consciousness
Manifesto for Slow Communication
Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication (via WSJ)
Where trivia and gossip pass for news…
A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, [...]
McLuhan’s Wake
So what I end up saying… is…take control of your entire reality… your media, your mythic life…your practical brain are the product of what you have made it to be…or have, quite willingly, accepted programs from others. And again, don’t forget about those cute feedback loops…via McLuhan’s Wake
The universe will be flying like a bird…
It just so happens that Leary makes a number of posthumous appearances in Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, one of which is a fictional conversation with a character called Molly2004, who tries to figure out what will separate future humans from “bacteria who would talk and think” once we will be “saturating the universe with our [...]
On or off the cushion
The direct recognition of your true nature is available in every instant, on or off the cushion, whether you meditate or not…
via Pointing to the Moon
All the world’s a stage
Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Erving Goffman proposed in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that the very warp and woof of the social world consists of carefully constructed dramaturgy, albeit of a manner that most performers were unconscious. Our daily lives and cultural rituals provide all the settings, costumes, props [...]
They call it ambient awareness
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
Each little [...]
The extension we call the net
The extension we call the net, the grid, the Infobahn, is more than the sum of its parts, it may perchance lead to an actual organizing principle of reality itself. An organizing principle somewhat akin to an operating system, yet directed, and multidimensional, interactive and intelligent.
—Wildcat: Mind Habitat, the quest for a home
Explaining the magic of consciousness with one word
Dennett argues that the ‘hard problem‘ is a red herring – the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.
He suggests that there isn’t a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but [...]
My cranium is open source
Our mental privacy and cognitive liberty depend first and foremost on the difference of interconnectivity. Moreover, the very concept of the individual, as currently understood, depends on the difference in interconnectivity. Once this difference changes, i.e. internal states of the nervous system are becoming increasingly accessible, our very notion of privacy, privileged access, cognitive liberty [...]
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