Maps and Mental Geography

I recently noticed a USGS benchmark near the intersection of Route 608 and Pearl Road in Hambden Township. Some of the benchmarks were embedded in a boulder, some were mounted to public buildings, like the Chardon Courthouse steps used to have one, and some were mounted in a cast concrete pillar, that presumably went down to bedrock.

Those benchmarks are a relic of the analog era and are no longer used because they're not accurate. For example, the one by Pearl Road is on an angle. Maybe something hit it, or freeze thaw cycles moved it over the decades. There's another one I took a picture of. It's near the Exit of the Hambden Cemetery also along route 608. It's barely legible, and it is also slightly off axis.

Since 2006, the benchmark locations are no longer even marked on the USGS topographic maps. If you want to find one today, you need to go to the historic USGS topo maps website. For example, this 1994 map includes one marked BM 1343 (feet), which was near my childhood home in Munson Township. It was there in the mid 1980s, but as far as I know, it no longer exists.

 

The benchmarks were a physical expression of state authority and part of an otherwise invisible mathematical and algorithmic system for establishing property lines and the like. As such, the markers include a nastygram message to not mess with them; some even include verbiage about fines and jail time.

Now, the invisible property line system is electronic and quite elaborate, and probably significantly more expensive than the old one, which was operated and maintained by literal boots on the ground. It's instructive to delve into the topic in detail if you ever have the need, or are sufficiently curious, but I won't do that here.

The main function of this system is to consistently represent map locations in terms of spherical coordinates, like GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. As a result of this system, anyone who plots a point on a map can go and walk to it in the physical 3D reality world. If you look at aerial photography via google maps or a county auditor web site, or the USGS maps, the same point on the ground maps to the same set of coordinates. This system is actually defined "by statute", which in this particular case is algorithmic and mathematical, but also somewhat arbitrary.

There are more and more of these types of systems cropping up into the real world, that is, a system that's really "algorithmic" or that exists in a computer somewhere, but also has a real world expression. The Flock corporation cameras are a good example of that. This stuff will be creeping into everyone's life over the next few years. Essentially a bunch of shitbird crooks and corporations will claim "ownership" of this or that thing and start new rent seeking scams, or new "enclosure movements" and lay claim to previously un-owned stuff.

Anyway, the thing I really wanted to point out in this post is the vast difference between these systems, even something like a map and associated geodetic models, and the mental model people use. For example, if you go for a walk in the woods on a well known trail, you "know" the trail as a string of essentially 1D places all tied together by your footsteps. When I ride on the big creek park mountain bike trail, even though I've done the thing like dozens of times, I don't generally know where I am with-respect to a map of the area, but I know the order of the features I'll ride over.

There are many more elaborate forms of mental geography like emotional associations, or giving a place a personality that don't show up on a map at all. For example, in our local Geauga County legend of "the melonheads" Wisner Road is scary and spooky, or the Lundgren Barn in Kirtland where a cult killed a family used to be considered spooky and foreboding for many years after that event.

The park "Hell Hollow" is another great example of mental geography. People often associated low spots with a decent into the underworld, and often think of Hell as cold and still say "It's as cold as hell out there", which was a feature of the Germanic mythology of Hel, rather than the "fire and brimstone" Hell of the christians, which I guess never fully caught on with the Germanic peoples.

Canonical Folklore

Stories of "the gods" were campfire stories at some point, and were often based on the characteristics of planets and constellations. A god like osiris in egypt was associated with the constellation Orion which is visible in the winter, then "dies" in spring when the crops are growing. And in those stories, somehow the character associated with some bright lights in the night sky came to be seen as the "sun" on earth as grain.

It seems plausible that people working and living in the field of agriculture would be interested a character like Osiris, while people engaged in other activities of life would be less so, like someone who was a hunter wouldn't care that much about it, or someone who was a builder wouldn't either.

There are characters associated with each of these concerns throughout the different mythological systems, like there are numerous historical builder and blacksmithing gods like the greek Hephaestus or the egyptian Ptah. It seems plausible these different characters filled the same role a modern mascot or advertising character does today.

At some point these stories transform from folklore created and maintained by randos to copyrighted, "canonical" stories under control of the ruling class people of a given region and era. One way that might happen is via public festivals and holidays where the god mascots are in parades and public processions and that kind of thing.

Also, simply by being a popular story and a popular character the ruling class slime of any given era would see the value of these characters as a proxy for the public and controlling it. The mere concept that some aspect of a story is "correct" and canonical while any other version of a story is blasphemy or heresy or whatever is a very basic way to condition people that the dirtbags in power are in control of "all".

Another common ruling class ploy associated with claims of a canonical folklore and its god characters is that the ruling class and its priesthood serves as the intermediary to the god characters based on knowledge and expertise about rituals and sacrifices and all that bullshit. When things are going poorly for the corporate entity of the state and the fortunes of the people are down, like crop failures or plagues happen, they can blame the people for not honoring the gods correctly, or not sacrificing enough to them or whatever.

Amazingly, all this same crap goes on today in an even more strident manner than prior eras and there's a ham fisted attempt to control even comic book characters and popular entertianment on behalf of ruling class chock full of pervs and weirdos like Bill Gates.

World Model that Includes a "Grain God"

The dominant model of the 3D reality world today is the based on the "god of forces", which really isn't a "god" at all in the traditional way. The "deist" concept from the Enlightenment Age sums it up pretty well, where "the creator" made up the rules of gravity, electricity, etc... then set the world in motion, but otherwise has no role in reality.

In prior epochs of the mind, people had a significantly different model of reality that was almost entirely based on what we'd term literary or poetic concepts like "synedoche" or allegories, or similes and metaphors where one thing was understood in terms of another, or where a long story would be referred to by a pithy phrase because everyone knew the story.

These two mental models are significantly different, obviously. The "god of forces" mindset seeks to model the world on first principles and insists any other model of reality is inherently wrong. The goal really seems to be to imitate the "god of forces" by recreating the universe in a computer based on the secret mathematical code of the universe, which is, if you think about it, the ultimate compression algorithm.

An example of the "god of forces" mindset is how the science of biology model of animals is "meat robot", which is why psychopathic trash people torture beagles or rabbits or whatever in "experiments" about diseases or to test some useless consumer product crap like eye makeup or whatever. The common sense understanding of animals is labeled as incorrect, that is assigning human qualities to an animal in some weird, arbitrary hierarchy that's also associated with this version of trash human. In recent years people earned PhDs by providing "scientific proof" of the common sense understanding of how animals behave and think, e.g. they have languages or can reason or dream or whatever.

The poetic universe mental model isn't reductive, it's a sometimes pleasant or pretty conceptualization of what happens in terms of human experience of reality. I think the grain god metaphor is a great example. The "grain god" like Osiris is akin to the Michelin Man who's the cartoon representation of "tireness". 

A character like osiris was a cartoon embodiment of grain. There's a poem by Robert Burns "John Barleycorn" that discusses the personified grain that becomes whiskey which is a good riff on this overall approach.

How did that mental model come to be and what is it? If the "god of forces" mental model came from reductive thinking about the universe that ended up in "peer reviewed" published works, where did the poetic model originate?

I think it's basically "folklore" that got really structured, mainly through repetition. If you live someplace with local legends, like here in Geauga County, Ohio there's a story of "The Melonheads" which I learned in high school, it's easy to see how folklore passes from generation to generation and slowly boils down to a handful of basic archetypal characters and narratives.

Another "local" folklore concept is "the devil's icebox". People in the 1800s realized some low nooks and crannies in local sandstone formations would remain cold and even snow filled far into spring. A number of these places would be get labeled as a "devil's icebox". There's a park in Northeast Ohio called "Hell Hollow", which is a Berea Sandstone formation in eastern Lake County. The "Hell" part comes from the ancient mental geography of "the underworld" or Tartarus in the greek mythology, so the steep decent of the park from the general relief of the surrounding landscape represented a journey to "hell". Obviously,  "cold" spot in such a place would be "the devil's icebox", which is also amusing because another folklore geography of "hell" is it's on fire even though the "underworld" is also associated with winter and Tartarus is cold in the greek mythical geography.

A very good example of how this folklore mindset forms is provided by role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, where a group of players improvise a shared hallucination... for those people the hallucination is like a movie playing in their minds eye. In the prior era of the mind, this scenario would happen, apparently, fairly often in people's down time, not as a role playing game, but as "shooting the shit" story telling. So a character like osiris or odin or thor would get a story and the universe would get a folklore mythological landscape, like for the Norse, there were 9 worlds.

So how does folklore turn into religion with priests and canonical stories? That's a really interesting one to think about.

The Previous Gods

The greek and norse mythology includes a concept of one or two prior "generations" of gods. For the greeks there were the Titans. For the norse, there were the Vanir who were later overthrown by the Aesir. This concept is even in the bible myths as "The Fallen Angels" who like the Titans are cast into Tartarus.

Some people think these stories encode a literal change of religion, so there was an older pantheon of gods that was supplanted by a new set of gods, maybe imposed via military conquest. Another interpretation is the changing of the gods represents various aspects of natural creation, like order replacing primordial chaos.

The conversion of european people to christianity offers some clues, potentially. There are some interesting hints that can be gleaned by comparing the extant norse mythology with the bible myths and the present day claims about the characters of the bible.

The norse myths are stories where the main characters like Odin or Thor are subject to the rules and forces of the universe, which are sometimes embodied in other characters like giant wolves or serpents. In fact, in the norse mythology the end of the gods, Ragnarok, is a prime feature of the tale. The characters like Odin are more like the main character of allegorical stories and represent aspects of human life, like the quest after wisdom and knowledge in his case. There's a separation between the "gods of forces", that is, the forces of the natural world like time, cold, heat, etc... The "gods", and then the human world.

I don't think anyone really knows what the pre-christian european "religious" practices were. There are a handful of clues left in history, but it was thoroughly wiped out. The extant mythology suggests it was a sort of shamanistic, maybe individual oriented religious practice, meaning, the people who had access to a shaman would maybe be coached in their life and spiritual journey via these stories, but who knows?

The set of beliefs people regard as "christian" is pretty interesting, because the core concepts of christianity are not found in the bible. In fact, it's sort of a mystery what purpose "the bible" served for "the church". The bible is a compilation of mediterranean world mythology that has a lot of similarities to the greek myths or even egyptian myths, including solar cycle characters like Dionysus or Osiris or Jesus who are "the sun on earth who turns into crops and dies and is reborn", plus the underworld character of Hades/Satan, the city founding twins, and so on.

The "religion" of christianity, though, is a mish-mash of greek philosophy and cliffs-notes and addenda to "the bible" mythology. Christianity was tied to various political attempts to reboot the Roman Empire, even within the ongoing eastern Roman Empire... So there's a "Tsar" (a Cesar) of Russia and an Eastern Orthodox Church, or various European Empires like the "Holy Roman" empire with an Emperor that's allied with the Catholic Church.

As an ingredient of a political project, then, the christian religion was meant to create a "roman" citizen out of europeans in the same way the school system, today, trains a person to be a member of the corporate/consumer society and the way the "media" blasts concepts into the brains of adults 24/7, or the way some clowns in an HR department send spam emails about pronouns or indigenous people's day or whatever.

The mythology of the chrisitian religion differs from the norse or greek myths on some key points. One of those is the god character names that were in the bible were stripped away. So in the norse religion there's Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, etc.... or the weekday names correspond to the prior era religions in most countries like Thursday is Thor's Day in the germanic countries and is Jueves (Jove/Jupiter) in Spain. In the christian relgious scheme, though, there is "god", and is regarded as a universal entity rather than a parochial "Yahweh" character or Zeus or Odin.

Also, along with this change in the prior era mythology, this generic "unnameable god" supplants the "gods of forces" and natural forces in the mythology of the norse or greek panetheons to whom the god characters are subject. This is an innovation of the christian religion and comes from greek philosophizing rather than anything found in the bible, which incorporates the mediterranean world's mythologies of creation. The nonsense concept of "the trinity" sums up the attempt to merge the god pantheon of the classical and ancient world with the "god of forces" characters, like the Titans or the Vanir of the norse myths. Some of the "reasoning" about god is still taught today in colleges in medieval philosophy courses. In retrospect as an advertising/propaganda talking point it is absurd. Their claim was basically "our god is the biggest and bestest" versus the prior brand of god.

Eventually, that propaganda invention killed the christian religion and its predecessors, and quite ironically, allowed the Titans to defeat the Olympians and effectively threw them into Tartarus. Now there's only a "god of forces", that is "nature".

"Last Year's Sun" Character

There are a handful of mythological characters from different cultures through history who represent the solar agricultural cycle. The egyptian characters provide a guide for the greek characters and the biblical characters. For example, the Osiris character is the sun on earth character who becomes crops and is then mutilated or cut up or otherwise horribly mistreated, which is a comical depiction of what happens to wheat. Similarly, wine gods are castrated (grapes cut off the vine), or torn to pieces by crazed (drunk) women, etc... Jesus is both a grain god and a wine god. He's flogged and beaten and put up on a trellis and pierced.

One of the really intriguing characters of the agricultural cycle is the "last year's sun" character. In the egyptian mythology it's Ra. Ra is also the underworld sun who goes through the underworld at night and fights Apep. In Greek mythology Ra turns into Hades/Pluto, the god of the dead, the underworld and wealth. The modern vampire character seems to be pressed out of the Hades mold. In the teen drama TV show "One Tree Hill", the character Dan is the Hades/Ra character. He's the rich father of the two main male characters. I can't remember the character names. One of those boys actually "dies" and is resurrected in a nod to the mythology. In the show he's a "harsh taskmaster" like Ra and he's wealthy like Hades.

"Wealth" is often just a version of stored or "last year's" sunlight. Even something like oil is just old solar energy. It's very likely the concept of a "loan" and interest originated with an ancient seed and grain monopoly. It's very interesting that "last years sun" turned into the concept of harshness and "evil". In the bible story of Cain and Abel, Cain is "cursed" to work and also ends up in the city and has become associated with "technology" (because he's Greek Prometheus). The "curse" is really to come under the thumb of Ra, or the last year's Sun character and all his bullshit, like contracts, which is really just a type of "curse".

Who's "Ra" in the bible myths? It's left somewhat ambiguous. In the egyptian myths "Ra" would match up with the God character of the bible, however in the greek myths, the Ra character is split into Zeus and Hades. Similarly in the bible there's the God character and the Satan character. Some commentators draw the conclusion they're the same, that is God=Satan. One of the interpretations is Satan is "the god of this world", that is the world of man. Like Hades or Ra, he's associated with "work" in that the curse of man is to "work" because Eve ate the apple, and the Satan character is also supposedly the secret father of Cain, which is even part of the story of One Tree Hill where the main solar hero character of the show is actually the illegitimate son of Dan, the Hades/Satan/Vampire figure.

I think what the Ra character ultimately represents, and the reason it becomes "evil" or scorned is that "wealth" is illusory. Take the concept of "stored work" as wealth like numbers in a bank account. Bitcoin fanbois imagine a bitcoin represents "stored work" in the hashing of the blockchain. This is a good representation of work in general. The blockchain is actually a representation of the increasing entropy of the universe--a bunch of burned fuel to make a pattern in computer memories, which are constantly eating energy, etc... Most of things people do to "create value" are mere transformations of an underlying substance, and in the case of agriculture, it "just happens" via nature.

In the mythology a character like Prometheus dies over and over because there's no "extracting value" or "storing value". The Hades/Ra character is a cheater or really a god of fraud in many cases because he can't provide the thing people really want.

Serious vs Play

The "Ant and the Grasshopper" fable is a great depiction of the "serious" mindset. In that fable, the ant is diligent, works, and is prepared for winter while the grasshopper messes around then starves. The "serious" mindset is really interesting to ponder. Where does it actually come from? What is it?

A variation on the "serious" mindset is the "security" mindset. One example of that is "coyote fear". In northeast Ohio most predators were extirpated by around 1900. Over the past 30 years or so, though, as the area transitioned from a rural/agricultural zone to suburbs and exurbs, coyotes moved in. Some cadre of people thinks they are very dangerous animals. A subset of those hysterical people think the presence of coyotes warrants wearing a sidearm when walking around in suburban or exurban parks. In reality, a coyote is a medium sized dog that avoids people. Other predators like eagles, possums, foxes are similarly dangerous to pets and farm animals, but the coyote gets weird fantastical status among local suburban retards.

"Folk concept" is another way of saying people rely on a prepackaged story based model for interpreting reality. A hysterical retard lady who sees a coyote when she's taking out her trash, for example, won't be able to ascertain it's a medium sized dog that poses no threat and runs away as soon as it sees a human, she'll only see the folk story version of a deadly predator. In some places and among some people that folk version of reality becomes the consensus view and when there is fear or some minor risk involved, it can foster a sort of mass hysteria.

In other cases, an individual's anxiety and phantasmagorical horror show understanding of reality doesn't extend beyond their inner world. I saw an interesting bodycam video a few days ago where a 74 year old man pulled a knife on an 11 year old. The old man was afraid of a kid riding a bike on the sidewalk so he threatened the boy with a knife. The old man was also carrying a loaded gun. In the old man's mind, he was maneuvering in a world of threats to his person and his fear justified his actions. This is the basis of the security mindset: fear and anxiety. However, in his case, his delusions were proprietary, rather than shared so he was arrested.

Anyway, I think the "serious" mindset is a variation on this same theme. It's a folk world view, or maybe a religious belief about the nature of reality. Essentially, if you don't "work hard", that is, be serious, god or reality will "punish" you. In some circumstances people believe this literally, that is, being frivolous is a sin which results in future punishment.

However, these same people also realize the converse scenario isn't a sure thing, that is "hard work" does not necessarily lead to success. In fact, it is often frustrated, so the folk concept of "man plans, god laughs" or the line "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft’ go awry” sums that folk view up.

I think those two concepts are fused together in the minds of many people, maybe especially european descended people. They believe in hard work, but know "luck" or good fortune or "god's favor" is actually the dominant force in the universe.

This topic takes me back to the "play" approach versus the serious mindset. Kids and young animals play to "develop". Their lack of experience makes them necessarily open minded, and often willing to experiment and push boundaries of what they think they can do. In the context of the adult world this can lead to innovation and new ways of understanding the world, or even just provides an individual with an opportunity to have their own experiences rather than living inside a folk model or religious delusion of reality.

An important element of these models of reality is it imposes a sorting process on the population. Let's take that 74 year old crazy man as an example. In his community, his delusion is personal, so he's jailed and forced to accept the nominal world view. However, in some scenario where everyone is equally a shithead about danger and every other man is packing a side arm because they think they might be attacked at any moment, he'd be right at home and the kid in that story and his family would move. In the "coyote fear" community, if you were a nature boy you'd leave so you could have a pet coyote, or hang out in peace with the critters.

Ironically, the "play" mindset seems like the big time winner for humans at least in terms of generating wealth, and it also seems to be associated with intelligence, while the serious people can be pretty stupid. A "folklore heavy" or religious community is often stifling and/or materially poor.

Status and Competitions

When I was a kid, there was a gradual transition in the organized activities kids participated in from "free form games" to structured competitions. I didn't really "get it" for a long time, that is, I was sort of stuck in the free form game mode when classmates were shifting into competition mode. I remember, for example, being kind of traumatized by the coaches and kids being "serious" about baseball when I was still in "game" mode when I was maybe 8 or 9.

At some point, even the tone of school changed similarly. In elementary school there weren't really grades. I think we got check marks or something like that, then in 6th grade/middle school there were "grades" and maybe even rankings of students. There were also myriad competitions in almost every activity, like in band there were rankings of players "1st chair", and so on, plus spelling bees, competitions in presentations, etc... Of course there were organized sports as well, so kids began training to be on the football team or whatever.

All the organized judging and rule based games are supposed to be training for "the real world", which is theoretically a bunch of similar competitions. I heard warnings from adults maybe 1,000 times that I'd be a loser if I didn't work hard, or that if I didn't buckle down and study I'd be a bum. As I noted in the previous post, "the loser" character is really the invisible fence of the boomer world, or the corporate/consumer society.

I guess the purpose, or maybe just a side effect of all the competitions in school is students internalize a phony model of reality, that is, there is a merit based hierarchy all throughout life that's determined by work and talent and judging. Maybe you suck at sports, but you can win the spelling bee, or maybe go to the chemistry olympics, or vice versa, you suck at chemistry class, but are a starter on the football team and so on. That is, there's always some "fair", real competition you can participate in.

One fairly useful observation is that almost every game is arbitrary and even the competitions are fraudulent or severely distorted in the sense that the rankings are really meaningless. For example, in high school football in the US, there are divisions of schools because some high schools only have 150 students and others have 3,000 so a kid who might be the quarterback on a Division IV football team might not even get on the varsity Division I football team. That's true in almost every type of organized sporting event I ever participated in as an adult. The competition is divvied up so people are participating against "peers" rather than the whole population of athletes, like in running races there are age groups, or in cycling races there are skill categories.

In professional sports, which is ostensibly the closest thing to the "real world" form of competition, that is an unlimited contest which reveals who is really the best, there are myriad arbitrary rules. In fact, in many pro sports the rules accumulate endlessly. In pro cycling, for example, there are all kinds of rules about how much your bicycle can weigh, what the geometry is, the position you can ride in, and on and on. Most pro or olympic level sports have all sorts of rules about the substances an athlete can take to eliminate the use of 'roids and HGH and such.

Another aspect of this competition internalization is people seek counterfeit representations of merit via "status" symbols like expensive cars and houses or sporting goods. In almost every case, a person gets their "status" object like a house with a giant pile of debt. Then they retain their status symbol by avoiding loser status, usually by grinding away at a shitty corporate job for their whole life. 

Anyway, quite ironically, it turns out that the elementary school view of games versus the high school competitions forever corresponds to the "real world". That is, there's no gamified reality except the shared hallucination of the general public who's been trained to participate in it.