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 Thursday, November 28, 2002
THE OCCULT SCIENCE OF BUSHCRAFT
posted by Andrew 11/28/2002 03:25:00 PM
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
HARRY POTTER SKA
In the Global Memory Theatre
Does anybody remember if
Ever we'll turn delight on
"Hide not your talents. They for use were made.
What's a sundial in the shade." Benjamin Franklin
THAT HAPPENS
Heckler & Coch (salt-sulphur-mercury)
A rolling thunder tour
Through the meaning of rock
"If our senses were fine enough, we would experience
the slumbering cliff as a dancing chaos."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"All power corrupts and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
Ted Nelson
Alamut - Bastion of Peace and Information
... we interrupt this blog to bring you some dance analogy ...
The Dance of Shiva
CRACKING THE RIDDLE OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY
"Bardeen insisted that Cooper's solution was not yet complete. They did not yet know how to go from a single "Cooper pair" to a full-blown many-electron theory. We tried many techniques," Schrieffer recalled but "things just didn't jell." A major hurdle was coping with many pairs at the same time, most of which overlapped. Even conceptualizing the situation was very difficult.
More than a year later Schrieffer found a way to portray the problem using the analogy of a crowded dance floor on which many couples are doing the Frug. In this popular late-1950s dance, the members of couples dance separately but remain bound to one another, even when they are far apart and other dancers come between them. The problem was how to represent this situation mathematically. "It was very perplexing to us." Schrieffer remembers Bardeen saying, "Well, it's in momentum space. You shouldn't think about the coordinate space so much. It may not be confusing if you view it in the right language."
True Genius : The Life and Science of John Bardeen by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch
(Joseph Henry Press, Washington DC, 2002, page 203)
PUNCTUATION
"This is very much in keeping with Einstein's remark: "It is the theory which decides what we can observe." But in human relationships the "theory" is itself the outcome of punctuation, and we run into a chicken-and-egg problem as to which came first - the problem or the punctuation. People remain consistently unaware of their discrepant views and naively assume that there is only one reality and one right view of it (namely their own); therefore anyone who sees things differently must be either mad or bad. But there is strong evidence that in the interaction between organisms there is a circular pattern: cause produces effect, and effect feeds back on cause, becoming itself a cause. The result is very much like two people trying to communicate while speaking two different languages, or two players trying to play a game with two separate sets of rules."
How Real Is Real? - Paul Watzlawick (Vintage, 1977, page 63)
Cosma Shalizi - "The great Muslim theologian, jurist and logician Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in his book, 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers', disputed the notion of causation along lines which would be followed several centuries later by David Hume."
posted by Andrew 11/27/2002 12:59:00 PM
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
IN THE KICK OF TIME
When he tried to prove quantum mechanics isn't as odd as it seems, this unlikely guru [John Bell] ended up twisting reality another turn into the weird zone where particles light-years apart may communicate instantaneously
"Locality is the idea that consequences propagate continuously, that they don't leap over distances. And so the question immediately posed itself: Is that inevitable?"
John Bell - Interview (Omni Magazine, Volume 10, Number 8, May 1988, page 90)
"This principle of Lorentz invariance was speculative when Lorentz formulated it around about 1900. But now it has been so solidly built into physical theory that it is extremely difficult to consider giving it up. The idea that somehow nature has no preferred velocity and no preferred inertial reference system [such as ether] has paid off enormously. But this idea presents one of the biggest difficulties in formulating quantum mechanics in a sensible way, because when you look at these funny paradoxes of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, they seem to imply that something goes faster than light. "
John Bell - Interview (Omni Magazine, Volume 10, Number 8, May 1988, page 92)
"It is one of those strange facts of experience that when we try to think into the future, our thoughts jump backward. It may well be that nature has some fundamental law by which opening up what we call the future also automatically opens up the past in equal degree.
Time is not linear, but probably consists of omnidirectional wave propagations."
Buckminster Fuller - Goddesses of the Twenty-First Century (Saturday Review, March 2, 1968, page 13)
"The future is not what it used to be; neither is causality,
for thought travels much faster and farther than light."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt - The Argument: Causality in the Electric World
"Lorentz invariance is very embarrassed by anything going faster than the speed of light, because that would seem to say that you should be able to measure the simultaneity of distant events more precisely than you can using light. Yet somehow the fact that light is the quickest measurement available is built into the theory of relativity. Now, it's not as simple as that; and that's just the kind of thing I would like to investigate. What restrictions on velocities - and velocities of what - are really imposed by Lorentz invariance?"
John Bell - Interview (Omni Magazine, Volume 10, Number 8, May 1988, page 92)
RETROCAUSALITY - A Bibliography compiled by Klaus Scharff
The Noseless Sphinx
"... we shall perceive that matter is an admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting, and restraining the consciousness which it encases. Its impersonal character gives it the superiority which Aristotle [Eth. Nic. x. 9, 12] ascribed to the law over personal rule. It does not cause hatred, and escapes 'the detestation which men feel for those who thwart their impulses, even when they do it rightly.' Even children ... cannot long be angry with sticks and stones. The dull resistance with which it meets and checks the outbursts of unreasoning passion, is more subduing than the most active display of power. The irresponsive and impassive inertia, against which we dash ourselves in vain, binds us with more rigid and yet securer bonds than any our fancy could have imagined. Matter constrains us by a necessity we can neither resist nor resent, and to dispute its sway would not only be a waste of time and strength, but display a ludicrous lack of the sense of the ridiculous.
Materialism is a hysteron proteron, a putting of the cart before the horse, which may be rectified by just inverting the connexion between Matter and consciousness.
Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that which limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits : material organization does not construct consciousness out of arrangements of atoms, but contracts its manifestation within the sphere which it permits.
And it is an explanation the possibility of which no evidence in favour of Materialism can possibly affect. For if, for example, a man loses consciousness so soon as his brain is injured, it is clearly as good an explanation to say the injury to the brain destroyed the mechanism by which the manifestation of consciousness was rendered possible, as to say that it destroyed the seat of consciousness."
F.C.S. Schiller - Riddles of the Sphinx, 1910
The Modern Age and the Postmodern Debate
"On or about December 1, 1910, human nature changed."
Virginia Woolf
"Use the light that is within you to regain your natural clearness of sight."
Lao Tzu
posted by Andrew 11/26/2002 03:00:00 PM
Monday, November 25, 2002
THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
"Mathematics is a collective activity of human brains, working under certain constraints."
Ian Stewart (Start the Week - BBC Radio 4, 25/11/02)
"We may compare the observer of a physical phenomenon not with the audience of a theatrical performance, but with that of a football game where the act of watching, accompanied by applauding or hissing, has a marked influence on the speed and concentration of the players, and thus on what is watched."
Max Born - Physics In My Generation (Pergamon Press, 1956, page 105)
"From the start we are involved in the argument between nature and man in which science plays only a part, so that the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties."
Werner Heisenberg - The Physicists Conception of Nature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958, page 24)
"We are all suspended in language so we don't know which way is up and which is down."
Niels Bohr
"Since Werner Heisenberg and Linus Pauling*, the only remaining material bond is resonance."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt
The Argument: Causality in the Electric World (Technology and Culture, Volume 14, Number 1, January 1973, page 10)
*In The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structures of Molecules and Crystals: An Introduction to Modern Chemistry, 3rd edition (Ithaca, New York, 1967), Pauling establishes that the chemical bond is not a mere connection but a "stabilization of the system of resonance energy."
"In the world of atomic physics the distinction between particles and waves assumes a complementary character. Light displays the properties of particles, knocking electrons out of metals (the photoelectric effect), while electrons are found to behave like waves (electron diffraction). According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one can no longer measure simultaneously the exact position and momentum of a particle. One is forced to adopt a probabilistic description of nature, in which particles are represented by waves of probability. The chemical bonds which hold atoms together are resonances of these probability waves. The very elementary particles of which matter is composed are themselves resonating composites of each other."
Marshall McLuhan and R. K. Logan
Alphabet, Mother of Invention Et Cetera (December 1977, pages 373 - 383)
Consciousness and Non-Locality
posted by Andrew 11/25/2002 12:36:00 PM
Saturday, November 23, 2002
Elixir Lips Shocks Body Unlocks Encoded Streaming Life
Trees are the zipper between the earth and the sky
Grasp and release the true vine of being and become a wild real world-child
"Let each jewel reflect all the others, each according to its own faculty"
Destratify the Chain of Command; Receive
Ainsoph, 'this upright one, with that noughty'
Embrace, retrieve & install soul-force, create non-violence & joyful science
Making human-heartedness the kernel of matter more [metamorph]
Our cardinal metaphors are all mutating, myth's on the move
New verbs are .... fisking nerves of awareness, we're shiftin' godzimmagin
from monologue to dialogue, from pipeline to grapevine and groupname and net
The Metaphor is the Key
"Communication" as we tend to understand it is itself a metaphor. English speakers tend to speak as if they share a particular mental image of how words work. As Michael Reddy has persuasively demonstrated, the English language defaults to a metaphor of communication as a conduit for human thoughts and feelings. In this cognitive shorthand, the speaker begins with a meaning that she "puts into words," which are then "gotten across" to the auditor who then "unpacks," "gets," or "absorbs" the speaker's meaning.To put it another way, the speaker/author "encodes" meanings into words that "convey" meanings that are then "decoded" by the recipient.
Michael Froomkin
Robert N. St. Clair - Cultural Wisdom, Communication Theory, and the Metaphor of Resonance
"Western communication theory is based on the conduit metaphor. Information is transmitted by putting messages into forms, sending them through channels (the conduit), and decoding them for the receiver who retrieves the messages. This model underlies linguistic theory, communication theory, semiotics, and a plethora of other language related disciplines."
The Conduit Metaphor
"The idea that information passes from brain to brain through pipes. Pervades everything."
matt webb - [link and quote added 2003-08-11]
The Conduit Metaphor is habitually linked to 'fossil phrases' such as
The Content Is Contained In The Stimulus & Words Are Weapons
"sharper than knives, makes you wonder how the other half dies."
INXS - 'The Devil Inside' from the album 'Kick'
Freak Noir: Sowelu unveils a new carnival of souls
"American culture has always been a balancing act between the puritanical forces of conformity and the unlidded voices of the individual. In a culture that has hypnotized the world with happy faces and happy meals, there remain Coney Islands of the mind, places of dissent and exile, places to be the freak in the herd.
Carnivals and freakshows have long been the reigning metaphors of dissent in American culture. Though the circus and Gypsies play similar roles in Europe, there's something darker in the American psyche ..."
Steffen Silvis
Davos Newbies by Lance Knobel - 'Power of metaphors'
"I take a fairly jaundiced view of most management writing. But Michael Skapinker, who is usually reliable but dull in the Financial Times, has been reading his George Lakoff. He looks at the reigning metaphors in pre-collapse Enron and finds nothing but confusion. His conclusion? "Find the metaphorical anomalies and you have identified the companies where something dreadful is about to happen."
Rhonda Lieberman - 'Film Fatale'
"Throughout, Aliens & Anorexia sucks us into an intellectual time warp, one that revives an embarrassing '80s moment that fetishized "transgressive martyrs" and glorified hysteria as a site of resistance to patriarchy. Typical of a certain kind of intellectual who filters everything through discourse, Kraus romanticizes actor-outers like anorexics, alleged alien abductees, and inarticulate girls, in whose experience she fantasizes a kind of transcendent freedom from language. While Kraus's theoretical vintage values "escaping" psychology through sensation, mysticism, s/m, and terrorism, her methods for busting out are so trite and unfelicitous that they restrict more than they liberate."
Smart Art and Theoretical Fictions [Part II] - Joan Hawkins
"Aliens and anorexia are, Lieberman maintains, "the two reigning metaphors" of [Chris] Kraus's most recent "novel". Perhaps "hyperlinks" would be a better word here -- since they function more as a conduit to parallel, cultural sites than as an illustrative analogy. In fact, Kraus is suspicious of analogies, which she sees as always already mired in dominant ideology."
"Who's killing higher education?" - Educom Review March-April, 1999
"For a long while now we have slowly been reconceiving education as the transfer of information from one database or brain to another. Access to information is the universal slogan, and by "information" we demonstrate with countless phrases every day that we mean something routinely transferable between containers.
What we haven't realized is that this fact-shoveling model of education renders both teachers and schools superfluous. It's true that many colleges and universities have struggled mightily to convert themselves into more efficient vehicles for information delivery. But they can hardly hope to compete successfully with the computer in this sterile game.
The old institutions, however, are not the only things placed at risk by the computer's fulfillment of the reigning model of education. Eventually, we will realize that students, too, are superfluous. It's much more efficient to transfer information from one database to another than from a database to a mind.
... Everyone disowns fact-shoveling education. And yet the computer and its databases, into which we pour information, have emerged utterly triumphant as the reigning metaphors for learning."
Stephen Talbott
Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion
"In Membranes, Laura Otis examines how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the nineteenth century. Exploring a wide range of scientific, political, and literary writing, Otis uncovers surprising connections among subjects as varied as germ theory, colonialism, and Sherlock Holmes's adventures. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins."
First Monday: The Social Life of Documents - (1996)
Documents as Darts?
"School formed most people's subliminal idea of what a document is. But it probably took more than the painful process of learning how to write a five-paragraph essay. For many, there was also that startling first time someone's careful folding transformed a page from an exercise book and a newly created paper dart took flight across the room.
Though no doubt mischievous, this classroom recreation of the Wright brothers was probably more supportive than disruptive of classroom activity. For it merely underscores the widely held notion of the document as some sort of paper transport carrying pre-formed "ideas" or "information" through space and time. By darts or didacticism, we all usually come to believe that, like freight, information is boarded on a document at one end of its journey and taken out at the other. If a little is lost in the transaction, to most this seems no more significant than the occasional package lost in transit.
The idea of a document as a carrier is an example of what Michael Reddy calls a "conduit" metaphor. People regularly describe most communication technologies in conduit terms, talking of information as "in" books, files, or databases as if it could just as easily be "out" of them. We ask or are asked to put ideas "down on paper," to "send them along," and so forth.
Undoubtedly, this metaphor captures important aspects of communications technologies. But it simultaneously hides others. As new technologies take us through major transformations in the way we use documents, it becomes increasingly important to look beyond the conduit image."
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Making News
"The conduit metaphor suggests that information sits around in discrete lumps waiting to be loaded onto a carrier. Newspapers, for example, appear to be freighted with news that they carry out to readers. But ... news is not some naturally occurring object that journalists pick up and stick on paper. It is made and shaped by journalists in the context of the medium and the audience. There's no need to go as far as Marshall McLuhan's claim that the "medium is the message" to see that the medium is not an indifferent carrier here.
The newspaper, then, is rather like the library - not simply a collection of news, but a selection and a reflection. And the selection process doesn't just gather news, but weaves and shapes in accordance with available space and ..."
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid - The Social Life of Information
(Harvard Business School Press, 2002, page 185)
"All power corrupts and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
Ted Nelson - inventor of hypertext
George Lakoff - Index of metaphors
"The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work or leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium."
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)
Mcluhan's Message Clarified
"When I gave my Inaugural Lecture at University College in February 1957, I paraphrased a sentence I had read in Colin Cherry's writings: "symbols do not carry meaning as trucks carry coal. Their function is to select from alternatives within a given context", and I illustrated the remark with the episode from the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The robber had marked one door he wanted to remember with chalk, but his fair opponent, who had observed him, took chalk and repeated the sign on all the other doors, thus destroying the meaning of the symbol without touching it.
I sometimes come back in my writings to this selective function of symbols because this insight helped me to criticise what was, and still may be, a dominant theory of expression in aesthetics, the theory of art as expression. Though this theory takes many forms it never gets far away from the idea that the shapes and colours an artist puts on the canvas "carry meaning" (in Colin Cherry's words) as railway trains carry coal, to be transmitted to the responsive viewer."
Ernst Gombrich
�Writers worship the god of eloquence. Editors worship the god of accuracy. Designers worship the god of looking good. But no one worships the god of understanding.�
Richard Saul Wurman
Communication and change
"The idea of communication is really an investigation into the permeability and dissolution of the boundary a system creates in order to preserve its own autonomy. A human individual, for example, is sovereign over his or her body, mind, and experience. Yet individuals do communicate with each other; they share, relate, and at times, merge their horizons to form a new whole. Love between two people dissolves all boundaries yet is based on mutual respect for each other's individuality. In a similar way, one can feel love for nature and a profound relationship with a tree or river, a relationship where a person merges with the inscape of the natural world.
In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, psychologist Carl Jung described how as a boy he spent long hours sitting and daydreaming on his favorite rock. At a certain point, the horizon between himself and the rock began to dissolve, and he was no longer certain who was rock and who was person, or who was thinking that thought. Jung's experience recalls a dream of the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu who, when he awoke, could not recall if he were a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu or Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly.
If we are to appreciate fully the autonomy of levels and structures, we must also be able to understand how they relate and communicate together. But as soon as one begins to think about communication, one realizes that it has assumed a very special meaning in science, engineering, and linguistics. Ideas about communication have been greatly influenced by what is known to telecommunications engineers and computer experts as information theory. In the late 1930s, an MIT graduate student who was studying switches in circuits became interested in the way data are transmitted along telegraph lines and how some of them can be degraded by random electronic noise. The result was Claude Shannon's seminal paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which stimulated a whole new area of science involving such things as information content, the rate at which information can be transmitted, random nose, and the idea of entropy. (Entropy was an idea first introduced in thermodynamics, the study of the relationship between heat and work, and is related to the degree of order and disorder in a system.)
Information or communications theory produced powerful results, and its insights were applied far outside their original field to the design of computers and artificial intelligence systems; communication networks; the operation of the human brain; linguistics; and the study of organizations, societies, and ecological systems.
But does information theory capture the essential spirit of what it really means to communicate and to enter into an understanding with someone else? Or does it only deal with a more limited conception? The problem with the theory is its essential passivity in the way it deals with how information is exchanged between a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter generates a message, in code, which is then sent to the receiver, which decodes it and extracts the information. Communication is seen in terms of an exchange or interaction along a communication channel.
A similar idea prevails in some theories of linguistics in which communication is pictured like a cargo that is carried by a train between two cities. Language is the train and information the cargo. But this is a singularly passive picture of what it means to communicate with someone. To begin with, it makes a sharp distinction between the nature of the message and that of the transmitter or receiver. It also preserves an absolute distinction between the two people who are in communication. They merely exchange goods, in the form of language and gestures, which they then proceed to decode.
The French linguist Gilles Fauconnier has, to some extent, moved toward a more realistic theory of communication with his idea of "mental spaces." Having a conversation, he proposes, is a creative business that cannot really be described in terms of the transmission of messages. Rather, each person is involved in a continuous act of creativity as he or she attempts to build "mental spaces" that will resonate, one with the other.
When you listen to someone else, you are in a state of constant activity, drawing on all your knowledge of past conversations and contexts. Some of what is said is ignored, but other parts seem replete with meaning. In this way, you begin to create a "mental space" of what the other person is talking about, a space that is richly furnished with meanings and allusions. While this space is partly built out of what you are hearing, a large part of it is actually created out of what you already know, what you have learned in your life, what you know about your own language, what you know about the other person and the particular context in which the conversation is taking place. As this mental space grows in the complexity of its structure, so, too, it acts to help you understand and integrate what is currently being said. For example, what at first appeared to be unimportant may now assume a greater value.
And so both parties in this conversation are constantly creating and furnishing their mental spaces, which then begin to resonate together and evolve. It is no longer possible to give any objective external account of the "information content" of the conversation because the value of the information is purely subjective and changes from moment to moment. It depends on the ever-changing context of the mental spaces themselves."
F. David Peat - The Philosopher's Stone: Chaos, Synchronicity, and the Hidden Order of the World - Chapter 5 - The Symphony of Life - (Bantam Books, August 1991, pages 114-117)
[Steve Krause reviews 'The Philosopher's Stone' right here]
Gilles Fauconnier - Meaning, Language, Cognition
"The famous computer program Eliza produced what looked like a sensible interaction between a psychiatrist and a subject operating the program, but the rich meaning that seemed to emanate from the machine was in fact read in (constructed) by the subject. And strikingly, just like a perceptual illusion, this effect cannot easily be suspended by rational denial."
Marc Demarest - CityWare: Information Technology Planning And Urban Planning (pdf)
"The philosopher Paul de Man once observed that the strategies we employ to organize our thinking are at best mixed blessings. For every insight such strategies yield into the nature of the problem at hand, de Man observed, these strategies produce blindnesses: the inability to have other possibly more important insights, the inability to uncover some fundamental flaw or misconception, the inability to think past our own constructions.
The crucial problem, de Man pointed out, was that this duality -- the simultaneity of blindness and insight -- is a fundamental condition of thinking itself, since we are compelled by language itself to employ strategies -- metaphors, similes, figures of speech, models, paradigms -- when thinking about anything, from computing to thought itself."
Landscapes of the Heart: Challenging the Reigning Metaphors
"Politics begins in poetry, in the metaphors, myths, and symbols that command our loyalties and organize our social consciousness. Tyrants know this; consider Hitler. The first territory he set out to conquer was the landscape of the heart. Before he started annexing land he stormed the cultural consciousness of the German people:
"The Germans were the best-educated nation in the world. To conquer their minds was very difficult. Their hearts, their sensibilities were easier targets. Hitler's strength was that he shared with so many other Germans the devotion to national images new and old: misty forests breeding blond titans; smiling peasant villages under the shadow of ancestral castles; garden cities emerging from ghetto-like slums; riding Valkyries, burning Valhallas, new births and dawns in which shining, millennian structures would rise from the ashes of the past and stand for centuries."
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 1310-31.
I begin with this observation about Hitler because it presents in glaring light the potency of mythological images and stories to engage a group's energies for corporate action. By "mythological images and stories" I mean those metaphors, symbols, and narratives from which a group draws its reason for being, sustains its current life, and envisions and realizes its future. These mythic-poetic realities constitute the "landscape of the heart," the nexus of meanings that filters our interpretation of the world and shapes our patterns of response and creativity."
Thomas H. Troeger
Blending and Conceptual Integration
"Conceptual blending has a fascinating dynamics and a crucial role in how we think and live. It operates largely behind the scenes. Almost invisibly to consciousness, it choreographs vast networks of conceptual meaning ..."
Gospel of Thomas Saying 5 - The obscure will become disclosed
Wilhelm Dilthey - "Understanding is the rediscovery of the I in the Thou."
The Stars-Spiral
And is it butter-art?
To Be Alive When Something Happens: Retrieving Dilthey's Erlebnis
where systems intersect
"What I am suggesting is special about the Erlebnis concept is that at its heart is the idea of connection to a whole, and this saves it from the worst propensities of the aestheticism that it nurtured in its own time."
John Arthos
"The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle ..."
"The breakdown or hang-up is always in the connection, whereas the breakthrough or discovery is inside the problem itself, not outside but "in the gap." Breakdown is the old cause in action, the extension of the old figure to the new ground. Breakthrough is the effect of understanding as the new cause. The solution is a figure that we can discover by organizing our ignorance and swarming over the ground."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt - The Argument: Causality in the Electric World
posted by Andrew 11/23/2002 03:01:00 PM
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
007 - THE HUMAN BOND
All the Ages
Passing the Lantern to Bacon
Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica
Voynich Manuscript Resources
Cryptography and John Dee
On 28 May 1555 Dee was arrested and charged with "calculating".
"History is moving pretty quickly these days" James Bond
john dee and cosmo-politics
Biographies of alchemists and hermetic philosophers
John Dee, the Queen's astrologer
International Mystery
The R+C Legacy: Dr. John Dee
"In 1561 John Dee wrote an augmentation to Robert Record's Ground of Artes, a book that was written for the mechanists. It became the first universal textbook of arithmetic using the Arabic system of numbers�after the cumbersome Roman numerals that had been used for centuries.
In 1564 while on a stay in Europe, John Dee also wrote a Hermetic treatise called Monas Hieroglyphica. He dedicated it to Maximilian II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (1564-1576). In the Monas, which was referred to by contemporaries as a magical and Hermetic work, a "magic parable," he dealt with humankind's spiritual transformation and the need to return to our original divine nature. Written in the oral tradition, it was intended only for those who could recognize its meaning, intentionally disguised for his personal protection under heresy laws."
The Emerging Web of Consciousness
Technoetic
posted by Andrew 11/20/2002 03:00:00 PM
Monday, November 18, 2002
EMPTINESS AND FORM
"Apparently we only read because the writing is already there, laid out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first person who ever wrote, who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies ... changed all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind him was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less - a subtraction of matter, a hollow in the relation to the relief. Then what was it? "
The Absence of the Book - Maurice Blanchot
Meister Eckhart - "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
The Conscious Reed - hole in the universe
"It wasn't until 1951 that Cage was inspired to proceed by seeing the white, empty paintings freshly done by his friend, Robert Rauschenberg. "I responded immediately," he said, "not as objects, but as ways of seeing. I've said before that they were airports for shadows and for dust, but you could also say that they were mirrors of the air."
"The whole overflows the sum of these parts." Aristotle Jones
SAVE THE GAP
persona with a stained mask
makes new recorded walking steps
on through a pane
to conceal and protect
Doctor Glas
"It is often the wrapping that determines the content ... The code generates the message."
Ernst Gombrich
Silence as Text Among the Works of George Oppen
English - does it speak you? Mother Tucker
Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel's use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
Why is there something rather than ?
"Nishkala Shiva, was literally the Shiva without parts. He was the ultimate void, the supreme nothing - lifelessness incarnate. But out of the void, the universe was born, as was the infinite."
Charles Seife - Zero (Souvenir Press, 2000, page 65)
"Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?"
Screaming Lord Sutch (The Observer, 4 July 1999)
The Observer in the Observed - Open Portals
Almost an amphibian between being and non-being
"Leibniz thought that i was a bizarre mix between existence and nonexistence, something like a cross between 1 (God) and 0 (Void) in his binary scheme. Leibniz likened i to the Holy Spirit : both have an ethereal and barely substantial existence. But even Leibniz didn't realize that i would finally reveal the relationship between zero and infinity."
Charles Seife - Zero : The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Souvenir Press, 2000, page 135)
"Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration." Otto Fischinger
The Importance of the Unbelievable
Stealing Beauty
Thomas Merton by Sitaram on Sulekha Coffeehouse
Reality and perceptions - On Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops us from Seeing by Darian Leader The Not-All
When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, thousands of people flocked to see the empty space where it had once been on display.
What could have drawn these crowds to stare at a blank wall?
posted by Andrew 11/18/2002 12:43:00 PM
Sunday, November 17, 2002
OF BEING NUMEROUS
"In earlier times, when the relevant social unit was the tribe, the religious sect, a nation, or even a civilization, it was possible for the local mythology in service to that unit to represent all those beyond its bounds as inferior, and its own local inflection of the universal human heritage of mythological imagery either as the one, the true and sanctified, or at least as the noblest and supreme.
And it was in those times beneficial to the order of the group that its young should be trained to respond positively to their own system of tribal signals and negatively to all others, to reserve their love for at home and to project their hatreds outward.
Today, however, we are {all the crew} of this ... spaceship Earth ... hurtling at a prodigious rate through the vast night ... And are we to allow a hijacker aboard?"
Joseph Campbell - No More Horizons - New York, 1971
"Everyone on board our Spaceship Earth can live abundantly and successfully on an ecologically sustainable basis. Humanity has the option to make it."
The Buckminster Fuller Institute
Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
"A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference." Thomas Merton
"Nietzsche, nearly a century ago, already named our period the Age of Comparisons. There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is ... natural ... that when energies ... come into collision - each bearing its own pride - there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new ... condition of {humankind} "
Joseph Campbell - Myths To Live By - No More Horizons
The Official Stafford Beer
23 Zeitalter der Vergleichung Age of Comparisons
"The less men are bound by their tradition, the greater the internal stirring of motives; the greater, accordingly, the external unrest, the whirling flow of men, the polyphony of strivings. Who today still feels a serious obligation to bind himself and his descendents to one place? Who feels that anything is seriously binding? Just as all artistic styles of the arts are imitated one next to the other, so too are all stages and kinds of morality, customs, cultures.
Such an age gets its meaning because in it the various world views, customs, cultures are compared and experienced next to one another, which was not possible earlier, when there was always a localized rule for each culture, just as all artistic styles were bound to place and time. Now, man's increased aesthetic feeling will decide definitively from among the many forms which offer themselves for comparison. It will let most of them (namely all those that it rejects) die out. Similarly, a selection is now taking place among the forms and habits of higher morality, whose goal can be none other than the downfall of baser moralities. This is the age of comparisons! That is its pride - but also by rights its sorrow. Let us not be afraid of this sorrow! Instead, we will conceive the task that this age sets us to be as great as possible. Then posterity will bless us for it - a posterity that knows it has transcended both the completed original folk cultures, as well as the culture of comparison, but that looks back on both kinds of culture as on venerable antiquities, with gratitude."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The prominent feature of our time is not so much the wars and the dictatorships which have disfigured it, but the impact of different cultures on one another, their interaction, and the emergence of a new civilisation based on the truths of spirit and the unity of mankind."
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan - Fragments of a Confession
"You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.
Lead kindly fowl! They always did; ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest."
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake 1.5.112
A Little Heap for George Oppen by Eliot Weinberger
"Oppen's metropolis consists of walls within walls: the Great Wall becomes the Forbidden City. Yet among the walls, Oppen's eye, characteristically, picks a brick."
Oppen: "Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists."
Brecht: "We'd all be human if we could."
Education in an Age of Rising Transnationality (pdf)
THE CLASH OF SYMBOLISMS
"Religion is based on Eros, science on Logos. The age now dawning will provide a synthesis for this thesis and antithesis. Religion sought linkage, science sought knowledge. The new world-view seeks linked knowledge."
Edward F. Edinger - The Creation of Consciousness : Jung's Myth for Modern Man (Inner City Books, Toronto, 1984, page 58)
"The drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate, the dream of everyone, everywhere. The fate or dream is the fate of more than mankind. Our secret Adam is written now in the script of the primal cell. We have gone beyond the reality of the incomparable nation or race, the incomparable Jehovah in the shape of a man, the incomparable Book or Vision, the incomparable species, in which identity might hold & defend its boundaries against an alien territory. All things have come now into their comparisons. But these comparisons are the correspondences ..."
Robert Duncan - Rites of Participation (Chapter 6 of Part 1: The H.D. Book)
Overcoming Existing Pseudospecies Mentalities
7
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.
George Oppen
posted by Andrew 11/17/2002 11:47:00 AM
Friday, November 15, 2002
Monotheism - Monototheism
"When I was in Sinai - the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments - I had a sort of negative revelation ..."
Michel Houellebecq
Holism and Islam: The Tawheedian World-View - Jeremiah D. McAuliffe Jr
"Islam is profoundly and intelligently holistic. Fourteen hundred years ago Muhammad had regular periods of non-ordinary experience, we Muslims would say a revelation, regarding the relation of creation to the Transcendent. That insight is contained in the term tawheed. This untranslatable term is not often encountered by non-Muslims reading about Islam. If it is it may not be grasped in its fullness of meaning. On a basic level tawheed simply refers to Islam's strict monotheism, but it is a much richer term than just that. Isma'il Faruqi writes that "[Tawheed] is a general view of reality, of truth, of the world, of space and time, of human history and destiny."
"There is no god but the God" Tawheed - Fundamentals of Tawheed
Origins of Biblical Monotheism : Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts
Akhenaten-Akhenaton and the Myth of Monotheism Part One by Vincent Bridges
"Without an understanding of how the Egyptians viewed the idea of "one" god, the unity principle, it will be difficult to see how this concept became corrupted through misapplication over time."
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
"Hinduism is a subtle, complex, multi-dimensional spiritual cosmos. Although it spawned a great and powerful religion with profound philosophies and daring intellectual constructs, it never ceased to be a way of life. It never wholly identified with the religious forms it gave birth to (Shaivism, Vaishnavism, et al), nor was it subsumed by them. This is how it remains a living civilization: the individual seeker is accommodated theoretically and actually. Even today a seeker may reject the world of man and the world of formal religion, and pursue a solitary salvation on the banks of the Ganges or in the Himalayan mists. None may chastise him for deviance (for there is none), nor catechize him about the path to take (for there are as many paths as there are seekers)."
The manacles of monotheism by Sandhya Jain
"Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the omnipotent father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.
The founders of the United States were not enthusiasts of the sky-god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether ... "
Gore Vidal - MONOTHEISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Monotheism is Dead
"Within the deepest sheath of the heart is the Light of lights ... " Monotheism or Polytheism?
A distinction has to be made between exoteric and esoteric monotheism
The Error of Monotheism
"The First Commandment of all monotheisms is: I am the Lord, thy God: Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. All monotheisms are vengeful, aggressive, expansionist, intolerant." Timothy Leary
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte," is how Camus began his challenge to French wartime fiction in L'Etranger.
The sum of private parts
Oil and Water : Abrahamic Monotheism versus the Buddha's Dharma
by Gan Uesli Starling
posted by Andrew 11/15/2002 01:54:00 PM
Monday, November 11, 2002
Beware of the Dead Metaphor
"We may remember now the poets' insistence, particularly Mallarm�'s and Pound's, that method in metaphor is not only exactitude in the figure but potential of development in that figure."
Elizabeth Sewell - The Human Metaphor (University of Notre Dame Press, 1964, page 59)
"With "dead" metaphors, we can say, rigor mortis has set in: they have no flexibility, no force; they have stiffened into one meaning."
from C. Brooks and R. P. Warren: Modern Rhetoric
Myth & Metaphor
"A lot of science is about metaphor and perhaps the most important metaphor of our age is the selfish gene." Kenan Malik
"Metaphor and analogy are very important to scientific reasoning because they allow us to view phenomena in new and distinct ways. Perhaps the most evocative and influential modern scientific metaphor is that of the 'selfish gene'. Richard Dawkins� memorable phrase illustrates the strengths of metaphor in science. It replaces the drab mathematics of population biology with a wonderfully illuminating picture of how natural selection might work. But it also illustrates the dangers of metaphoric thinking. All too often writers, including Dawkins himself, seem to forget they are dealing with a metaphor and argue as if genes actually were independent agents acting out their selfish desires.
In the case of the selfish gene its metaphoric nature is apparent to all, though some may forget it on occasion. In dealing with the relationship between modern behaviour and that of ancient humans, however, many sociobiologists fail to grasp at all that they are dealing with an analogy, not a true material relationship." Kenan Malik - The Darwinian Fallacy - Prospect Magazine, December 1998
"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." Richard Dawkins
Doctors stole Meinhof terror girl's brain in search for killer gene
"German scientists secretly removed the brain of one of Europe's most infamous terrorists to look for a 'terrorism gene'.
The brain of urban guerilla Ulrike Meinhof, who committed suicide in jail, has been found in a jar at a German university ... "
From Allan Hall in Berlin - The Daily Mail, Saturday, November 9, 2002 - Page 37
"Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture."
Iris Murdoch - Metaphysics and Ethics
"We are offered things or truths. What we have lost is persons."
Iris Murdoch - Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
Reviewed by Alan Jacobs
man is unmade according to his image
posted by Andrew 11/11/2002 07:02:00 AM
Sunday, November 10, 2002
MATTER MODEL MUSIC
"Nature, artistically considered, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps."
As Steven Johnson conceives it, the unnerving gap between "raw information and its numinous life on the screen" is the setting for the interface, the evolving medium ...
God, Man, and the Interface by Harvey Blume
Of Slime Mold and Software
"Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings ... every living being, thinks continually ... In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness ... go hand in hand ... language serves as a bridge between human beings but also a mien, a pressure, a gesture. The emergence of our sense impressions into our own consciousness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs."
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science (Vintage, 1974, pages 298 - 299)
I am reminded of writing theorist David Bartholomae's notion that writing is an "act of aggression disguised as an act of charity."
The Rules of the Game
the hypertext murder case
"Word of mouth ... is the lifeblood of cities." Anjana Ahuja
"In contrast to our current method of bookmarking singular sites without tracking the thought process that leads us to those sites, the Memex allowed users to build their own trails of interest ..." Tropeano Review of Interface Culture
Review: Interface Culture by Steven Johnson
If you want a glimpse of where we might be going, " ... that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone is what we call the interface." (Interface Culture p. 41)
"To make music possible as a separate art one had to immobilize a number of senses, above all the muscular sense (at least relatively : for all rhythm still speaks to our muscles to a certain extent) : so that man no longer straightway imitates and represents bodily everything he feels. Nonetheless, that is the true Dionysian normal condition, at least its original condition: music is the gradually-achieved specialization of this at the expense of the most closely related faculties."
Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols (Penguin, 1990, page 83)
"Paradoxically, the alphabet enabled the Greeks to reduce the massive polyphonies of their oral culture by selecting and logically (visually) connecting what had been simultaneous and musical. If the Greek means of abstracting and conceptualizing was by logical connection, the abstract art and science of the twentieth century proceeds by the contrary means of pulling out the logical (visual) connections in space and time. This returns the art and philosophy of today to musical form. If the Greek drive to abstraction had been to eliminate the acoustic and musical in favour of visual and logical connectedness, our nonrepresentational and abstract art and science assumes a complementary pattern."
Marshall McLuhan and R. K. Logan ALPHABET, MOTHER OF INVENTION
Et Cetera, December 1977, pp. 373-383
"There are, in fact, no connections in the material universe. Einstein, Heisenberg and Linus Pauling have baffled the old mechanical and visual culture of the nineteenth century by reminding scientists in general that the only physical bond in Nature is the resonating interval or "interface." Our language, as much as our mental set forbids us to regard the world in this way. It is hard for the conventional and uncritical mind to grasp the fact that "the meaning of meaning" is a relationship: a figureground process of perpetual change. The input of data must enter a ground or field or surround of relations that are transformed by the intruder, even as the input is also transformed. Knowledge, old or new, is always a figure that is undergoing perpetual change by "interface" with new environments. thus it is never easy to divorce knowledge and experience. In the same way that knowledge and experience are continuously modifying each other, the relation between "hardware" and "software" is not fixed but is in a perpetual state of metamorphosis."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt - Take Today : The Executive as Dropout
"Western man with his highly specialized and precarious individual ego (or private psyche) has resisted all efforts to study the effects of technologies, old or new, upon his own psychic life. "
John Brockman and Ed Rosenfeld - real time ... a catalogue of ideas and information (Pan, London, 1973, page 98 - quoting McLuhan & Nevitt)
"Johnson's primary point is not how the computer has changed our cognition, but how the lens of the interface transforms the way we experience the information sphere, and subsequently the way we think and express ourselves." Anne Tropeano, San Diego State University
Vannevar Bush regarded information as valuable not because of the group it belonged to, but because of "the connections it had to other data" (Interface Culture p. 119)
When we push our paradigms back, we get "history": when we push them forward, we get "science."
posted by Andrew 11/10/2002 01:16:00 PM
Friday, November 08, 2002
TRACES OF EMERGENCE
Why cities behave like ant colonies
"A city seems to pulsate with its own rhythm, as if it is a living, breathing organism." Anjana Ahuja
"What is the relationship between the disparate elements of consciousness, communities and computer games?"
"Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seems to behave like a coherent, living system. The trouble is that the flow of information is mostly one-way." Lewis Thomas
without apparent cognitive resources
Slime mould finds shortest way through a maze
"In a satirical comparison to mankind, Voltaire introduces us to Microm�gas, a giant visitor from the star Sirius who is over 20 miles tall, has a lifespan of about 10 million years and still feels insignificant in the universe." Terry Boyce
Growth after Death - fontenelle - Dreams and God
Introduction to Buddhism
"The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation ...
The whole of English Darwinism breathes something like the musty air of English overpopulation, like the smell of ... distress and overcrowding ...
A natural scientist should come out of his human nook; in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity." F Nietzsche - Joyful Wisdom
Anti-Darwin
"As regards the celebrated 'struggle for life', it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is ... absurd prodigality ...
One should not mistake Malthus for nature ... Darwin forgot the mind (- that is English!)"
Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols
A Question - What is man fashioned by?
An answer - Houses
Holy Matter & the Philosopher's Stone
"The psyche harbours contents, or is exposed to influences, the assimilation of which is attended by the greatest dangers. If the old alchemists ascribed their secret to matter, and if neither Faust nor Zarathustra is a very encouraging example of what happens when we embody this secret in ourselves, then the only course left to us is to repudiate the arrogant claim of the conscious mind to be the whole of the psyche, and to admit that that the psyche is a reality which we cannot grasp with our present means of understanding. I do not call the man who admits his ignorance an obscurantist; I think that is much rather the man whose consciousness is not sufficiently developed for him to be aware of his ignorance.
I hold the view that the alchemist's hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious. We are dealing with life-processes which, on account of their numinous character, have from time immemorial provided the strongest incentive for the formation of symbols. These processes are steeped in mystery; they pose riddles with which the human mind will long wrestle for a solution, and perhaps in vain. For, in the last analysis, it is extremely doubtful whether human reason is a suitable instrument for this purpose. Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an 'art', feeling - and rightly so - that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name. The alchemists themselves warned us: Rumpite libros, ne corda vestra rumpantur (Rend the books, lest your hearts be rent asunder), and this despite their insistence on study. Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding."
Carl Jung
"Glassy Essence was not a philosophical doctrine, but a picture which literate men found presupposed by every page they read."
Richard Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Blackwell, 1990, Page 42)
"Our consciousness is, in part, structured like a narrative. We tend to behave as if we were a character in a story."
David Lodge Thinks
Sense and Sensibility
Self-annihilation as the price of knowledge?
posted by Andrew 11/08/2002 02:58:00 PM
Monday, November 04, 2002
THE ABSENCE OF THE BLOG
"This is the music, anyone who has ears should hear." Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok
Poetry is the plough that turns up time
"Now, ever since Mallarm� we have felt that the other of language is always posed by the language itself as that in which it looks for a way out, in order to disappear into it, or for an Outside, in which to be reflected. Which means not simply that the Other is already part of this language, but that as soon as this language turns around to respond to its Other, it is turning towards another language, and we must be aware that this other language is other, and also that it, too, has its Other. At this point we come very close to Wittgenstein's problem, as corrected by Bertrand Russell: that every language has a structure about which one can say nothing in that language, but that there must be another language dealing with the structure of the first and possessing a new structure about which one cannot say anything except in a third language - and so forth."
Maurice Blanchot The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays (Station Hill Press 1981, Page 130)
"Because they envelop us in a world-view, environments are intrinsically imperceptible. We are inside them like fish swimming in a circumscribed tank. Environments turn us into experts of the limited field, but ignorant of the total field. An 'environmental thinker' is gullible but mimics expertise. He regurgitates concepts, substituting cudlike closed circuits for perception. Since environments swallow us whole, in ritual fashion, we require an outsider, or a counter-environment, to perceive them."
From The Hidden Environment - Basic McLuhan: Marshall McLuhan and the Senses
Poetisation of the metropolis Cosmopolis May 1897 Key Concepts of Holopoetry
"Mallarm�, who in the crystalline structure of his certainly traditionalist writing saw the true image of what was to come, was in the Coup de d�s the first to incorporate the graphic tension of the advertisement in the printed page." Walter Benjamin - One-Way Street
"Cr�er, c'est m�tisser" (to create is to hybridise) in the words of Adonis
"The clean world of scientific facts, or manufactured artifacts, cannot be understood without looking at the hybrid networks that sustain them. These hybrid networks connect people to machinery, machinery to things, things to funding committees, committees to articles in journals which are written by people and so on. Each of the elements in this hybrid arrangement is active, constantly involved in redefining all other elements in the networks. "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us," as McLuhan used to say ...
For Latour now, the shaping and being shaped of culture, technology, nature and people, is an endlessly ongoing process, and, this is important, one without a clear temporal sequence or cause-effect relationship ...
ANT (Actor Network Theory) yields not the simple truism that everything is connected to everything else which, by the way, is not true at all! Nor does it end in post-modern despair ... Well yes, everything is a construction, but not an arbitrary one. Since not only texts are connected to one another but also people and things, a network is at the same time subjective and objective, infinitely malleable and rigid. And it often changes from one state to the other according to the connections between its constitutive elements."
Source - > Felix Stalder From Figure / Ground to Actor-Networks: McLuhan and Latour
"Captain Surry went over the events again and again with the Tibetans, convinced that the riddle of their unlikely survival and their profound, elastic passivity in the face of hardship after hardship was eluding him. The modern world had done its worst to them, and yet had done nothing at all. The Tibetans were neither stupid men nor, on their own terms, were they ignorant.
Finally, it came to him. For ten years, these two men had believed that they were dead."
Lamps - From Cambodia : A book for people who find television too slow
by Brian Fawcett
Edmond Jab�s and the Question of Death
James Clerk Maxwell once asked - What if the book of nature were really a magazine?
"The invention of a mechanism for the systematic publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of modern science."
John Ziman
Sam Slote - Imposture Book Through the Ages
Mallarm� and the "End of the Book" by William Barker
"It was as if, in place of the Bible, say, as a singularly fixed text, we were to view it now as the multiple books (the biblia, plural) that it actually was. And all this, in the contemporary context, against the resurgence of those (fundamentalists & others) who pretend to a single book, not in Mallarm�'s sense but in that of the tyrannies from which they've descended & which they threaten to restore." Jerome Rothenberg
"A regular journal carries from one research worker to another the various ... observations which are of common interest ... A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw - not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than one individual can exert [italics mine]."
Source - John Ziman - 'Information, Communication, Knowledge,' Nature Magazine, Volume 224, Pages 318 - 324, 25 October 1969
"A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. {But} it is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants .. blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits."
On Societies as Organisms
From Lewis Thomas - The Lives of a Cell (Futura paperback, 1976, Pages 12 - 13)
Squaring the circle: St�phane Mallarm� by John Simon
St�phane Mallarm� : a portrait of the poet as a spider
DELUGE
"Something is being swamped under all these hyped-up bricks of printed paper. One can call this process the triumph of universal education. One could also see it as another example of machine getting the upper hand of master ... Writing is not improved by contraception or genocide or even by selective critical murder. It does respond to education, through good criticism."
Neal Ascherson - The Observer - Sunday 21 September 1986, Page 11
tSUNAMI of iMAGES
"Of the terrible devastation being wrought by the printing press, it is still not possible today to have any conception. The airship is invented, and the imagination crawls along like a stage-coach. Automobile, telephone and the mass dissemination of stupidity - who can say what the brains of the generation after next will be like?"
Karl Kraus - 1908
alive after dearth
"The book is as old as fire & water, and thought is made in the mouth - as it is also in the hands & lungs & with the inner body." Jerome Rothenberg
"A silent white ant, I dig and work" St�phane Mallarm�
posted by Andrew 11/04/2002 04:09:00 PM
Friday, November 01, 2002
Axiomata Esoterica
These fragments shall serve as starting conditions for a self-organising dynamical system. The system is non-linear in that there are infinite possibilities contained in the starting conditions. Growing each fragment separately assures maximum freedom for each node of thought to expand to its full potential. Rather than being laid out in a linear fashion, harnessed to a deductive argument, each node remains independent. The fragment-bases can be re-ordered and re-arranged until their relationships to each other, the pattern of the organic whole, shows itself.
In the modern scientific mythical model, Singularity is the name of God.
Myth is meaning, and meaning transcends time and space. Myth serves to re-connect what is separated in space and time.
Myth is the rich and complex potential of realities accessed through contemplation as opposed to the limited possibilities of the world separated out, delineated by logical deduction.
The atomistic philosophy of logical deduction reduces existence down to ever smaller parts isolated from the whole. This logic of reduction is the logic of destruction. It is the logic of control.
In apposition is the non-linear logic of complexity. It is the logic of construction. It is the logic of freedom. Each part remains separate and the whole is the measure of the relationships among the parts.
Each ego, or conscious perspective in reality, is an extension of the divine into that reality. Reality is the divine relating to itself. There is no being, no time. Only Consciousness co-creating reality. The relationship of ego to the divine shows how freedom of the I need not be ego-centric. Is it the freedom of the alienated ego or is it the true freedom of the deity in mutual respect?
Creation is all the potential maps in the neural network of the mind of God. We suffer from two limitations: we are stuck in one neural configuration, and we think the map is the territory.
1)The possibilities expressed in the scientific materialist model are only the tiniest fraction of the possible relations: Physical reality is crystallized of selected contents of the totality of meanings, or possible ways of relating. Which meanings you recognize are which possibilities you recognize. If we only believe material objects are possible, then there must only be material objects.
2)The second error is the error of believing that our model is the reality. It is to suppose our ideas are about something. The patterns in the neural network are relations, not objects. By understanding the patterns, or meanings, we understand each other.
Objects are defined by their relationships. The relationships form patterns. These patterns are meanings. All the meanings associated with an object are its attributes. Stripped of its attributes, there is no object left.
Corollary to the Fallacy of Materialism is to believe that consciousness is the product of matter. The opposite of Objectivism is Relativism. The relativist apprehends relationships, not objects. To be is to be perceived. To perceive is to grasp a meaning. To grasp a meaning is to apprehend a pattern. If then this pattern is mapped as a mathematical formula, then to be is to be the value of a variable. The variable is a logical object, however. It represents a possible way of relating, a potentia rather than a material object. The apparent object is a product of consciousness relating.
Mind creates matter.
Materialism is self-limiting, and acts as an anchor to the soul, tying it to the material world.
A paradigm is a set of beliefs, or accepted meanings. It is a pattern of patterns. The world consists of meaning. Control of meaning is control of the world. If you do not choose the contents of your mind, someone else will. To control meaning is to interpret. A consensus reality is a set of shared accepted meanings.
The interpreter is steering the ship of human evolution through the river of time.
Disintegration of the ship in time allows integration outside of time.
To deny the excluded middle is to accept paradox. To accept paradox is to accept the absurd, to break the boundaries between meanings. To deny these boundaries is to open up to the totality of meaning in all possible worlds, the totality of being. It is pattern without content, pure consciousness without object.
There is no Being, no time; only consciousness. Being and time are manifestations of change. Creation is a verb. It is consciousness relating to itself.
Time is the observer moving through the phase space of all possible meanings. The phenomenal world is the possible made actual through observation. Maya means �to measure.� It is the measuring of the relationships between observers forming the phenomenal world, the world of illusion. Yin and Yang are alienation and combination. Dark and light.
The apparent one way arrow of time is karma. It is the product of action, the observer moving through the phase-space of creation. The experienced relationships, or collected memories, are thus �in the past.� There is no objective time: Time is relative to the observer.
Time is change. Time is novelty. Time is new meanings. To grasp new understanding, new meanings, is to grasp a new reality. To re-interpret reality is to re-make reality.
Ingression of novelty is the expansion of consciousness into new fields of meaning, or existence.
Timewavezero is the infinite ingression of novelty, the expansion of consciousness to include all possible worlds, the totality of being.
The edge of time is then a paradigm shift. The potential end of the perception that time is linear and absolute, a deliberate step out of the cage of 4 dimensional space-time and into a dynamic new world consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite timescales. I am not talking about the end of the world, the Judeo-Christian apocalypse; that is something that happens to us. What we are looking at is something that we must do.
Posted by permission, the online original is here -> Fragments
posted by Andrew 11/01/2002 12:32:00 PM
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Heckler & Coch 