felt luck is green "Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that cybernetic systems could run into 'several possible sorts of behavior considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium. Some machines went into runaway, exponentially maximizing their until they broke or slowing down until they stopped. Others oscillated and seemed unable to settle to any mean. Others -- still worse -- embarked on sequences of behaviour in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself oscillate or would become greater and greater,' turning themselves into systems with 'positive gain, variously called _escalating_ or _vicious_ circles.' Unlike the negative feedback loop which turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole, these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own to the detriment of the stability of the whole. "Undermining distinctions between human, animal, and machine, Wierner also challenged orthodox conceptions of life, death, and the boundary between the two. Were self_governing machines alive? If not, why not? After all, they were certainly not dead matter, impassive and inert. And, since many life_forms were less sophisticated than automatic machines, the status of being alive could not simply be a matter of complexity. "Only by reverting to some notion of essences was it possible to distinguish between the liveliness of an organism and that of a machine. In principle, neither was more or less dead than the other. Life and death were no longer absolute conditions, but interactive tendencies and processes, both of which are at work in both automatic machines and organisms. Regardless of their scale, size, complexity, or material composition, things that work do so because they are both living and dying, organizing and disintegrating, growing and decaying, speeding up and slowing down. 'Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.' Either extreme can be fatal, and in this sense systems do die in a final and absolute and final sense. 'Death, then, does actually happen.' But it is not confined to the great event at the end of life. This is a death which is also 'felt in every feeling,' a death which 'never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming.' All living systems are dying: this is the definition of life. Something that lives is something that will die, which is why 'the hint of death is present in every biological circuit.'" -- Sadie Plant, _Zeroes and Ones_ (interpolated quotes, third paragraph, from Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_) 010805 ... MisterFunkadelic ...up 010805 ... alice ive never felt so much just laying with someone, so happy, content. ive never felt this in my entire life, and its wonderful 020723 what's it to you? who go blather from