Time's Fool

There is no such thing as leadership!

2012-01-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

Try out this idea for size: "Leadership" is a reified concept. That is to say, the idea of leadership is constructed from a variety of behaviors (by presumed leaders) and from a variety of experiences by "followers". However, while the concept as a culturally transmitted idea serves useful purposes, there is in reality no such "thing" as leadership.

Think about "leadership functions" or "leader behaviors" instead of about "leadership". Then consider for any particular situation or group or organization what might be the optimal distribution/organization of those functions and behaviors. Do they need to be collected together in a single role/status? Or can they most effectively be distributed among the members of the group/organization??

Our culture leads us (!) to assume that a "leader" is needed, when in fact what is needed is that certain functions be satisfied, certain behaviors performed. Maybe they can be spread out among all the members of a group/organization? Sometimes, at least? . . . (And maybe in the long run that will work better for everyone concerned?)

(Cf., "participatory leadership," "democratic leadership," "group dynamics," "process governance," "distributed leadership," "participatory democracy.")

OWS clearly has gone in this direction.

Why OccupyWallStreet?

2012-01-07T18:11:00.000-07:00

While individual memory builds up to collective memory, collective memory frames/limits/facilitates individual memory. The "big picture" is sometimes hard to see, but it can be seen. This is a pretty clear look at the present in the frame of the recent past.

How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation

2011-11-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation:

"This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala.

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”"

'via Blog this'

Transcending the market economy

2011-10-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

(from a "Foundations of The Free Market Economy" course.)

It's an economy even if there is no trade! The arrangement of social relations toward the satisfactory provisioning of all the people involved is an economy. In one extreme, if every individual alone were to provide for the satisfaction of all hir (his/her) needs, that would be the "negative" endpoint of the scale. (Negative in the sense that no economy would exist.) At the other extreme, if everything went into a common pool and everyone simply drew out what they needed, that would the other endpoint. (Still, an utterly simple economy.) In fact, most hunting-gathering cultures arranged for some division of labor and some redistribution of the results of that labor, but a redistribution that involved traditional/customary status-based assignment/choice of labor and distribution patterns. E.g., both the male hunters and the female gatherers would, by customary expectation, give some of the fruits of their labor --meat or vegetables-- to relatives and neighbors, who would pass some on to other relatives and neighbors. Early agriculture, with its new potential for storage of overproduction, resulted in a great increase in hierarchical relationships, differentials in relative power, and opportunities for changing the traditional patterns of labor allocation and product distribution. Butactual trade (you give to me and I give to you in exchange) is not a necessary principle of distribution; distribution by status-right is quite sufficient for operating an economy.

The institutionalization of exchange as the major principle of labor allocation and product distribution is the invention of the free-market system. Sharing can occur without trading, without any formalized exchange as such. (The almost-inability of people in industrialized economies to think that way is the major new cultural idea that we find in free-market economies.) Reciprocal gifting is the closest we usually are able to come to thinking in the old way. . . . Bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, or party favors . . . if there is no normative expectation of return . . . is perhaps even closer. I guess that potluck dinners are really a survival, though, of the older non-market economic behavior! (When you go down to your local Occupy Wall Street demonstration, be sure to bring a food item or something else to share! That's a start at setting up an alternative economy.)

Get it? . . . Sharing without trading. Sharing!

Note to a class on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

2011-09-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

Conscious thoughts.
Clear thoughts.
Precise thoughts.
Sloppy thinking.
Unconscious thoughts, and wishes.
Muddled thoughts.
Half-baked ideas.
True thoughts.
Incomplete thoughts.
Imprecise thoughts.
Simple thoughts.
Complex thoughts.
Thoughts like a shuffle-step-shuffle.
Thoughts like a tango, or flamenco, wild, abandoned, and passionate.
Thoughts like a waltz, precise and flowing.
Inarticulate thoughts, disordered, meandering.
Thoughts of beauty, thoughts of pain, prohibited thoughts, required thoughts, thoughts of the heart's desire and of the punishments of the devil.
Logical thoughts, thoughts like a treasure hunt, or like a maze.
Thinking through a long proof of a mathematical theorem, slowly, carefuly, each step selected carefully to make the following step possible.
Thinking through an unproven mathematical theorem, puzzling, selecting, sifting, rejecting, accepting, creating.
Thinking dangerously.
Thinking differently.
Thinking exactly like you're supposed to, exactly what you've been told.
Thinking an old, comfortable, thought.
Thinking a new, exciting, or scary, of completely unfamiliar thought.
Dumb thoughts.
Bright thoughts.
Depressing thoughts.
Liberating thoughts.
Dancing through one's own mind, twinkle-toes, or ploddingly.
Thinking the thoughts of the great writers of the world, as the printed words pass through the portals of the eyes into one's eager mind.
Practicing thinking, slowly getting more skilled at it.
Thoughts like flowers, thoughts like a machine . . .

It's the 21st Century now, folks!

2011-03-03T11:12:00.002-07:00

The Economist, Mar 3rd 2011:

India’s Supreme Court ordered the head of the country’s anti-corruption commission to resign, because he faces corruption charges.

The recently retired head of Bolivia’s drug police was arrested in Panama and sent to the United States to face charges of trafficking cocaine.

Jon Stewart debunks O'Reilly

2011-02-03T14:23:00.001-07:00

Laws of Form as emergent from Wittgenstein's Tractatus

2010-09-24T10:58:00.001-07:00

"The symbolism of logic can be rightly construed as a determination to reproduce as mechanically as possible the deductive thinking that takes place in our brains in a split second without our knowing how. . . . Accordingly, it is with form that logic is concerned. The content of any argument is nothing more than an inconsequential vehicle of its form. And symbolism is the device for distilling the essence." Gerald B. Standley, New Methods in Symbolic Logic, p.3, 1971
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/039505429X//104-9891999-2979931?condition=all

"In trying to place (the syllogism) in a deeper mathematical foundation, we come across (or up against) the inconsequential relation, apparent in ordinary speech, between a form and its content, occasioned by the partly accidental fact that the existence of a particular content can serve to negate a general form." LOF, p.129, 1969

The Essential Tractatus

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of truth function is: [∂,ß,N(ß)
This is the general form of proposition.
6.001. This says nothing else than that every proposition is the result of successive applications of the operation N' (ß) to the elementary propositions.
5.502. . . . N(ß) is the negation of all the values of the propositional variable ß
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Pulse negates marker for time of its passage.

(Imaginary space
Oscillation
Transparency)

In evaluating e we imagine ourselves in S0 with e and thus surrounded by the unwritten cross which is the boundary to S1. LOF, p.42
If the value of every other indicator in Sq is n, the oscillation of v will be transmitted through Sq to Sq-1. Under this condition call Sq transparent. LOF, p.43.

The One who denies.

("I, knower, marker, am nothing.")

The market should peak within three weeks

2010-04-16T23:07:00.001-07:00

"If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evidence it seems a reasonable expectation. By this scenario, the market should peak within three weeks and then fall for six years."

The Elliott Wave Theorist—April 16, 2010 –– p.6

from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism

2010-04-16T14:52:00.001-07:00

Credit cards have been only one piece of the historically massive shift in the organization of our economy, and thus of our society, from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism. Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971 was another indicator of that shift. (Conservatives today rant about the shift from "real" money to "fiat" money, instead of focussing on the perversion of capitalism that widespread credit and over-expanded financial markets constitute. Socialists rant about the loss of connection between money and its real basis, labor, but only sometimes concern themselves with the social compact at the root of all social order and its necessary concommitants, interpersonal trust and the interpersonal infrastructure that is social capital. These are matters of economic philosophy that are really worth getting your heads around because they are at the root of the crisis of Western civilization. But as with all crisis-cores, they are heavily masked by smokescreens, mirrors, and fireworks.)

Interrogating The Peninsular Individual: A Sketch of A Presentation

2009-03-31T16:05:00.005-07:00

Interrogating The Peninsular Individual:
A Rumination on
The Dialectical Relationship Constituting
Individual Minds and Group Mind

• Rubinoff:

Art is the map of the human soul; each original piece is proof of the journey. As the artist navigates the unknown, the art adds to the collective memory.
Art has been liberated to address the internal, intuitive reality of the collective human memory.
Art is truth by metaphor.

Call for Papers - Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park

• John Donne:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), No. XVII

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson:

Primary metaphors are part of the cognitive unconscious. . . . From a conceptual point of view, primary metaphors are cross-domain mappings, from a source domain (the sensorimotor domain) to a target domain (the the domain of subjective experience), preserving inference. . . . Indeed, the preservation of inference is the most salient property of conceptual metaphors.

Philosophy in The Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to Western Thought, pp. 56, 58

• Melanie Klein:

The assumption was relinquished of an atomistic, only recently socially modelled individual, who is faced with a closed world, in favour of a mental picture in which the subject and his reality are gradually differentiated and mutually developed.

Rosemarie Kennel, Bion’s Psychoanalysis
and Edelman’s Neuroscience

• W.R. Bion:

The concept of the container/contained, developed by Bion as the model inherent to the human being of psychic development at the link and coordinating point between the soma and psyche seems here to be considerably more differentiated and plausible. Sense and meaning do not come into existence intrasubjectively, but right from the beginning in an interactional connection.

Rosemarie Kennel, Bion’s Psychoanalysis
and Edelman’s Neuroscience

“The human soul” is a phrase that oscillates between the singular inflection and the collective. “My soul.” “Our soul.” “The Soul.” This paper is a study of that oscillation. The human individual (each human individual) is both a particle and wave. A wave in the (genetic and mental) body of the collectivity, the species, the culture.

In addition to its origins in Rubinoff’s insight of Art as a mapping of the human soul and Donne’s metaphor of the peninsular individual, two main themes inform this paper:

1. Abstract concepts are metaphors rooted in the sensorimotor domain.
2. Thinking is enabled by supportive group membership, which may be real or imaginary.

These two themes are united developmentally by the psychoanalytic understanding that the individual does not emerge ab initio from either the union of sperm and egg or from the womb of a mother, but only slowly is created interactively by differentiation out of the cognitive/emotional union of mother/infant. And they are united conceptually by Klein/Bion’s theories of container/contained as the emotional-cognitive basis of thinking.

Contributory, themes include:

3. The importance of sensorimotor metaphors for thinking. (Lakoff)
4. The importance of family and group culture for individual identity formation.
5. The importance of containment in a collectivity for the ability to think.

i. Old thoughts
ii. New thoughts
6. The individual-group dialectic.
7. Lyotard’s figure of discourse genres:

i. The differend between them;
ii. Their embedment in the universal act of phrasing.
8. The Borromean knot–Lacan’s three orders, three consistencies:
i. The Imaginary;
ii. The Real;
iii. The Symbolic.

This is a dispatch from the DreamTime. The place the Australian Aborigine believes is a Reality in some manner superior to objective waking reality. The Dreaming, the EveryWhen. Jung’s Pleroma, Heidegger’s Womb of Mnemosyne.

This is an exploration of the notion that all humans share a single Soul.

The stance I take in these ruminations is that the biophysical medium –the human body— which is the necessary condition of all our life and of all our experience constitutes a structuring basis for all experience and that the genetic universality of that body/brain system in its relation to the biophysical world within which and in adaptation with which –with, not to-- results in a single potential-experience base for all human beings. The stance I take, in addition, is that the experience of being an individual is a cultural experience bonded to both a primordial group membership and emergent group memberships.

Neither an old-fashioned cultural relativism nor a new-fashion postmodernism are in contradiction with this stance. Both are accommodated within it. It is the continent, the maine, of which each man is a peece, each culture is a peece, each discourse genre is a peece, each heterogenous narrative framing is a peece, each aesthetic style is a peece.

This stance shares certain features/approaches/sentiments with the feminist critique of Western phallocentric epistemologies. It also diverges from that critique in certain ways.

This is a reflection on the human imagination. I am here identifying as one the human imagination, the human soul, the Dreaming. My underlying presupposition is that the phenomenon, entity, object, being, process about which I shall speculate in these comments is ineluctably biophysical. However, much of the language I shall use is metaphorical and some of it may seem to be mystical. I am of the opinion that all true mystical statements have empirically biophysical content.

My subject is how we imagine, how we think, how we talk about our experience to each other and to ourselves, how we represent our experience to each other and to ourselves –in whatever medium-- and how that experience is itself already an act of “representation,” or more precisely of signification. Experience is a species –a form—of signification.

≥ ∞ ≤

Witty cultural incongruity

2007-11-19T14:56:00.001-07:00

Bitches Aint Shit A Capella

This music video confronts "hostile black misgynothropic" music with a music style more usually associated with sacred music, even "Eurocentric white" music. A good example of the currently popular transgressive style in art and interpersonal signification.

Impeach Cheney

2007-10-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

Doing the Deportation Rag

2007-05-24T21:35:00.000-07:00

The 12 million illegals here is twice the number of Jews generally considered to have been murdered by the Nazis. A major reason for the creation of the death camps was the enormous organizational difficulty of forcibly emigrating 6 million persons. (Cf., the documents and publications pertaining to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. E.g., Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem.")

The Diary of Anne Frank is one story of Christians hiding Jews to prevent them from being rounded up. It is not the only such case.

The Underground Railway is what the informally organized opponents of slavery in America called the smuggling of slaves north to freedom prior to the Civil War.

Does no one who claims to be in favor of deporting the 12 million have any imagination at all?!! The failure of critical thinking exhibted by the pro-deporters is astounding! The disruption of American society that would result from attempting such a massive inhumane project would be enormous. Not only the economic depression that would result from their lost productivity and their no longer making purchases or paying taxes, (and the uncut lawns and uncared-for children and unbussed dishes) but the growth of an anti-government underground movement to protect the prospective deportees and a likely totalitarian (Nazi-like) response by the government to that opposition.

I think that a second Civil War would not be an unlikely result. Or a revolution.

(There’s not a chance that the US Congress and Senate will vote to deport 12 million people. The people arguing for that result, unless they are totally divorced from reality, must have some other purpose for arguing for it. Why are they wasting the government’s time with this pretense? If the illegal alien population is really a problem —and the evidence that it is is not universally persuasive-- then figure out a way to solve it, instead of play-acting like this! Sickos!)

. . . [Sorry, a bit of a rant there.]

An exchange with a student on the US Army of Occupation

2006-12-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

Judd: I have a friend who was in Desert Storm and he is adamant that we should not be providing the policing function that we are now. He saw first hand just how good we are at waging war and how difficult it is to provide the ongoing security function in a post war environment. It seems that if our military has a clear, definable objective, it functions very well. But when the objective gets muddled, as it does with security/policing of a populace, then it doesn't do so well. The increasing influence of Iraqi politics seems to be eroding our already limited ability to provide the policing/security functions.
------------
Jerry:
The US military is now an occupation force in Iraq. The functions of an army of occupation are vastly different than the functions of an army of conquest. Consequently, both the structure and the organizational culture of the occupation units must be extremely different from the structure and organizational culture of the conquering units. To pretend that the same military organization can do both jobs is so extremely managerially naive that it boggles my mind.

It's like sending assembly line workers out into the field to sell the cars they made. A sales force must be organized, trained, recruited, motivated, remunerated very differently than a group of factory workers. Any MBA student knows that. Why didn't the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President and the Vice-President know that?

I can only imagine that they all have been stuck in self-denial, refusing to admit that the US military is an Army of Occupation in Iraq.

The insurgency is a resistance to foreign occupation, just like the French Resistance in WWII. Just like the Viet Cong. Just like George Washington's Revolutionary Army. The Iraqi people do not want a foreign form of government forced down their throats. Even if we believe it is the best form of government in the world. They don't. Obviously.

Teaching children how to dance nicely with others

2006-10-26T12:01:00.004-07:00

Human beings interact with one another --inter-act. That is, when in the presence of another person, we are constantly responding to each other, to the words we speak, to the gestures we make, to the tone of each other's voice, to the clothes we wear, to the idea we each have of the other.

Verbal communication, non-verbal communication, our ideas of our own social status and the status of the other person. . . . Each of these 'areas' includes a variety of symbols/signs/signals. Interaction between humans is mediated symbolically. We send each other signals and we respond to those signals.

People in each other's presence --whether it is physical presence or presence mediated by text, or telephony, or TV or radio or film, or whatever-- are constantly engaged in a very subtle "dance" with each other. (The "realtime" media, of course, make possible more dynamic inter-action than the recorded media.) This is the dance of what sociologists call "social control". We control each other; that's what responding to another person is --being controlled by them. (Social control, in this view, is essentially mutual, not 'one-way'.) Our moves, our behavior, is responsive to the behavior of other persons.

You smile at someone. They feel good about themself and about you. You have made them happy, so they want to make you happy and to do what you want. (Think about it; isn't this inherent in the human condition?!) You are "controlling" them. You don't have to threaten them with punishment to get them to do what you want; you just have to be nice. (Of course, because of one 'reason'/cause or another, sometimes niceness doesn't do the job.)

When we socialize children, we teach them how to interact with other persons. We teach them how to dance nicely with us and with each other and with friends and relatives and strangers.

Human beings control themselves by means of the social cues that other persons send them. Self-control and social control merge indistinguishably with each other. Our selves are socially constructed; thus our self control is social control.

To teach someone to do the tango, we must show them the moves, and then we must move with them to the music. We don't punish our dance student/partner for making a wrong move. We show them how to make the right move. We show our satisfaction/pleasure when they succeed. We give them support and correction when they make a mistake.

When a child "misbehaves," they are making a mistake in how to dance with us. If you want your child to dance well, be a kind and good and friendly dance teacher! You don't slap your student around for stumbling. So don't slap your kid around for making a misstep, either.

A 'need' to punish a child indicates a failure in parenting, a failure in teaching the dance of living with other people. (Few of us are perfect; our parents weren't perfect dance teachers either. But denying the truth doesn't really help us to be better parents, or our children to be better dancers.)

---How do we know what to do in a social situation?

Conventions: The Land Around Us

2006-08-14T22:02:00.000-07:00

“Conventions: The Land Around Us” is a documentary film essay on the topic of cultural and political change. It takes as its particular subject matter the confrontations that took place between anti-war demonstrators and the US political establishment in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. While bringing to life the emotional and ideological dynamics of that historical moment, it also places it in the dual context of interactional analysis and the history of American Utopian movements.

Poster; Description; Project Report.

The New York Times > Books > Mr. Natural's Creator Visits the World of Art

2005-04-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

The New York Times > Books > Mr. Natural's Creator Visits the World of Art: "After the discussion, Mr. Crumb quickly ducked out of the library, avoiding a throng of fans, and later joined Mr. Hughes for dinner, where they took a while to warm up to each other, but by the end were in a spirited discussion about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, whom Mr. Hughes interviewed in the late 1970's.

Mr. Hughes told about an exchange in which Speer said that architecture was certainly one way to unite a people, but that if the Nazis had had television, there would have been no stopping them.

Mr. Crumb, finishing his plate of baked chicken, beamed. 'Oh, that's great,' he said. 'It's true.'"

Sensations & Vipassana Meditation

2005-02-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

I recently experienced a Vipassana meditation course, as taught by S.N.Goenka. The course included instruction and hour-long periods of practice for nearly all of a ten-day period. A major intermediate instruction is to attend to the sensations on the body surface. (First, for three days, only the upper lip area. Then, on the fourth day, slowly moving one's attention down the body from the scalp to the feet and up again.)

The claim was made that a variety of sensations are constantly occurring on the body surface, sensations of which one's normal mind is unaware, and that persistently and patiently intending to attend to these sensations will result in an increasing awareness of such sensations. (. . . Will result in a modified mind capable of noticing them.NOTE) The experience consequent on following the instruction to attend for an extended period was that more sensations were noticed than had been the case previously. (Pains, itches, touches of cloth and of air movement, "tingling" or "vibrating", cold and heat, . . .) The instructions suggested that such sensations as these would be noticed and that numbness and "blank areas" would also be noticed. After continued practice (including some hour-long periods of persistent intentional immobility) the edges of painful areas could be discerned, as well as regional attenuation of degree of pain and some "structure of sensations" within painful areas.

My first QUESTION is whether it is neurologically plausible to believe that "a variety of sensations are constantly occurring on the body surface, sensations of which one's normal mind is unaware." (I think I recall that the instructions went so far as to claim that "the entire surface of the body is constantly subjected to sensations of which the normal mind is unaware.")

I think that an affirmative answer to this first question would require a continual (though not necessarily continuous) firing of neurons in the skin. I am not, however, certain that it would, since my understanding of sensory experience is that it is "projected onto the homunculus" in the brain on the basis of a variety of inputs including not only nerve-firing data from the experienced surface locus but also both correlated nerve-firing data from elsewhere plus stored data. (I'm generalizing here to surface-sense experience from my understanding of the complex composition of visual experiences. Perhaps this generalization is unwarranted.)

. . . There seems to be a possibility that some sensations, especially some of those experienced after meditation has progressed for several days, are hallucinatory responses to the lack of both afferent impulses as a result of immobility plus the lack of efferent feedback results of motion. Alternatively, the possibility seems to exist that some sensations are a result of "tension holding" consequent on prior traumatic or otherwise stressful experiences. This later is akin to what Wilhelm Reich has called "body armoring", what the massage techniques developed by Ida Rolf are intended to alleviate. These possibilities are not at issue (yet) in the situation of my first question, however.

Both the "tension holding" hypothesis and the hallucination hypothesis are supported by the meditation teacher's explanatory claim that instances of psychological "grasping" and "aversion" condition the person to certain behaviors and perceptions during daily living and that, during meditation, traces of these "conditioning events" ("sankharas", in the lexicon of Buddhist psychology) reappear as sensations in the body. Merely observing these sensations with equanimity (i.e., without further grasping or aversion), it is claimed, allow the conditioning to fade, to lose its power to control one's behavior and perception. Thus, the conditioned responses are allowed to extinguish. (In Clark Hull's language, the habit strength thereby reduces.) . . . This, I believe, is the center of the therapeutic process in meditation.

NOTE: It seems that one consequence of this practice is a "lowering of the threshold" for awareness, or perception, of these sensations. . . . Unless the increasing number of perceived sensations are actually hallucinated.

Wolfram-first step

2004-11-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Wolfram-first step
Originally uploaded by Paul DeRougiez.

I'm looking for the edge. For a good edge to think on. Big claim Wolfram makes here. I've begun to read his book online. We'll see where it takes me, if anywhere.

Levels of Consciousness

2004-10-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Levels of Consciousness
Originally uploaded by Paul DeRougiez.

The social/personality model of levels of consciousness

2004-10-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

20040802-f1
Originally uploaded by Paul DeRougiez.

http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040802.html

Science And Consciousness Review

2004-10-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Science And Consciousness Review: "Levels of Consciousness"

buddha

2004-10-11T00:03:00.000-07:00

buddha
Originally uploaded by alfarman.

quietly listening
to silence
calm
settled
empty
even of
waiting

2004-06-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

Meditation --rational or irrational?

Stress, general physical health, mental health and balance.

Essentially, any practice of meditation assists primarily in the development of two skills: concentration and awareness. Several other "contributory" skills may need to be developed as well, such as silence and physical stillness. Numerous ancilary benefits may occur as a result of the development and practice of these skills.

The decision to engage in a practice of meditation may well be an extremely rational decision. Thinking about the practice may also be a very rational activity. Practicing meditation is itself, however, a non-rational activity (or inactivity).

Furthermore, there is no doubt in my own mind whatsoever that a practice of meditation is likely to have as one of its benefits the enhancement of the practitioner's ability to think rationally.

2002-07-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE! (?)

Editor's Note in 7/22/02 InformationWeek:

"Indeed, blogs have great potential for personal productivity in the workplace as well as idea sharing and collaboration across boundaries."

Of course, the term, "cooptation," comes easily to mind in this context. (My old organizational sociology professor, Phillip Selznick, first dramatized this term for me --in its meaning of "To neutralize or win over (an independent minority, for example) through assimilation into an established group or culture: co-opt rebels by giving them positions of authority. "--in his book, "TVA And The Grassroots".) "Expropriation" might be a more apt term for what's going on. Or, evaluating the process most neutrally, simply "appropriation".

The "underground", or the "outsiders", have always been a major source of both cultural energy and formal variety for societies under environmental (either internal or external) pressures to change.

The Western institutional order is in a vast disarray; its major institutions --the economy, the family, religion, the political order-- are all suffering the iterated effects of the industrial revolution (science, technology, private property, the cult of the individual) that reached lift-off with Adam Smith's invention of economics and James Watt's invention of the steam engine. (The so-called generation gap is sign of rapid socio-cultural change; no such gap exists in stable societies.)

This disarray, this pervasive breakdown --of values, of established ways of doing things, of settled expectations regarding interpersonal relations-- results in a "search for the new," a search for solutions, an attenuation of boundaries.

It would be marvelous, a realization of enlightenment ideals in a way, if this openness itself could stabilize as the dominant theme of 21st-century global society. The chaos of post-modernism could then be read as a sort of realization on the level of culture of Jung's concept of individuation.

2002-07-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

Do thoughts have shapes?
Are they structured, with distinct forms?
Can we describe the forms of our thought?
How?
Do we naturally describe them?
Or doesn’t the formal description of our thoughts come naturally to us?

Linear? Direct and straightforward? Sharp and to the point?
Or blunt, or vague, or ambiguous, multi-textured, or like a tapestry?
Or a web.
Back and forth, to and fro.
Circular? Meandering?
Treelike, branching?
Fractal?

Is to speak of thoughts having shape a metaphorical way of speaking?
Or is it a literal way of speaking?
Do thoughts literally take shape in our minds, in our speech and writing?
Take form?

Do thoughts take shape in discourse?
Are the forms of discourse the shapes of thought?

Is narrative a different shape of thought from argument?
Is description a different shape of thought from explanation?