Walter Logeman: Journal
Classic Wired from 1995. I recall reading this at the time and feeling annoyed with myself that I had not written it, as I thought along these lines in 1992. Now I don’t really mind 🙂 writing is hard. There are about a hundred links in Google to Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg and they all reference this one article!
An obscure Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago.
By Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg
Here is my message to linuxodyssey on Yahoo, where I have chronicled my free software adventures.
New Phase, lets call it phase 3. The first was my go at Debian way back in July 1999. Then Mandrake 8.1 on the Dell, which ended with severe problems. Now Red Hat 7.3
xrefer Came up with this item on dialectical materialism. Just a standard encyclopeadia item really, but what a great little search engine for when you want a classic encyclopaedia entry!
… the basic aims and principles of dialectical materialism remain very much in harmony with the fundamental spirit of progressive, rational scientific thought, which continues to perceive a fundamental opposition between scientific theories and religious myths, to address the scientific challenges posed by the failure of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic programme, and to seek a scientific metaphysics as the basis for an enlightened view of the world.
Playing God is an essay by Douglas Rushkoff
From Evolution to EmergenceThere are a few faiths in which congregants are invited to participate in the creation and interpretation of the underlying narrative. Certain Jewish sects spurn answers in favor of more questions and interpretation; Quakers enjoy a dogma-free, town-meeting-style Sabbath. Most religious traditions, though, simply treat their believers as a “mass” who must depend on priests or ministers for access to the “story.” But just as the Internet has led patients to information about alternative medical treatments (often against doctor’s orders), it has given congregants something in the spiritual realm that is very rare-the ability to find alternative stories about who we are, who made us, and why.
More important than any one story we may have discovered or written, the experience of sifting through them all and writing our own has changed our relationship to religion, perhaps forever. The Internet is anathema to unitary narrative. If you want to understand life only as a story etched in stone, you had better stay away.
Every early culture composed stories-myths-to explain the basic facts of existence. For centuries, we have understood our world-even our sciences-as being somehow authored: that things were set in motion by someone or something. We cling to the belief that our existence proceeds by design. That’s why Darwin’s theory of evolution was such a threat to our narrative understanding of the world, and why creationists resist its implications to this day. But even those of us who believe in evolution have been able to impose a kind of narrative on top of it in which we imagine matter and life to be groping steadily and consciously toward complexity, with evolution itself as the agent of that grand authorial entity we dearly hope exists.
Now our computers are forcing us to entertain new, even less linear models for why things happen. One of these models, described in Steven Johnson’s new book, Emergence, explores the way everything from ant colonies to ancient cities finds its order. It turns out that queen ants issue no decrees, and ancient cities still in existence today had no official planners. The necessary preconditions must exist, but it now appears that life, organisms, communities, and order arise-emerge, in other words-from the bottom up. There is no central story, yet there is radical change and something that, if it isn’t intelligence, has often been mistaken for it.
And what is the chief prerequisite for emergence to occur? You guessed it: networking. Interconnectivity is what allows an “it” to become a “they.” Instead of acting on its own, each atom, molecule, cell, organism, or community can act as part of a larger complex-a networked being.
OK, if it isn’t intelligence, what is it? Is there some sort Chardannian teleology? Is it just nature, bell curves and Bradford’s Law? There is a method in the swarming mobs of a net-work. Emergence looks interesting. How does it relate back to the old classic on this, Engles’ Dialectics of Nature.
McLuhan had a phrase: escape into understanding. My hunch is that the way to know is to not understand. Well, to know certain things, understanding works fine in its own niche. More than a hunch, I know this from being a psychotherapist. I see the escape into understanding all the time. “I want to know WHY she did that to me!” “How could he do that!” There is never a resolution to those questions, they aren’t questions, but while they sound like questions there is no … resolution. Now there is a nice word. A return to a solution? Becoming fluid? Coming into focus? Resolution comes from the WHAT question about experience itself. What am I experiencing? If we can go one beyond seeing the world in a grain of sand, we are a grain of sand.
Experiential learning is at the core of training to do psychotherapy. Once on this path all theory is more or less secondary. Ok, there is no central story, but there is an inner story, and the inner story is a facet, an incidence of something that can’t be understood without a story.
Many people are writing about this networked phenomena, and right from the inside. My hope is to be able to keep hold of the thread that sees beyond the social and technical and political in all of this and to find a story with a resolution.
Well said by John Patrick. He has a solution, digital ID, which may happen one day – I don’t know. However here are some simple steps I use and which are OK, and if enough people use them then spammers will be more discouraged:
The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?
HOWARD RHEINGOLD: SMART MOBS [7.16.02]
 |
Could not resist this one from George Eastman House Yousuf Karsh Series |
The news of the death of Yousuf Karsh led me to the amazing Google Image search led to Peter Fetterman Gallery : Yousuf Karsh where the images here, just a sample, come from. They are for sale for thousands of dollars. Wonderful to see them here on the Net. Here is a quote from IHT:
Working with a large-format view camera and a battery of artificial lights (he was said to carry 350 pounds – nearly 160 kilograms – of equipment on his trips abroad) he aimed, in his own words, “to stir the emotions of the viewer” and to “lay bare the soul” of his sitter. (NYT)
SHS ArtWeb: Photography – Yousuf Karsh – Nice selection with links to big images.
Yousuf Karsh on the Internet
This is not a link at all. It is a snippet from my Palm, one that as far as I know, I wrote though can’t really recall doing so! I like it and it is central to my philosophy.
Anything can be imagined, yet sometimes the mind is blank and nothing will come or it repeats the same image over and over. Imagination takes work, work to *allow* the images to present themselves. Yet if they present themselves, what do we have to do with their creation? What emerges from the void is not of our making but of our allowing. The emergence of experience is an autonomous process like the breath. We can stop and start it, allow it, but in the end it is life for ever re-emerging in us. Our life is not of our making, it is of our allowing.
Our experience of meaning is out of our hands, it is generated through a web or a net of previous givens.
I am tidying snippets off my Palm like this one from a NewsScan Daily. Sticking it all on the web is the way for me to build my memory.
And what is the collective unconscious? It’s a level of awareness
below that of one’s personal unconscious, and is unknowingly shared by
people across different traditions and cultures. At this level Jung saw
“archetypes” of demons, sages, dreams, etc. common to all humankind and all
human history.
