variety of animals and their intelligences. This Soul of an Octopus book delves deeper into just one animal, but the broader point remains the same. It seems that, for too long, we have categorically not afforded other beings with the depth of experience, feeling, and complexity that they have. Emotions such as joy and sorrow are much more universal than popular discourse would seem to belie, and the capacity for emotional memory in many beings also seems much deeper. In the last chapter of the book, titled simply "Consciousness," the author makes mention of the "Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness," which was put out in 2012 by a slew of scientists across fields. To quote their central point:

Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

The declaration doesn't explicitly state what their definition of consciousness is. On animal-ethics.org, they explain it as the following: What this means is that they are sentient, that is, they experience what happens to them and have mental states which can be positive or negative for them. With this definition and the prior quote from the declaration, there's a lot to unpack. Fundamentally, I am very much of the opinion that the overly-behaviorist, materialist, and reductive viewpoints that have been ever so popular, even regarding humans, for so long in the scientific community are exceedingly outliving their utility. I also very much afford other beings with depth, complexity, emotion, and personality. I've had enough animals in my life with individual quirks to know that us humans aren't the be-all-end-all species in terms of unique temperament. What brings more questions to my mind in regards to the above quotes would be the affording of consciousness to other beings besides humans. I feel as if it's mostly a problem of definition differences, because if they were referring to consciousness in the Julian Jaynes sense, I would have to disagree. If us humans only developed consciousness a few thousand years ago, and consciousness is a fundamentally metaphorical experience that develops from complex, metaphorical language over the course of several years of our development, then I don't believe that other beings would have that same framework for interfacing with existence. However! The Cambridge Declaration makes reference to "neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states" in other beings that we have. This brings up a very important point to ponder. If we developed language somewhere around 50-100K years ago, and our complex decision-making mechanisms within our brains were driven by linguistic communication between hemispheres (as Jaynes' theory posits), then I would have to wonder how other animals have evolved their respective compex decision-making heuristics over the course of ages -- in particular, the octopus. Their way of existing is already so fundamentally different than our own that it feels impossible to fathom how an overarching superstructure would generate over their base functions, or what that would *be* like. Many animals, including octopuses, do indeed make complex decisions though, and can solve complex problems. It seems as though they thrive on engaging with complexity, according to the book. That seems to be the case for lots of types of animals. If we were being spoken to by our kings/ancestors/gods when stressful and complex decisions were presented in front of us, prior to the emergence of our contemporary consciousness, then what do other beings experience in similar situations? What did we experience prior to the development of language? If we have neurological parallels with other forms of life on this planet that would suggest a parallel level of complexity of experience, such as consciousness, well, that's a notion pouring with potential.

Perhaps, though, this declaration isn't hyperfocused on what Jaynes meant with his theory, and they're pointing to a less specific idea of what "consciousness" is. For, just as it was with humans prior to the development of Jaynesian consciousness, other beings certainly do seem to have emotions, experience what is happening in their life, communicate in fashions, and hold unique personality traits and temperaments. Life organizes itself in marvelously complex ways, and the declaration seems more of a rebuking of the overly-held idea that humans and humans alone experience life in those fashions. This kind of seems to be a Western sentiment, at least historically. Many cultures, especially cultures that have chosen to not be ideologically dominant over others (indigenous peoples worldwide in particular), seem to have much more respect and appreciation for other beings than it feels we do in our contemporary societies. And indeed, I really feel that has a lot to do with how removed we are from nature. We have unplugged ourselves from a circuit that we are intrinsically a part of, and have chosen to plug into a network altogether foreign to our evolved ways of existence. We destroy and belittle what we have come to not understand, and generations grow further and further away from fundamental truth of experience. I believe those tides are changing in Western society, but whether it's just an undercurrent or something that can turn more and more of us on to our follies, I don't know.

Regardless, I do believe books such as this serve as a way to get more people aware of the fact that other humans, and other living creatures, are deserving of compassion and respect. This book certainly made me feel deeply, and I appreciate the opportunity to be moved so. It made me very curious about New England as well, and I now yearn for the opportunity to go out there and experience their ecosystems (aquatic and otherwise). Enhancement of my appreciation for the natural world? Further insight into human compassion and empathy? Big wins in my book, from this book. Thank you for the wonderful read, Sy Montgomery.

Saturday September 17, 2022

Review of the Multi-Game Arcade Cabinet at the Capri Drive-In Theater in Coldwater, Michigan

The Games On Tap:

The Player 1 joystick takes a learning and strength curve to master. This only applies to games where the vertical axis is required; going up can be a challenge. Getting that out of the way, I do not think it overly detracted from my play experience. Each cabinet that I've used with sub-optimal controller performance has been unique. The vastly differing nature between machines, their interfaces, and their inner workings begets a comparable uniqueness to each machine's hardware bugs. I've played with Robotron 2084 joysticks that just wouldn't go up at all, and other such joysticks that were loose and erratic in their responsiveness. Twitchy, dusty Pong potentiometers are never fun. When there is no simple formula you can discern between controller input and game action output, it gets frustrating and just not fun. However, if you can figure out a heuristic for a joystick that needs *just* the right level of force applied in a certain direction to make it go, or a shifter that needs to be jiggled with *just* the right level of nuance, or a button that needs to be pressed firmly-but-rapidly (but not too firmly), that's when it can be fun. I love developing that quick-trigger workaround, navigating from what I'm used to inputting with an optimal setup to what needs to be input with the given error.

For this given arcade cabinet's Player 1 joystick, it required a great amount of force to go upwards. Coupling this with Ms. Pac-Man, specifically the version with the speed boost, was an absolute thrill. It required gripping the stick firmly, clenching it honestly, in order to pair the extra upward force needed to circumvent the hardware malfunction with the dexterity needed to complete the quick judgement calls of the game. There were a few times that I got got due to not supplying a sufficient level of strength to an upward turn, but it didn't feel truly unfair. Rather, it was just another challenge in the overall experience. I ended up playing two games of Ms. Pac-Man, one before the first movie and one in the intermission between the first and second movies. I wasn't playing with any detailed strategy, besides trying to eat as many ghosts as I could per Power Pellet, and of course scooping up fruit where I could. My first score was 37,270, and my second was 55,260. I've certainly performed better than that before, but I figure it's a pretty solid set of scores given the extra layer of difficulty presented by the hardware. I do believe I could have gotten farther in my second game if the second movie hadn't have started while I was playing -- that threw me off a little bit.

I really, really enjoyed my Ms. Pac-Man experiences though. Having to exert that much force into my inputs, to the point were I was switching arms to give myself breaks and balance the physical load, provided a much more thoroughly visceral experience than an arcade game would usually afford. It reminded me of my times playing Sega's Turbo in the stand-up version the shifter for the particular cabinet I lived by really needed to be wrenched in a similar way. I am aware of and can feel the positive effects of exercise on my body, and I've often craved the palpable adrenaline-pumping experience of thrilling arcade titles. With the sped-up Ms. Pac-Man and its messed-up input, I got the best of both worlds.

More in the vein of regular arcade adrenaline, I also played a game of Space Invaders on this multi-game cabinet. It was the green-on-the-bottom, white-in-the-middle, red-UFO version. I wasn't using the 23/15 UFO strat; I just mowed down the invaders as fast as I could. As it often happens, I made it a few waves in before losing most of my lives all at the same time. The sound for this cabinet was on and up decently loud, which I very much appreciated. Sound is an important part of so many arcade games, especially Space Invaders. The ever-hastening bass notes always add to the thrill of the experience. I had an older guy stand by and watch me for awhile, no doubt reliving memories of prior gamers engaging with this same game back in the day. I ended up with a score of 3420. Nowhere near my highest score, and not as impressive as the Ms. Pac-Man scores due to no input problems on the horizontal axis, but it was fun nevertheless. I always appreciate a good game of Space Invaders.

Overall, I loved my time at the multi-game cabinet they have at the Capri Drive-In Theater. It was fun to exhibit myself a bit, as the cabinet is located in the lobby where they sell the concessions. It doesn't seem like they retain high scores in the machine, nor elsewhere on the premises, but that's all good by me. It was just fun to find some great games that I enjoy in the wild.

Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Cody and Jon Casually Review the Pine Knob Black Keys Concert

Cody: *bwow, bwow, bubwowow* I went to a cool Black Keys concert.

Jon: That was so good though.

Cody: Yeah, it really was, you know--

Jon: They were very good live.

Cody: They did very well live. I think, for all of the bands, the vocals could have been mixed a liiiiittle bit louder. But! As it is, everything was still understandable at least for the Black Keys, and like, you know, it was just a really great time. The mix was relatively clear, I'd say, you know, I was more or less able to easily distinguish all of the individual parts that I wanted to.

Jon: And just like -- it's like when you're listening in your car, there's like, distinct musical portions that you get in your ear-- you can tell when they're coming, even if it's an instrumental portion of the song, right? Like, Little Black Submarines has the high-pitched *imitates the song* and then the fourth one goes really high. And they put that in live! It's all in there! You can anticipate -- like, I don't go to enough live concerts to have a lot of the experience with it, but my thought was, it would be harder to track the song because in live concert versions they change it, right? But generally, from your muscle memory, translating it to like listening to a live version of whatever song is in your head, it was really accurate.

Cody: Mmhmm, mmhmm, yeah, they did a good job with it. Certainly.

Jon: Even all of the distinct parts, you know?

Cody: Yeah.

Jon: There's another one... I guess I'd key in a lot of the key guitar parts for Black Keys specifically, just because, like, Dan Arboch is kind of a legend, in a sense.

Cody: Mmhmm, mmhmm, yeah, you can certainly see that on display clear as day with the close-ups they got on the camera. And just hearing it! But it definitely lended itself to having that visual, like, what the sound that you are hearing is being, like, how that's being manufactured live right in front of you, you know? Really nice job on that front.

Jon: That concert probably might stick in my head for like, a good minute easy. Like, I can't imagine something tops that. I seriously listened to that album so many times.

Cody: Mmhmm. You know what would be really dope would be if they put out a live album of this tour, you know, just the best performances of each one.

Jon: That would be sick.

Cody: It would be really nice. Cuz they did a good job, you know? It was a really, just, good vibes the whole time.

Jon: It translated really well! Every song translated really well, even the ones I thought... I know Turned Blue-- I've seen some live performances of it on YouTube, and I know it translates well, cuz that whole tour was legendary, like everyone that went to go see it raves about it. But, my God, dude, it's so good! Fever, it was just amazing. I think that might have been my favorite song.

Cody: Yeah, you know, and they really pulled that off well. They made it look cool too.

Jon: Yeah.

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Thoughts While Beginning the Reading

Knowing folks that are communicated to directly with gods/God, I find Julian Jaynes' theory perhaps more personally resonant than other, more rigidly-minded people. Or perhaps, to put it in the opposite frame of reference, I have spent years introspecting and searching for answers as to how and why humans are the way they are, in their vast inner complexities, and this open-mindedness and yearning for better answers made me well-suited to give Jaynes' theory heavy consideration. Nevertheless, I am truly taken by what he has to say, and as I read through the introduction of the 2022 follow-up to his works, I find myself once again excited about and invested in this line of thinking.

The line of thinking begins with Jaynes' definition of consciousness: "The basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog 'I' narratizing in a functional mind-space. The denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable." The definition is crucial to understand the implications about consciousness and its origin within us. Other, more broad, definitions of consciousness make less sense with the theory, such as it being a function of perception or something innate to all creatures. While I do align with the Shinto-esque view that everything has a spirit of some kind within it, I can also see that the way Jaynes defines the word "consciousness" helps differentiate it as the seemingly unique human phenomenon that we experience. I have read the book Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans De Wall, regarding general assumptions we make about the cognitive abilities or lack thereof in animals, and I definitely do not wish to undervalue the abilities of non-human animals. Animals are amazing and so incredibly complex! But it's our spacialization of time, our introspection, etc; consciousness in this way is something unique to humanity, and doesn't take away from all the things that pre-conscious humans and other animals have been able to achieve. It just so happens that us humans have developed an additional level of complexity within the mind, and Julian Jaynes postulates that this development was relatively recent.

That is the next facet of the line of thinking: Using the above definition, it is postulated that consciousness originated very recently in human history. This directly implies that, for the majority of our time as a species, we were *not* conscious. Julian Jaynes calls this mode of human existence the bicameral mind. This way of existing was more or less a way of communicating complex information, usually decision-related, across our brain's hemispheres by way of auditory hallucination. These hallucinations would be heard from the likes of kings, ancestors, or gods. As our languages continued to become more based on metaphor, especially as written language became more robust and widespread, we began developing consciousness as we know it. This happened at different rates in different places in the world, and was often times hastened by external stressors in societies. All of this is a great oversimplification of the main points, and I implore those more interested to read the literature or at least peruse the Julian Jaynes Society website to get a more thorough understanding of the theory and its four foundational hypotheses. It's certainly worth the reading.

Jaynes original book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, goes through an extensive gauntlet of historical psychological evidence to support his theory. At the time of writing, he focused on the geographic areas of Greece and Mesopotamia to prove his point, as the historical evidence of consciousness manifestation was strongest there. This new book from the Julian Jaynes society incorporates Asia in a bigger way, and provides further historical corroboration to solidify the theory. I have really been drawn to the combination of history and psychology presented in these works, as my brain very much loves to look at things with a historical/chronological lens. I honestly learned a lot about the Bronze Age that I wouldn't have known otherwise, as the Bronze Age Collapse is given as the transitionary period into consciousness for that area of the world. I am excited to read about the Asian transition, and any further information about the American peoples to add to the tidbits covered in the original Jaynes book.

The implications brought forth by the main theory are immense, staggering, and almost paralyzing. I find it almost difficult to navigate the sheer volume of thoughts that are generated from taking this information in. The fact that we used to make our decisions by way of externalized command from authoritative figures, and have since transitioned to making decisions in a non-localized thought-space via an analog self novelly metaphorizing our past and present experiences, is so astounding. Virtually every aspect of our lives and our societies can be analyzed using this context. It helps make sense of our contemporary religions, and helps to fill in fuzzy gaps from ancient traditions to the more esoteric practices we have today. It helps explain this seemingly universal craving for authority us humans have, a yearning for an externalization of agency as a way to escape the immense and crushing presssures of our ever-increasingly complex existences. It helps explain our mental illnesses. It raises questions as to how the brain's Default Mode Network has played a role in our cognition throughout human history -- how do the timelines stack up of its origin compared to the origin of consciousness? What does a further evolution of human experience look like? There's so much to it all, and I just don't know where to even begin sometimes. One thought leads to another in such rapidity that it can be hard to nail down one line of thinking and elucidate on it for an extended period of time. Nevertheless, I would like to explore topics related to all of this as they come to me on this website, in hopes that it may stimulate thinking or discussions with new people that may happen to read this. As always, my email is cody@codymohr.com if you want to contact me personally.

Let's see... another important angle regarding consciousness is that it doesn't have a lot to do with learning. Most learning is not conscious in nature, and the entire behaviorist movement in psychology would seem to corroborate that. Operant conditioning, etc. I believe most discussions of the Flow State also corroborate this, as it's kind of the specific lack of focus and lack of non-focus that gets you to more and more optimal experiences. Another book that I've read, Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, covers this idea of non-conscious learning in an entertaining way. As he keeps trying and trying to perfect his game of Breakout!, he found that an increased level of conscious focus did not lead to any palpable increase in performance, and honestly often lead instead to a worse performance in the game. I have had a very similar experience in trying to get better at a variety of arcade-based games, particularly Ice Climber and Turbo. As it is, I tend to do better when I'm not investing a large portion of my processing power in the conscious awareness of my input movements or performance or dodging skills or etc etc etc; my best performances are when consciousness is more or less left out of the equation. As it is, learning transcends being a uniquely human phenomenon, and isn't much of a factor in the Jaynesian view of consciousness. That said, he does postulate that having consciousness itself is a learned mode of existence, and is not merely a biological evolution. Rather, it is passed down from generation to generation in societies of metaphorical language. To think that we're born in such a neuroplastic state, where consciousness is not inherently guaranteed in an individual, but virtually guaranteed contemporarily due to the near-universal acquisition of language involved in the upbringing of a child; what a trip.