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Freeman Dyson

Edge: IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL?

One of my favorite books is Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition” by Ed Regis. The book is a collection of stories about weird ideas and weird people. The transhuman condition is an idea suggested by Hans Moravec. It is the way you live when your memories and mental processes are down-loaded from your brain into a computer. The wiring system of the computer is a substitute for the axons and synapses of the brain. You can then use the computer as a back-up, to keep your personality going in case your brain gets smashed in a car accident, or in case your brain develops Alzheimer’s. After your old brain is gone, you might decide to upload yourself into a new brain, or you might decide to cut your losses and live happily as a transhuman in the computer. The transhumans won’t have to worry about keeping warm. They can adjust their temperature to fit their surroundings. If the computer is made of silicon, the transhuman condition is silicon-based life. Silicon-based life is a possible form for life in a cold universe to adopt, whether or not it happens to begin with water-based creatures like us made of flesh and blood.

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Fort

Forté Home Page I have used Agent for a long time as my email client. I like it. New version out, and a road-map for development that looks great.

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Wolfram Science

shell patterns from the book

An excellent review: American Scientist – Computing Science
I have a sense we are seeing a paradigm shift happening here. It is not just Wolfram science, Wolfram Science is only possible in this age. Everything is shifting, and now science is getting a nudge. I listened to Wolfram in an hour of audio and I was intrigued, moved because of being in the presence of someone so self-confident and perhaps a genius of our time. I had a sense of hearing something totally fresh and of major importance.

Ray Kurzweil has made a gtitique: Reflections on Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”.

See this too: Forbes.com – Magazine Article God, Stephen Wolfram, and Everything Else
Michael S. Malone, Forbes ASAP, 11.27.00, that is a year or more before the book came out. .

Also: Simulating the Replication of Life

Wired 10.06: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything …

Figure 2. Pigment patterns on snail shells might be products of a biological system working something like a one-dimensional cellular automaton. Wolfram argues that various mollusks illustrate all possible patterns generated by a specific class of automata. The shells shown are identified as the banded marble cone (left) and the textile cone (right). [Top, bottom in my image here — wl]

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Jung and the New Age

cover

Editorial from Amazon:

From Book News, Inc.
Tacey (School of Communication, Arts, and Critical Inquiry, La Trobe U., Melbourne, Australia) offers a theoretical and philosophical account of the New Age phenomenon and the archetypal imperatives that have brought it to birth, including the tremendous influence of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He investigates the appropriate of Jung as a prophet or mystic by the New Age movement and discusses the state of consciousness in New Age culture and the future of spirituality versus formal religion.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR

An article by David Tacey with the same title as the book: Jung and the New Age ~ A Study in Contrasts

And a post he made on the same theme in response to a comment of mine! (which just popped up in my search) Conversation with David Tacey sorted : Re: mystery versus intellect in Jung studies.
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Chiasmus

Dr. Mardy Grothe, Chiastic Quotes of the Week — August 11-17, 2002

“Have you ever noticed that it rains when you’re sad?”
“Lots of people get sad when it rains.”
“No baby, you don’t get sad because it rains, it rains because you get sad.”
— From Tommy Lee Jones. “Men in Black II.

This sums up my last three complex items.

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Yet more Metaxy

This time from James Hillman

Especially—this Neoplatonic tradition is thoroughly Western even if it is not empirical in method, rationalist in conception, or otherworldly spiritual in appeal. This tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea). Soul as the tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez–Pedraza 1977), as “esse in anima” (Jung [1921] CW 6, §66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy. Body, soul, spirit: this tripartite anthropology further separates archetypal psychology from the usual Western dualistic division, whose history goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople), occurring also in the medieval ascension of Averroes’ Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism. Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology. A first methodologically consistent attempt to articulate one in a philosophical style belongs also within the perimeters of archetypal psychology (Evangelos Christou 1963).

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More metaxy

Nous, Ananke and Eros: Reflections about the Images of the Soul by Marcus Vinicius Quintaes

João talks of love as being “a bridge which helps people connect these two places that are so very distant one from the other”; it is in this mediating space, on this bridge, in this intermediary region that the Greeks called Metaxy, that Eros is located, acts, and comes true. A region neither human nor divine, neither conscious nor unconscious, simply intercourse between regions. It is in this Metaxy, intermediary region where Eros can fly and burn with his arrows, that we find the realm of psychic reality: a place we should all go to, in search for the exercise of our Soul-making.

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