Birth daze, bath days and a voice to shatter crystal:)

Joyeux Anniversaire!

Given what the last post was about, I thought it might be quite good today to talk about feedback. Now that's not what's left on 'comments', but feedback in a more general sense. Those of you who came of age in the late sixties/early seventies of the last century (you're feeling old now, I can sense it from here. Last century indeed! :) will know all about acoustic feedback. Jimi's recreation of the Vietnam war with six strings, a couple of pick ups and a Marshall amplifier, cranked to '11'. Blackmore's swooping, howling banshee of a Stratocaster as he swung it above his head by the strings, having previously disengaged the neck from the stock with the heel of his boot! (It's only four screws, big ones to be sure, but only screws!)

Now all that's happening here is that the sound wave generated by the speakers is allowed to arrive uninterrupted at the pick up (which is geared to 'pick up' the subtle vibrations of the strings and is normally shielded by the body of the guitarist). The 'pick up' picks up the wave form as vibration and feeds it back to the amplifier which emits it amplified again and so on. A closed loop develops which eventually after a little oscillation around a central point finally settles down down into a screaming wail at the limit of the amplifier's output.

A small digression. It used to be quite scary down the front in the early seventies. You had to be there within spitting distance, at least for Deep Purple gigs, because they would hire a couple of strippers posing as members of the audience to dance naked in front of the front row or the mosh pit, depending on the venue, during 'Wring that neck' or 'Space trucking'. Adolescent males, ay? Even worse was Keith Emerson lobbing knives into speaker cabinets to 'fuzz up' his Hammond organ or bringing out the bull whip which had the bass player, Lee Jackson, running for the far side of the stage :) Emerson actually got every rock band banned from London's Albert Hall for about three or four years by burning the 'stars and stripes' on stage during a perfomance of Bernstein's 'America' :) Good ol' Emo! Some people felt quite strongly about Vietnam then, even in Britland!

Anyway, a revenons a nos moutons, as they say. Normally mechanical feedback, as opposed to audio feedback, is handled by the central heating/air conditioning thermostat example, but I would like to offer my sincere and heartfelt thanks to Douglas Hofstadter for the much more interesting, and scatological, example of the......... flushing cistern! Now, it's just an inlet pipe with a valve, there's a float attached to an arm which then controls the valve. The float's called a ballcock! You can tell plumbing was traditionally a male dominated craft, can't you?. As the water level falls in the cistern, the ballcock falls with it, opening the valve and allowing water to enter the cistern. As the level of the water rises the ballcock, being mainly air, rises with it and closes the valve at an appropriate point. We know this because we can take the lid of the cistern and see it in action. But what if we couldn't? Might we think the cistern might be 'conscious' or at least dimly aware of the water level? After all, it 'knows' exactly when to turn off the water to stop the cistern overflowing?

Of course no-one would seriously suggest a lavatory cistern is aware, it's an inanimate object and, as far as we know, sentience belongs only to animate objects, things that are 'alive', whatever that means.

Now a bacterium is alive but is it aware? An aphid? A fish? A lizard? Quite clearly, these have some concept of self and that which lies outside self, eg food, mates, rivals, predators etc but self aware akin to the way you are self aware? What about a dog? A cheetah? A howler monkey? A chimpanzee? Ah, now we're on much safer ground and not just because they are mammals too. They are relatively 'late' arrivals on the planet and come equipped with large brains relative to body size so it is not so difficult for you to think that there might be something akin to your consciousness in them as well. But what develops the brain? After all, brains are not needed for survival. The most successful 'animal' on the planet doesn't have one. The humble bacterium has colonised just about every niche on planet earth, including you, and it doesn't even have the rudiments of a brain.

Feedback develops the brain. Little if anything else is required except memory. As the brain and the body in which it resides interact with the environment in which they live, there is a constant and expanding series of feedback loops, wildebeest is good to hunt, lion is not. That chimp punched my lights out the last time I tried to groom him. This one didn't. That place is hot and burnt my foot. This place did not. Those animals which process this feedback in the most efficient and effective manner will have a greater tendency to survive in a competitive environment and will pass on those innate processing skills to their descendents.

Which brings me to my point. (And there was you thinking I'd never get there! Or I didn't have one to start with!) In one sense, the feedback loops supply our ego, our sense of who and what we are. No external force, no divine spark, no soul is required. If once we get the idea that we have one, an ego that is, and we did, survival makes this a necessity, a sense of 'this one' as opposed to 'that one', then the ever expanding feedback loops of life's experience provide all that we need to generate that indisputably existing I.

With the brains we have, as I does this, it impacts on my environment, and as I gets the feedback, I gets stronger, or at least the perception of I gets stronger.

So I rules.

From there it is but a small step to the realisation that you too have an I.

And your I, though less important, becomes tangled with my I and all the other Is and forms the surely wondrous I.

This truly is Darwin's Dangerous Idea!

The penguin is sorry that there is no Obelix and no 'petit' Idefix; no Tintin et Milou; no Lucky Luke; no Spirou, Fantasio et le Marsupilami, no 'mousse au chocolat'. Time has been short, much else has needed to be done and it is far to go, from here to there. The penguin hopes that the bouncing smiley suffices. :)