Author: Walter

Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren’t for the edge that the USENET “group mind” gives the system administration and support people! The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis’ [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

I have linked to this item before However I am following up on the biosphere notion — see also the post re Chardin a day or so ago.

[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986. amazon

I could not resist adding this review from amazon, all new to me, I hope the reviewer (unknown from Texas 1998) is is ok with me quoting this:

This is an outstanding and very readable book on the world of microbes. Beautifully written and filled with insights, it should be required reading for biology students. I couldn’t put it down and I hated biology in high school! I takes you from the beginnings of our planet to the present time, showing the reader the crucial role of microbes in the creation and maintenance of all life. This book will also be of interest to any serious student of the Gaia hypothesis. Read it and you will never think of cells, bacteria and viruses the same way again. You will come away with a humbling and enlightened view on man’s place in a world created, dominated, and maintained by microbes.

For those of you who don’t know, Lyn Margulis is the ex wife of the late Carl Sagan (prior to Ayn Druian) and Ms. Margulis is Dorian Sagan’s mother.Together, they make an excellent writing team.

Something, which I have never grasped before, explained here, beautifully: 0(zero)format. Emailed a copy to myself incase I need it and it goes.

Thanks for the link Josh.

On this website are MP3 recordings of presentations. The topic for these presentations is political events/issues from a Socialist perspective.The source for the presentations is Marxism, an annual event in London, organised by the Socialist Workers Party. I am hoping to include other sources.
They average at about 5MB for 40 minutes of audio (download time approx 20 minutes @ 56k). To minimise download time they have been edited down to the main presentation (contributions from the floor and summing up cut).

Test post. Blogger is so messy. Pro features don’t work for me. Email posts need too much editing later. They mess up the future posts. Drafts get lost. Spell checking is too slow, I am better off cutting and pasting into an editor. Never mind. Good to be on the Pro mailing list. I hope it all gets sorted.
Later: Still having trouble, network errors all day, me or Blogger? Now trying IE. Now trying Pro1. Later… Pro1 got the next post up, but posted the future post again, which I can’t remove. Now in Pro1, testing.

This is from the intro by Julian Huxley, p 16 in my Fontana edition, to Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. amazon

Père Teilhard was a strong visualiser. He saw with hie minds eye that ‘banal fact of the earth’s roundness’ the sphericity of man’s environment — was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial
activity. In an unlimited environment , man’s thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outward: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to the spreading over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.

It is all very well calling it energy but that is not quite it? I have a sense that the passage below (in an earlier post), where I talk about about Moreno’s sociometric matrix shows that the two were grappling with the same idea. Note that Moreno too saw this matrix as a return of God.

My hypothesis:

Moreno’s sociometric matrix, Chardin’s noosphere, McLuhan’s ‘audio space’, Jung’s ‘objective psyche’ are all ways of exploring cyberspace.

Here is a quote from Chardin, p 78 in my Fontana edition:

When I speak of the ‘within’ of the earth I do not of course mean those material depths in which — a few miles beneath our feet — lurks one of the most vexatious mysteries of science: the chemical nature and the exact physical condition of the internal region of the globe. The ‘within’ is used here … to denote the ‘psychic’ face of that portion of the stuff of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the scope of the early earth.

Chardin puts it a little differently from the sympathetic but less metaphysical Huxley.

So was the ‘psychic’ always there, or did it emerge with our activity?

I have posted up more of my distractions!

THE GROUP AND ITS PROTAGONIST

The term psyche, underlying forces, focal conflict, central concern, unconscious processes and Bion’s notion of basic assumption have all been used in theis paper. Moreno’s concept of sociometric matrix brings in a new understanding of the unconscious of the group, and covers all of these ways of seeing the interconnections. It is satisfying to have found the concept of sociometric matrix in Moreno’s writing. That it is a “matrix” is a profound idea, which links it to a source, the womb, or more accurately the placenta, which nurtures all of life. That it is “sociometric” means that it can be empirically and experientially explored. Moreno’s work emphasises that sociometry is a science which can name and measure the living links between people and thus give us a secular grasp of what otherwise might remain exclusively intuitive and spiritual.

I like that.

Here is the link. Here because this weblog is also my bookmarks. I have kept bookmarks for years but they tend to get lost when I change OSs or machines. And this weblog can be Googled, and thus keywords will return this page of philosophical, psychological, essays. I note that Robert D. Romanyshyn is on the board and that Jonathan Moreno is a contributor.

Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”

www.rumi.org.uk

Heaven Retains Within Its Sphere Half of All Bodies and Maladies [Paracelsus] Very clear on literalism.

I love this paragraph, with its interesting word epistrophé:

Each time an astrological consultation can return a characteristic to its divine character, polish a problem so it shines in a different light, reveal the God in the disease, let the client see clearly for a moment that other heavenly half, the astrologer is performing an epistrophé, returning a mess in the human to a myth in the Gods.

I get this from dictionary.com:

epistrophe

\E*pis”tro*phe\, n. [L., from Gr. ? a turning toward, return, fr. ? to turn toward; ‘epi` upon, to + ? to turn.] (Rhet.) A figure in which successive clauses end with the same word or affirmation; e. g., “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I.” –2 Cor. xi. 22.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

But it is much more than a rhetorical device. Hillman links this process to Neoplatonism and ta’wil in Persian mysticism. See also: Epistrophe