Tuck Detchon Writes

“Every action is performed by a body, or rather; bodies are entities which perform actions.” (Wes Unruh & Edward Wilson, The Art of Memetics)

“Magick is merely to be and to do.” (Aleister Crowley, Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4)

B.U.T.T.S. isn’t just a synonym for your tuchis. It’s the acronym for the Beme-ing Up Thoughtform Type Schema model of the continuum of matter, human society, and civilization. Starting from generic spatiotemporal matter and passing through different nested categories of signals (ideas/messages) and their structural bases (aggregate agents or code-bodies) up to the whole global class system, B.U.T.T.S. is a way of orienting oneself as an individual component in the body of humanity, in order to contemplate and agitate for transformations of that social body, human civilization.

B.U.T.T.S. is:

1. Spime – Object
2. Gene – Organism
3. Beme – Person
4. Meme – Market
5. Right – Class
6. Law – State
7. Ideology – System

The term “spime” originates from the talk, “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”, delivered by Bruce Sterling at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, in August of 2004. Originally it refers to “gizmos” or tech objects which can be tracked through time, with more or less their entire history documented from collecting raw materials and manufacture, through changes in owner and modifications to and customizations of the object by each owner, all the way to the end of the device’s life cycle (disposal and recycling).

It is very “Internet of Things” (IoT).

My buddy Rob Bryanton and, I assume, others use it as a synonym for “object” or maybe even “process,” but in the context of changing the perspective to how that object travels through time as well as space. A spime as a choice in vocabulary then intends to evoke consideration of the object’s or system’s “world line,” or the trail it leaves as it passes through spacetime. The emphasis here is of dynamism and change. Corollary to this change is that any spime exchanges mass and energy with its environment and other spimes, and passes through space, so its world line is necessarily increasingly diffuse and cloudlike over longer intervals, spreading more and more the further in spacetime it travels from when you first start tracking it (say, for example, starting at conception for a living being on Earth and ending at death, basically forming a “long, undulating snake” (Rob’s turn of phrase)).

A gene of course is the hereditary, biochemical code that determines which molecules are assembled in a cell of a living being, how, and when. Genes, as digital code, program the expression of the traits and behavior of all cellular life (as well as quasi-living viruses — about which I find it interesting that it is thought that life produced viruses as a byproduct, not the other way around). Genes constitute a genotype which expresses as a phenotype or physical expression of traits in the cells, tissues, organs, and bodies of living creatures.

A beme is a “unit of beingness.” Originally, the term was defined as such:

“A ‘beme’ is the smallest unit of being, or existence. Being is usually defined as a state of existing, or as somebody’s essential nature or character. Hence, a beme is the smallest unit of someone’s essential nature or character. For example, the image of one’s mother, a predilection toward honesty and the ways one smiles are all examples of bemes.” (Martine Rothblatt, “Are we Transbemans yet?”)

We might revise the definition to mean a mental property or event, in light of consciousness being embodied and extended into the environment, especially through communication and socialization. 

From “Mythic Meta-Gamification (MMG): “Extended, or ‘actively externalized,’ cognition is the idea that thought extends or is externalized from the brain into the body and environment. The parable often used to explain it is that of two people, one with a healthy memory and one with a memory disorder, both planning on going to the same event on the same date at the same time and place. The person with the healthy memory just remembers and goes, while the person with the brain disorder writes down the details and directions on a pen and pad which they use to remind them when and where to go. The argument is that the cognitive process is the same, it’s just that one person incorporated their pen and pad into their cognition, and therefore cognition was externalized into an external object, or the environment. From here we can conceive of all interactions with body and environment as extended or actively externalized cognition.”

To this last point, I will cite another post, “Information Equals Reality”: “Our conscious-information management operates at the levels of internal cognition (roughly brain-based, self-aware thinking), ‘embodied cognition’ (thinking involving the rest of the body), and ‘extended cognition’ (thinking which is actively externalized into the environment), embedded within (and as) the informational environment. …

“From the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (US Department of Defense, 2005): The ‘informational environment’ is, ‘The aggregate of individuals, organizations, or systems that collect, process, or disseminate information; also included is the information itself.’ Control and manipulation of the informational environment, and thus the information people use in their decision making and reasoning, is cited as the third, more powerful tool besides the carrot of incentive (reward) and the stick of disincentive (punishment) when it comes to controlling individual or social behavior.”

The “bleedthrough” of mass and energy into a diffuse cloud-like pattern over time also appears to apply to information and consciousness. Like the self and free will, we are projecting strict boundaries on dynamic interconnected processes that really involve the whole natural, social, cosmic system; yet, we have to pragmatically and practically see “things” as things in order to act on and interact with these things as bodies and achieve goals. We have to do a sort of “motion tracking” of processes and systems, grouping them into “things” and reifying them as more metaphysically static than they are.

“You know, you couldn’t see me unless you could also see my background, what stands behind me. See, if I myself—if the boundaries of my skin were coterminous with your whole field of vision, you wouldn’t see me at all. You would see my bright red vest instead. … [Y]ou, your behavior, is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. … ‘[Y]ou’ are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it—alright, the sea, the ocean, is waving. And so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos; the entire works, all there is! … But … [someone usually] doesn’t feel that the external world is his own body. It is; the external world is your own body, extended.” (Alan Watts, Myth of Myself: The Tao of Philosophy 5)

So we have to step back a little bit from the nondualistic big picture, narrow our focus, and treat things as things, beings as beings, and bemes as bemes.

If we could scan someone’s body at a given moment, every “beme” will have a physical structure, process, or network of structures and processes enabling or supporting it. We might imagine there are shared or interpersonal and cultural bemes, which aren’t memes, strictly speaking. These shared bemes would represent units of subjective experience “stored” in the brain of a given being. We might imagine that a beme is merely an “unsent” meme, but that would presuppose something like machine mediated brain to brain networking or “telepathy” (or actual telepathy), since much of experience is fundamentally inexpressible in discursive or linguistic communication.

A meme is originally defined as a unit of culture or “imitation.” Conceived as analogous to the gene by Richard Dawkins and others, the biologist later compared it with viruses. We might define it as a unit of communication, imitation, and innovation, or simply a message. Communications and culture, like other thoughtforms, operate within a natural human social network or body, however great or small, or simple or complex, of exchange of matter, work (labor or services), and information (e.g. knowledge, news, or art). For our purposes we can call such networks “markets.”

From the post, on this blog, titled “Mythic Meta-Gamification (MMG)”: “Work is Labor: Metabolic, intellectual, and creative physical work i.e. the intentional/willful movement and transformation of matter (mass, energy, space, time, consciousness), especially as defined in physics as, ‘energy transfer that occurs when an object is moved over a distance by an external force …’ (Encyclopædia Britannica). We can conceive of every application of embodied will and perception as Labor/Work, as even thinking and feeling transfer energy and move mass within the brain (albeit at small scales). Biology, chemistry, physics etc. are also like this. Furthermore, intellect and creativity are present in all applications of will and perception. All Labor, or ‘Work,’ is intellectual and creative.”

Our use of “market” as the generic term for a self organized network of exchange of matter, work, and information may be problematic for anti-capitalist reasons. But, here it is used as a term of convenience and not in an attempt to bear the weight of all of bourgeois ideology and praxis.

It is “close enough,” and I worry using “network” in its place is too vague and immemorable.

Since markets as we are using the term describe the exchange of matter, work, and information, by necessity we are confronted with different actors or interests asserting or claiming that the physical (and even the ideological) world “ought to be” one way or another. Each “ought to be” is a “right,” and rights often (but maybe don’t usually, at least inherently) conflict with and contradict each other. The resolution of the contradiction of different opposing rights will be achieved through some sort of struggle, including or especially, as we can see throughout history and in current events, violent struggle.

I have faith both in the intrinsic goodness and collectivist spirit of humanity as well as the wisdom of crowds, though — yet while everything good or bad in the conduct of the human species as a whole derives fundamentally on physical systems of trust and collaboration, the promise, which I believe in, of the fulfillment of a liberated society where rights mostly no longer conflict with each other, especially not violently, has yet to be achieved.

But this, along with the concerns surrounding the ecosystem, make up most of why I am a communist.

Now, as large numbers and more or less closely associated arrays of rights are asserted by similarly numerous parties, there emerge aggregate tendencies which coalesce around the enforcement of the victors’ rights, mainly through coercion to secure rights over the physical world, and then on that basis to enforce mental pictures of the world which inform choices of those whose interests (or implicit rights) are being dominated. The several groupings of parties with shared interests define “classes” — ruling classes then regulate which rights become material facts, and which ones simply remain “interests.”

As we’ve just seen, one method for resolving the contradiction of rights is the most effective, and thus is the most influential: violence. The exclusive right to use violence within the parameters of a given territory constitutes a “state.” The state is a ruling class conspiracy, and its primary weapon is terrorism (civic/social violence) — thus, class society is a conspiracy-terrorism based system.

From this root springs the whole tree of law regulating almost everything in a given territory — pointing back to violence, pointing back to rights, pointing back to interests, pointing back to how human beings socially communicate and exchange things with each other, which points back to our unique yet shared experience as sentient beings, which points back to our living natures, which points to our existence as patterns of processes of physical matter.

The tree metaphor has its limits, but most importantly the soil and seeds of human nature and potential are pure, the tree choking out the rest of the field is rotten and defiled, and neither watering and feeding the tree, nor pruning and tending it, will resolve this state of affairs.

It should be uprooted and something new should grow from it. To stretch the metaphor maybe we can salvage some of its lumber to make tools or something. But that’s not the point.

Atoms, organisms, minds, messages, rights, and states can conflict with each other, but from groups of states or on the whole planet to this point in history we have a “system” — or, dominant global mode of production (presently capitalism-imperialism, a form of class society) — and the set of all conscious states (and perhaps documents, other material culture, and nature … see the discussion of the “informational environment” above) at any given moment or across time is an “ideology.” The system-ideology level is global and contains everything else within it, and if it is possible to escape it, it isn’t possible to remain free from it for very long.

Which is why we need Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution in Intention, Effort, and Result. (Soon I’ll incorporate these two sets of three things as “Team Moves” and “Input” into the Mythic Meta-Gamification (MMG).)

If you’ve made it this far, I have a little bit more to say about code-bodies, addressing the term “thoughtform” which I’ve used a couple times above but haven’t yet explained. We’ve already looked at seven code-bodies, and we might say that thoughtforms conservatively start at level three, beme/person, where they get a little bit abstract and thus “subtle”, but we can also massage our definitions with the help of multimind panpsychic panentheism to encapsulate B.U.T.T.S. within a larger religious/spiritual (r/s), esoteric/occult (e/o), or magickal/mystical (m/m) framework.

From my Email to Peter J. Carroll: “I usually label the following line of thought the ‘spirit-information’ model. Every set of cosmic data, including the universal set, the null set, and random sets etc, are all phenomena, processes, structures, beings, or ‘spirits.’ Now, geometric/spatial localization, adjacency, continuity, interaction, and integration, especially as differentiated by conscious minds through sense-perception and learned mental predictive processing models, lead us to group phenomena as entities or objects — which we usually identify as making ‘more sense’ or being ‘more intuitive’ than a given random set. The direct local interactions of systems make it easy for us to group them together, less so if they aren’t directly interacting. In this view, though, they’re all spirits — and every spirit is ‘manifesting their reality’ at once; each spirit gets a ‘vote’. The lawful habits expressed by the cosmos emerge from this sort of parliament of spirits — ‘The Pantheon,’ (as above, all beings in the Omniverse).”

I’ve been working on another post in the spirit of whose introduction I would revise that last bit about “the Pantheon,” to be “the Panentheon,” which would be the Panentheistic One Highest God transcendentally including the Omniverse and all all its beings (the Pantheon).

Another quote, this time from The PSI-PHI Matrix (PPM): “Goff and Bryanton, in their respective books … invoke the Quantum Observer interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM), which has been discredited, wherein the view is that a conscious being such as a human or animal is necessary to resolve probabilistic wave functions representing an array of possible states into a specific outcome (‘collapsing the wave function’). I think this view can be rehabilitated and squared with accepted QM interpretations by Panpsychism: literally every possible system in, let’s say, 10 dimensions, is an Observer, so the accepted stance that ‘observer means physical interactions of particles and systems of particles,’ becomes trivially compatible with the Quantum Observer interpretation of QM.”

There are several definitions for “thoughtform,” “servitor,” “egregore,” and “godform” floating around the internet. I don’t know that any are the gold standard, but some of them influence my somewhat simplified definitions:

1. Thoughtform – Code-body/agent (usually conceived of as a subtle system though inclusive of gross physical forms in B.U.T.T.S.)
2. Servitor – Internal subsystem and/or smaller unit relative to the primary frame of reference i.e. evoking host body
3. Egregore – External supersystem and/or larger unit relative to the primary frame of reference i.e. invoking host body
4. Godform – A thoughtform “vertically integrating” servitor, evoking/invoking host, and egregore

The main takeaway is that the more integrated one is, acting across as many levels of analysis as possible, the more influence they may have. This of course involves a delicate and consciously and effortfully demanding process of orienting on existing system states and then “steering them” in one’s desired direction, towards stated goals or outcomes. Organizing formally and informally is an additional effort multiplier.

A servitor is an energy/information sink, requiring investment of energy and information, and an egregore is a an energy/information source. The perspective I’m trying to advance here is that of constant exchange, inward and outward, upward and downward.

And this “vertical integration” and effort multiplying through organization of intentional effort is, in essence, “Beme-ing Up”, and what B.U.T.T.S. is all about.