“The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms… life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
—Virginia Woolf - Modern Fiction
February 2009
“Human consciousness… can be best understood as the operation of a… virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which is runs.”
—Daniel Dennett—Consciousness Explained
Play
“The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
—William S Burroughs
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We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures.
A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and he silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills.
” —Goethe
“I wonder whether fractal images are not touching the very structure of our brains. Is there a clue in the infinitely regressing character of such images that illuminates our perception of art? Could it be that a fractal image is of such extraordinary richness, that it is bound to resonate with our neuronal circuits and stimulate the pleasure I infer we all feel?”
—P. W. Atkins
Noosphere
Though rudimentary, the texts quoted below pin things in a place where I like them as a metaphor for what appears to be one of the more successful ways of comparing our current emerging reality with an abstract model of whatever part of this fits within our comprehension, tiny though that may be.
Definition from the mothernode:
The noosphere can be seen as the “sphere of human thought” being derived from the Greek νους (“nous”) meaning “mind” in the style of “atmosphere” and “biosphere”. In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and thebiosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters ofcyberspace, Vernadsky’s noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.
Deoxy’s page on the Noosphere:
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On to the syntactical future
The starships of the future that will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets.
This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won’t build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we’ll build them as high as we want.
Roof height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost effectiveness and gravity, it will be a parameter ruled by the imagination as well all other parameters and then we will discover what man truly is—when we are able to erect, stabilize, share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual hyperspace that, carefully analyzed, is seen to be linguistic.
from here
Stream of Conciousness: From my deranged mind
I can always find happiness in the beauty, complexity and infiniteness of the world we live in. Looking at and wondering who we are, who we want to be, and what defines or creates all of the aspects of the world we can see, in short what defines human experience, will always remain a tool for reflection, and ultimately satisfaction and stillness in the chaotic world which surrounds us.
If human perception dictates the world as we see it, and we all live in our own world, how do we know it is not simply a constructed world. This leads me to believe that science may not be the empirical pursuit of truth and knowledge, but perhaps simply the study of ‘our world’.
Interpreting the infinity into the infinite
drifted away for awhile
dialogues with the self
consciousness and the articulation of the possible
here is always somewhere else
the place btween waking and dreaming
self portrait as a landscape (mind not person)
a shift to a value system based on creation versus the current system based on consumption
kinetic typography
Living is easy, the goal is to become immortal, to transcend time and space, to transcend the boundaries of the mind. We must change the world through philosophy.Ultimately, I believe that the key to unlocking this cosmic immortality, the infinite universe which is around and inside, it is our mind. Once we can understand the insignificance or, in contrast, the significance, of our existence and experience on this small planet in a never ending void, we can unlock other mental states which may help us transcend human experience, and lock into something much more significant. These “states” may be interpreted as a connection with a divine being or true unity with nature and the universe but I believe these are just illusions connected with the narrow concepts of being that our mind can fathom. We must escape the idea that the universe, that what exists, or doesn’t is limited to what we can observe with our senses. We must realize that these spacial and temporal states are unique among several species, and vary unimaginably within the different forms of living organisms on our planet; such concepts are only comparable to other human states.
Understanding the brain is key to understand being.
Changing the world
1. If one single person, a single unique mind has the power to make significant changes in society, imagine the possibilities a collective group of minds, a true world consciousness, a collective consciousness could achieve.
2. Transcending the boundaries of traditional sociological ideoligies, escaping these programmed boundaries we have created for ourselves to recreate the concept of ‘being’.
I have faith in cycles and I know that it is going to change again
society focusses on escaping reality
we are losing culture for a mush culture, trying to focus on the best (which is subjective), tayloring to individual needs (through the internet) yet losing the focus on cultures and sustaning cultures or at least letting the best of these cultures survive in our digital landscape.
Defy Culture
We have to decypher a history which we have created and in tern interpreted.
Your mind is hackable, open source
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Unseen forces
to document what I’ve done and my feelings about a certain place or event
I’m just responding to what’s in front of me, relying on my first impression to guide me along. It’s almost like a Ouija board, where I let these unseen forces guide my pen along
Hip-hop’s foundation, built on sampling, storytelling, cultural references, and competitive attitude, encouraged an entire generation to express themselves
When I travel I realize what really matters, so I shed unnecessary feelings, and learn new sensations that I need. Traveling sort of resets me. It’s frequently difficult to see our lives from the outside, like tourists. In my case, [feelings can] materialize in color, like when I taste new foods or flavors, my color sense changes magically. I think about how what I just experienced will appear in my next work, because the good things and the bad things will all affect me, and I have been able to enjoy traveling because I have this mode of expression called painting, by which I express boredom and excitement.
I like vacations in nature, the great outdoors. Without a care in the world, just passing time slowly, making my mind empty. That’s really important to have sometimes.
” —James Jean
“Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness”
—Miguel de Unamugo
“My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.”
—Miguel de Unamuno
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Gasping the Concept of the Eternal.
The world is being changed all the time- change is the engine that drives the universe. What needs to be done is more thinking about change: can we co-exist with each other, other animals and environments?
To me being alive means consciousness and I remember the moment when I was 4 years old and realized I was me and nobody else. It was very strange and wonderful. One theory is that consciousness is the firing between connections in the brain. Whatever it is, it is marvellous and I do not know why it exists. Sweet Fuck All. We die. We get eaten by worms, and then we make the grass greener. Dying is simple. Its the grieving thats the hard part.
Are we anywhere near where we need to be?
The planet is having a mid-life crisis
“Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
—Howard Zinn
Listen
Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express
“Given that the krautrock quartet did so much to de-individualize the pop star—donning uniforms, foregrounding machines, and absorbing the performer within a technologically determined system—it’s ironic that ‘Trans-Europe Express’ would help give birth to hip-hop, arguably the most ego-driven genre in pop music. Afrika Bambaataa and coproducer Arthur Baker borrowed the song’s main riff and fused with a fudgety rhythm—reminiscent of Kraftwerk’s 1981 song ‘Numbers’—to create Bambaataa’s 1982 hit ‘Planet Rock’, a cornerstone of hip-hop history.”—Philip Sherburne in The Pitchfork 500.
