I have just read this lecture, and it is really nice.
The Conclusion to Abraham Maslow’s 1957 Alfred Korzybski Lecture follows:
Continue reading “Abraham Maslow’s 1957 Alfred Korzybski Lecture”
WNYC – Diagnosis – great audio
Excellent, especially the last of the three stories on depression & the brain.
However…
Biocentrism – Robert Lanza, Bob Berman
I read this and think it is philosophy, not science. It boils down to getting the meaning clear. Does falsifiability matter here? It all links to Korzybski too, this sort of radical phenomenology involves learning to speak in a new way.
A previous reviewer draws a distinction between Robert Lanza’s biocentrism and Stephen Hawking’s sense of the “RWOT (Real World Out There).” However, from a recent article on Dr. Hawking’s latest thinking, it appears that Lanza and Hawking may actually be converging on the same point. Hawking is quoted in the July/August 2009 issue of Discover magazine as follows (“Return of the Invisible Man,” pp. 50-51):
“Hawking’s most recent work explores the implications of the notion that the universe is a giant quantum phenomenon. The problem with conventional attempts to understand the cosmos, he now believes, is that researchers have failed to appreciate the full, bizarre implications of quantum physics. These efforts to create a unique theory that would explain all the properties of the universe are therefore doomed to fail. Hawking refers to such attempts as `bottom-up’ theories because they assume the universe had a unique beginning and that its subsequent history was the only possible one.
“Hawking is now pushing a different strategy, which he calls top-down cosmology. It is not the case, he says, that the past uniquely determines the present. Because the universe has many possible histories and just as many possible beginnings, the present state of the universe selects the past. `This means that the histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured,’ Hawking wrote in a recent paper, `contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history.'”
Dr. Lanza insists that future theories of the universe will be biocentric in nature. That Dr. Hawking might agree, in a complete reversal from his past writing about this, certainly raises the most intriguing of possibilities, does it not?
Bent Flyvbjerg – Phronetic social science
http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/Publications2006/ForesightNo2PRINT.pdf
http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/Publications2008/PhronOrgDict62Proof.pdf
Two pdfs by Bent Flyvbjerg. I almost bought his book on Social Sciences, but not really sure that it is on the track I want to pursue. I’ll read these two items and decide.
I want to shape a form of research that is practice based in psychotherapy. But this might be the opposite?
Phronesis is a complex idea.
The Interpretation of Khan – Robert S Boynton
Fascinating article & also a link to Boynton’s site. An interesting journalist.
Link to an article from Psychoanalytic Review, 95(6), December 2008
D. W. WINNICOTT AND MASUD R. KHAN:
A Tragic Misalliance James W. Hamilton
Quote from Boynton follows.
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Scary #ACTA Threat
Steven Hodson in the Inquisitr
Scary, there are a bunch of people out there hell bent on making the world worse:
It is planned that all these secret negotiations taking place will finish in 2010 and the world will be presented with a new world wide copyright/IP treaty that has been written and bullied through all levels of individual country governments by the US entertainment industry and their trade groups around the world.
A few recent sketches
Ok! It’s twenty ten!
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/30/2010/
Walter (From my phone)
Afghanistan – NYT with Google
Interesting page, finally New York Times has a page that makes sense online! I guess it will update as life goes on, an interesting development. It might help both their business models but not the world. Here is a more pertinent summary.
Summary: In a major policy move, President Obama has committed 30,000 more United States troops to Afghanistan but added he would begin drawing out American forces there starting in July 2011. But administration officials have since scrambled to defend that withdrawal schedule. Some lawmakers voiced skepticism. Mr. Obama’s decision is likely to prove to be a defining one for his administration. The policy also leaves unanswered the question of whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai will met the challenge and how to respond if he does not. The strategy’s success may ultimately be determined in an unruly region that straddles the Afghan-Pakastani border.
Supreme fiction
I listened to a podcast today from the ABC on Claude Levi Strauss (W) and made connections with what I think of as Korzybski’s somewhat phenomenological ideas, so I searched for the connection and found one, guess who?:
(Quote follows & some references to books I’d like to follow up on here too)
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