July 2010
56 posts
“
The distinctions between inside and outside, and between virtual and non-virtual realities, that an observer may make do not apply to the operations of the nervous system. The distinctions between perception and illusion, or between virtual and non-virtual realities, pertain to the operation of the observer as a languaging being.
Our being as human beings occurs in languaging, in the flow of our being in conversations. A human being is a dynamic manner of being in language, not a body, not an entity that has an existence that can be imagined independent of language and can then use language as an instrument for communication.
If we attend to what we do and to what happens with us when we participate in a conversation, we see that we live (dance) together in a flow of recursive coordinations of languaging and emotioning.
” —- Humberto Maturano.
via Scribd: The Biological Foundations of Virtual Realities and their Implications for Human existence
(via jamreilly)
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“Excuse me, let me tell you something: When America opened up the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ‘Cause they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities and dig their subways—to make them richer. The Carnegies and The Rockerfellers: they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor and family and loyalty—and some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we weren’t educated like the Americans but we had the BALLS to take what we wanted! And those other folks, those JP Morgans, they were crooks and killers, too, but that was the business, right? The American Way.”
—
Tony Soprano (via early-onset-of-night)
Love this show forever.
(via gadgetry)
(via popnihilism)
“Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.” —Hafiz (via paynehollow) (via saturnrising) (via rememo)
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.” —Hafiz (via paynehollow) (via saturnrising) (via rememo)
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
—Albert Camus (via wildcat2030)
“All of this should be couched in the notion that the dichotomy between indeterminism and determinism is a false dichotomy, because brains operate in the gray area between the two. This may be the most difficult concept to grasp, that indeterminism and determinism are not mutually exclusive, but delineate a spectrum of what one may call ‘probabilism’.”
—bjoern.brembs.blog: The will and its freedom: biological evidence from invertebrates (via wildcat2030)
“The notion of Emptiness engenders Compassion.”
—Milarepa (via vril) (via itnumberpi)
“The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far. It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness …”
—
Nietzsche: (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 1886).
Your Move: The Maze of Free Will - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
(via wildcat2030)
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
—Carl G. Jung (via fuckyeahcarljung) (via heartmindspirit) (via parkstepp)
“possibilian: a word to describe those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”
—The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman < Killing the Buddha (via wildcat2030)
Definition of a theoretical physicist
fuckyeahchemistry: Noun. A theoretical physicist is one that is postulated to exist, but has never been actually observed in the laboratory.
“Violence is described (in the media) and criticized when it is practiced by people who are oppressed, when they try to defend themselves somehow. But when it is practiced by a state, it is not described as violence.”
—
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti
-And as Zizek would point out. This method of describing subjective violence in a way which shows preference to one party (the state) is in fact a subtle, but no less potent act of violence in itself.
(via thebarstoolphilosopher)
(via popnihilism)
Nietzsche’s idea is that things and actions are already interpretations. So to interpret is to interpret interpretations, and thus to change things, “to change life.” What is clear for Nietzsche is that society cannot be an ultimate authority.
The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority.- Deleuze in ” Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter”
“I do not ‘concentrate’ in my reading … either exclusively or primarily
on those points that appear to be the most ‘important’, ‘central’,
‘crucial’. Rather, I deconcentrate, and it is the secondary, eccentric,
lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are ‘important’ to me
and are the source of many things, such as pleasure, but also insight into
the general functioning of a textual system.” —Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (1988)
(via gcso) (via popnihilism)
on those points that appear to be the most ‘important’, ‘central’,
‘crucial’. Rather, I deconcentrate, and it is the secondary, eccentric,
lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are ‘important’ to me
and are the source of many things, such as pleasure, but also insight into
the general functioning of a textual system.” —Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (1988)
(via gcso) (via popnihilism)
“Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.”
—Deleuze (via delizious) (via deleuzenotes)
“Some argue that enhancement is unnatural and threatens to take us beyond our humanity. This argument, too, suffers from a major problem. All of our civilization is unnatural. A fair speaker could not fly across a continent, take a taxi to an air-conditioned auditorium, and give a microphone-assisted PowerPoint presentation decrying enhancement as unnatural without either a sense of humor or a good argument for why these enhancements are different. Because they change our physical bodies? So do medicine, good food, clothing, and a hundred other unnatural changes. Because they change our brains? So does education. What argument justifies drawing the line here and not there? A strong naturalness argument against direct brain enhancements, in particular, has not been—and I think cannot be—made. Humans have constantly been changing our world and ourselves, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. A golden age of unenhanced naturalness is a myth, not an argument.”
—Enhancing Brains - Dana Foundation (via wildcat2030)
“The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence. In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownesses of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.”
—deleuze (via mrmuo) (via mattermedia) (via wildcat2030)
Daniel Dennett on Consciousness
“There is no single, definitive “stream of consciousness,” because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where “it all comes together” for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of “narrative” play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine is not a “hard-wired” design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists. The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless “images” and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.”
—
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, (tnx inwrdbound) (via amiquote)
“I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (via libraryland) (via frenzyandlightning) (via parkstepp)
“If philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it doesn’t find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic state or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. WE LACK RESISTANCE TO THE PRESENT. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”
—“What is Philosophy” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
“Indeed to be free and to be rational, in the Kant-Hegel-Brandom account, is one and the same. This is because the rational agent, in binding herself to a norm, gives the law to herself, and thereby acts autonomously and freely. Human freedom consists not just in doing what one wants, as merely sentient creatures can do, but in taking responsibility for the norms that one binds oneself to and the commitments one makes, including the rational consequences and presuppositions of those commitments, which is integral to sapience.”
—via TPM: Review: Reason In Philosophy (via jamreilly) (via wildcat2030)
“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. The lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.”
—Alan Watts (via presentidea) (via be-epic) (via northernnostos) (via heartmindspirit) (via parkstepp)
“If philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it doesn’t find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic state or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. WE LACK RESISTANCE TO THE PRESENT. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”
—“What is Philosophy” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online →
openculture.com
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union. The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists. Ingmar Bergman went so far as to say, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” And Akira Kurosawa acknowledged his influence too, adding, “I love all of Tarkovsky’s films. I love his personality and all his works. Every cut from his films is a marvelous image in itself.”
Shot between 1962 and 1986, Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using a distinctive cinematic style. Long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery – they all figure into the archetypical Tarkovsky film.
Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online – for free. Each film is listed in our Free Movie collection, but here you can access each major film in the order in which they were made.
- Ivan’s Childhood (1962)
- Andrei Rublev (1966) Part 2 here
- Solaris (1972) Part 2 here
- The Mirror (1975)
- Stalker (1979)
- Nostalghia (1983)
- The Sacrifice (1985)
FYI: Strictly Film School offers a short summary and analysis of each film. A big thanks to Eren Gulfidan (@gulfi) for the heads up here. And kudos to Film Annex for bringing this body of work online.
All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online is a post from: Open Culture.
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“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
—Umberto Eco (via lastchatwithphontaine) (via rhea137) (via wildcat2030)
“The most important breakthrough came when individuals trusted one another enough to share their thoughts and believe what somebody else told them. That milestone was passed about 2.5 million years ago. Attempts to teach sign language have been successful enough to show that apes are smart enough to learn a few hundred words and even put a couple of them together, but in the wild they never actually do it. And even when trained to use sign language, they use it only to manipulate their trainers or in response to a question. So it cannot be intelligence that keeps apes from using any language at all. The problem appears to be that there is no benefit from sharing information. If I tell you what I know and you only give me hogwash in return, I lose, you win. Somehow our ancestors came to trust one another and reap the great benefits that come from sharing knowledge honestly. More than intelligence, more than syntax, that social change made language possible.”
—Why humans speak: It’s a matter of trust (via xixidu)
“This question of speed is important and also very complex. It doesn’t mean the first in the race: you can be late through speed. It doesn’t mean changing either: you can be invariable and constant through speed. Speed is to be caught in a becoming - which is not a development or an evolution. One must be like a taxi, queue, line of flight, traffic jam, bottleneck, green and red lights, slightly paranoid, brushes with the police.”
—deleuze (via mrmuo) (via pareidoliac) (via uminuscula) (via popnihilism)
“The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.”
—The Moral Instinct - New York Times (via wildcat2030)
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“Most new analogies lead nowhere, but occasionally they reveal something important. Creativity doesn’t operate when your focus is high; only when your thoughts have started to drift is creativity possible. We find creative solutions to a problem when it lingers at the back of our minds, not when it monopolizes attention by standing at the front. You can’t make yourself fall asleep; nor can you make yourself have a creative inspiration (in the way you can make yourself solve an arithmetic problem). Sleep and creativity happen only when your thoughts drift beyond your control.”
—Edge: DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHTBy David Gelernter (via wildcat2030)
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