To the Dance or the Pools ~ Virtually?: How Different it is to Soak at Harbin, than to Realize it in Virtual Reality
Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,
The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,
Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.
The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,
Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.
- Seamus Heaney
To the dance, then the pools,
First at actual Harbin, over years,
Dancing free, dancing be,
Dancing bee, buzzing, its own honey ~
This movement-freedom grows
With warmth and energy
In concert with the music.
Connecting with dancing begins,
Connecting with dancing beings,
Singing inside with freedom in rhythm,
I delight in this liberation, ~
but depends on the music too ~
Blues, Grateful Dead, jamming, Rock & Roll,
Make it happen for me, actually.
Heat comes, the music closes at evening's end,
and people head to the pools,
To cool down,
to complement the body-movement jam,
With serene soaking under starlight
- and the warm waters - ease.
These Harbin warm pool waters,
This elixir of encompassing body suits ~
One's whole being received by
This geo-thermally warmed liquid, ~
We like.
Virtually?
Dancing at home - wearing the Glasses -
I'm there, and so are you,
in the Harbin Conference Center,
And people be jamming,
this be music is hop-happening,
Virtually.
I start to move here at home,
Glasses revealing new openings
through which to glide,
And around my body goes,
Dancing at home, dancing my home.
How Different it is to dance at home in virtual Harbin, ~
and cool - a realization.
... "Question:
whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"
(https://poets.org/poem/hamlet-act-iii-scene-i-be-or-not-be)
Or, to head to Harbin actually or virtually,
different it is,
To seek and find freedom,
By traveling from the SF bay,
The way, the Napa Valley
Wine way to Harbin,
Or to find one's way
There, Virtually there,
'as if' and by multimedia,
With gorgeous visuals
On a screen, currently
What a scream!
Yet beyond this traveling difference -
A big difference - this venturing out
In bodymind, locomotively, to move through,
To see, to interact with, the world,
The Soaking in warm pool
Actually, in waters there,
While being in Harbin all around,
Communicating silently, communing that is,
with fellow soakers, is wondrous.
The Soaking in one's bathtub,
Virtually, from home, Glasses on,
digital screens behind the glass,
newfangled things,
While surround-seeing in Harbin ~
Brainwave headset too to come
For communication,
Tan Le's* or Brainfingers* or EEG*
(only functional when able to relax) ~
Still wondrous
Yet you don't hang out actually ~
By mingling silently in warm pool ~
Or visiting quietly naked
Sunning on the Sun Deck.
Immersive both, in different ways,
The warm waters help
meditation deepen ~
Release inwardly deeply ~
a relaxation response in both,
And all is one in the now,
Consciousness changes.
Yet there's more space too
in the actual Harbin's warm pool
than in this bathtub.
How best to understand consciousness,
and this consciousness?
Subjective-Objective accounts,
1st person-3rd person scientific narratives ~
In the warm waters, with the Glasses,
Re visually observing,
And beginning to examine neural processing ~
as sentience,
awareness,
perception and
feeling
In the brain the mind, the BodyMind?
These neurophysiological e-states
Are consciousness.
(And how far does sentience extend
down the phylogenetic tree?
Won't study this here now at Harbin,
Yet Tononi's integrated information theory - IIT - holds promise
- 'that consciousness is identical to a certain kind of information' -
and measurable as Phi, the symbol for integrated information.
How could brainwave headset devices best turn their
information gathering inwardly
in these regards - and from the Harbin warm pool?)
Qualia, infinite qualities,
('the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions,
arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena' too),
Perceived by many,
in myriad ways, in many bodyminds?
At actual Harbin in the warm pool,
with brain wave headsets monitoring the brain,
might one be able to study these anew?
At home with Glasses,
and brainwave headsets,
people could talk more readily
adding a language element
to the 'subjective,'
their 1st person accounts, - and
in studying the brain technologically,
actually-virtually & physically-digitally,
where the 'as-if' virtual experience
created by multimedia and
perceived in the brain could be
digitally developed
in virtual brains
in a realistic virtual earth for STEM
and brain science,
And of species and individuals,
like you and me,
soaking, soaking, soaking
in the warm pool at Harbin,
in the bath tub at home
in real virtual Harbin,
in real virtual Harbin,
... and yet Virtually:
How Different it is to Soak at Harbin,
than to Realize it in Virtual Reality
And loving bliss neurophysiology,
Uniquely Harbin warm pool generated
As it bubbles up, While soaking?
How to measure this with headsets,
Distinguishing even between,
Objectively,
The relaxation response,
The relaxation response
in the Harbin warm pool,
And brain chemistry
of neural cascades of pleasure,
And also then, Subjectively, I say,
In words?
And with machine learning, further,
On the objective, 3rd person
Scientific accounts' side,
Could we add cameras to cells,
cameras, or wee antennae, to atoms,
(have George Church,* Ed Bowden* and Karl Deisseroth* done something like this?)
As well as send ontogenetic signals
In from the headsets
While
In the warm pool,
In the bath tub,
at Harbin soaking?
at Harbin soaking?
And subjectively, when we're blissing,
After releasing into meditation,
After eliciting the relaxation response ~
Self reported, ~
use language to talk about this?
I know it consciously when I'm blissing
in the Harbin warm pool,
in the Harbin warm pool,
when bliss is simply bubbling up.
So can we measure such,
And bring this together with what we say about this ~
With our awareness, consciousness that is,
in an account of infinite qualities?
Long way to go to measure
integrated information Phi in the brain,
integrated information Phi in the brain,
To hypothesize this further,
And then objectively and 3rd person-wise
Observe this scientifically (& consciously)
In the brain,
But maybe nakedness,
Actually, and
Virtually,
And examining desire,
Further, too, will open ways ...
So first the dance, then the pools
This time, and
How Different it is to Soak at Harbin, than to Realize it in Virtual Reality.
Understanding consciousness
And realizing bliss further
in complement with scientific sentience,
Thanks to Harbin.
--
- Scott MacLeod
- http://scottmacleod.com
- http://scottmacleod.com
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