May 2010
76 posts
"Be Drunken" - Charles Baudelaire →
deathkittydreaming.tumblr.com
Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps…
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“…. Distrust everything I say, I am telling the truth.
… The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
…. that the truth is a matter of the imagination.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (via fast-t-feasts) (via wildcat2030)
… The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
…. that the truth is a matter of the imagination.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (via fast-t-feasts) (via wildcat2030)
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“I close the eyes of my intelligence and, giving voice to the unformulated within me, I offer myself the sense of having wrested from the unknown something real. I believe in spontaneous conjurations. On the paths along which my blood draws me, it cannot be that one day I will not discover a truth.[1]”
—Artaud, Deleuze and The Will to Nothingness | Minimal ve Maksimal Yazılar (via wildcat2030) (via montycantsin)
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“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”
—Einstein (via oceanofmind)
“ “Exponential growth requires the exponential consumption of resources (matter, energy, and time), and there are always limits to this. Why should we think intelligent machines would be different? We will build machines that are more ‘intelligent’ than humans, and this might happen quickly, but there will be no singularity, no runaway growth in intelligence. There will be no single godlike intelligent machine. Like today’s computers, intelligent machines will come in many shapes and sizes and be applied to many different types of problems.
”Intelligent machines need not be anything like humans, emotionally and physically. An extremely intelligent machine need not have any of the emotions a human has, unless we go out of our way to make it so. No intelligent machine will ‘wake up’ one day and say ‘I think I will enslave my creators.’ Similar fears were expressed when the steam engine was invented. It won’t happen. The age of intelligent machines is starting. Like all previous technical revolutions, it will accelerate as more and more people work on it and as the technology improves. There will be no singularity or point in time where the technology itself runs away from us.” ” —Jeff Hawkins in Tech Luminaries Address Singularity | IEEE Spectrum (via chrbutler) (via amiquote)
”Intelligent machines need not be anything like humans, emotionally and physically. An extremely intelligent machine need not have any of the emotions a human has, unless we go out of our way to make it so. No intelligent machine will ‘wake up’ one day and say ‘I think I will enslave my creators.’ Similar fears were expressed when the steam engine was invented. It won’t happen. The age of intelligent machines is starting. Like all previous technical revolutions, it will accelerate as more and more people work on it and as the technology improves. There will be no singularity or point in time where the technology itself runs away from us.” ” —Jeff Hawkins in Tech Luminaries Address Singularity | IEEE Spectrum (via chrbutler) (via amiquote)
“ “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn.” ”
—Alvin Toffler via The Secret to Learning is Unlearning (via amiquote)
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“Those facts give rise to the conjecture that the series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If the plan does not fail, some reader of “Kubla Khan” will dream, on a night centuries removed from us, of marble or of music. This man will not know that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams will have the key.”
—JL Borges, The Dream of Coleridge (via rhea137)
“I suggest to you, now, that the word “idea,” in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with “difference.” Kant, in the Critique of Judgment—if I understand him correctly—asserts that the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact. He argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts. The Ding an sich [thing as such], the piece of chalk, can never enter into communication or mental process because of this infinitude. The sensory receptors cannot accept it; they filter it out. What they do is to select certain facts out of the piece of chalk, which then become, in modern terminology, information.”
—Form Sutstance and Difference (via wildcat2030)
“We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic systems—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an individual mind.”
—Form Sutstance and Difference (via wildcat2030)
“ “What (Thomas) Merton does, in terms of knowing and knowledge, is to capture anew a quality of knowing alien to our modern and western consciousness, one that reflects an integral relationship between mind and heart, between lived inner experience and insight, between intellect and intuition, and between understanding and being. This way of knowing seems an important, if not necessary basis for growth in wisdom and contemplative awareness. In fostering it, Merton provides a striking and instructive contrast to the all-too-familiar approach in which learning is construed as a matter of acquisition, of absorption, control, and manipulation of information by a detached and unreflective individual, or as a purely cerebral act. Merton’s understanding of the purpose and manner of knowing implies a profound interior or ontological openness and attentiveness, and the possibility of a new, renewed, or deeper re-orientation of self in love. As he put it simply, “We study in order to love.” ”
—Thomas Del Prete in his speech “The Contemplative as Teacher: Learning from Thomas Merton” presented at the first general meeting of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Southampton, England: May 1996). (via Thomas Del Prete on Thomas Merton’s epistemology) (via amiquote)
“ “It is impossible to establish the internal logical consistency of a very large class of deductive systems… unless one adopts principles of reasoning so complex that their internal consistency is as open to doubt as that of the systems themselves.” ”
—Kurt Gödel (Source: x0) (via amiquote)
“ “If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it.” ”
—Albert Einstein (via amiquote)
“I reserve the right to evolve. What I think and feel today is subject to revision tomorrow.”
—Gwen Thomas (via quote-book and leda-swanson) (via arsvitaest) (via wildcat2030)
Checking in on Saturn - The Big Picture - Boston.com →
boston.com
While we humans carry on with our daily lives down here on Earth, perhaps stuck in traffic or reading blogs, or just enjoying a Springtime stroll, a school-bus-sized spacecraft called Cassini continues to gather data and images for us - 1.4 billion kilometers (870 million miles) away. Over the past months, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has made several close flybys of Saturn’s moons, caught the Sun’s reflection glinting off a lake on Titan, and has brought us even more tantalizing images of ongoing cryovolcanism on Enceladus. Collected here are a handful of recent images from the Saturnian system. (30 photos total)
“The common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to possess it; and yet our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful, but rather to lay a permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies. We want to give our experience of the sublime weight in our lives.”
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- Alain de Botton
Immortalism: Ernest Becker and Alan Harrington on Overcoming Biological Limitations | h+ Magazine
(via wildcat2030)
“A person spends years coming into this own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned – finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold – and then the real tragedy: That it might take sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying.”
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- Ernest Becker discussing Andre Malraux
Immortalism: Ernest Becker and Alan Harrington on Overcoming Biological Limitations | h+ Magazine
(via wildcat2030)
Magnetic monopole experiment at CERN could rewrite laws of physics →
physorg.com
An experiment led by a University of Alberta researcher, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, could dramatically change our concepts of basic physics, revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and could eventually lead to technologies in future generations that right now only exist in science fiction.
“It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths”
—Greil Marcus (via hotparade) (via aperfectcommotion) (via rhea137)
“Nothing is more abstract than reality.”
—Giorgio Morandi (via artnotartnot) (via masakepic) (via montycantsin)
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Like Neurons in the Brain: A Molecular Computer That Evolves →
hplusmagazine.com
“This new molecular computer uses an organic molecular layer and can evolve to solve complex problems, similar to neurons. Like the human brain — and unlike any existing computer — the tiny molecular computer heals itself if there is a defect. Anirban Bandyopadhyay, from the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, explains: ‘No existing man-made computer has this property, but our brain does. If a neuron dies, another neuron takes over its function.’
Interestingly, the evolving patterns generated on the molecular layer — when viewed with a scanning tunneling microscope — bear an uncanny resemblance to fMRI images of various events in the human brain.”
The Singularity is nearing…
