Categories: Animals, Nature, Photos, Images, Links, Amazing, Flickr

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Despite its vaunted reputation as a juggernaut of American culture, McDonald's has come to function as an ecumenical refuge for travelers of all stripes. This is not because McDonald's creates an American sense of place and culture, but because it creates a smoothly standardized absence of place and culture a neutral environment that allows travelers to take a psychic time-out from the din of their real surroundings. This phenomenon is roundly international: I've witnessed Japanese taking this psychic breather in the McDonald's of Santiago de Chile; Chileans seeking refuge in the McDonald's of Venice; and Italians lolling blissfully in the McDonald's of Tokyo. - link

These days I tend to get a confused, neutral feeling in most matters of global culture. For instance, being British to me means no more than talking English (a conglomeration of, arguably, the majority of old world languages), watching Neighbours (an Australian TV soap), drinking tea (of Indian origin), and avoiding the shadow cast by American culture (something the rest of the world tends to feel the British are immune to). Yet, none of these activities are distinctly British, and those aspects of my culture which foreigners see as British symbols, mean little or nothing to me.

As cultures become more homogeneous, and what little remains of our countries' distinctiveness becomes symbolic, stereotypical and voided by its own simulacra, nationality is inevitably losing its meaning. What then of the McDonalds of this world? Here a neutrality has arisen which makes a laughing stock of any distinctiveness you care to mention. The Big-Mac belongs to everyone, because American culture has been the devastating virus which the US has used to infect the world; and nobody is immune.

Part of me loathes this continued homogeny, but to focus my perspective only here would be to miss the bigger, wider reaching truth. Since the days of colonialism cultures have been seen to meet, exchange via osmosis their identities, and re-emerge in symbiotic union. Many of the details of these mergers have been largely forgotten. When we think of a country, food often comes first in our mind. The Italians and their sun dried tomatoes, the Irish and their potatoes, the Indians and their chillies, yet none of these foods found there way into that country earlier than 600 years ago.

Potatoes, tomatoes and chillies all came from South American civilisations. Ask most people what country they associate with coffee and they will probably say somewhere in South America, yet it was Ethiopia which first cultivated the bean. Cultures we now protect from over-homogenisation; symbols of our nationality we have projected to simulacra status, are recent acquisitions to our heritage. All culture is change. Let's take a closer look at that Big-Mac and fries.

Talk about a Global Meal:

McFood (Composition)	Origination	1st left continent of origin
McTomato Sauce (Tomato)	South America	C 16th-17th - Spanish Conquest
McFries (Potato)	Peru / Bolivia	C 15th-16th - Spanish Conquest
McBun (Wheat)	Fertile Crescent	Around 8,000 BCE
McBurger (Cow)	Europe	Around 10,000 BCE
McCheese (Fermented Milk)	Central Asia / Middle East	Around 8,000 BCE
McSpicy Sauce (Chili)	Americas	Around 1493 - Columbus Voyage
McCoke (Sugar Cane)	Americas	Around 1493 - Columbus Voyage
McGherkin (Baby Cucumber)	Ancient Mesopotamia	Before 3rd Century BCE

As you can see from this McTable, nothing cultural is truly unique. It never has been.

Before you bemoan the passing of individuality or fear the uprising of the neutral McFranchise take a moment or two to really examine what is it you are trying to protect. The cultural symbols which have made you who you are, and will continue to do so, are as vaguely nationalistic as any domesticated crop you care to mention. I'm no great fan of globalisation, but neither too do I like to see symbolism worshipped almost for the sake of it. In avoiding the over simulation of our societies' greatest commodities we tread a dangerous path towards simulacra in the name of simulacra. Culture is an ever evolving interplay of forces, stretched at every boundary by the loves, fears and wants of society. The McFranchise, in all its neutrality, is here because it satisfies the needs of a global-ready world. Perhaps it is the nature of those needs we should first be attempting to address.

UPDATE:

Categories: Food, Weird, Humour, Culture, History, Society, World, Future, Time, Simulacrum, Ideas, McDonalds, Human, Earth

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Ever wished yourself Godlike properties? Ever wondered what it felt like to spawn universes from the slightest ounce of your being? Well now you can, with The Random Logline Generator! Realising mythical universes is as easy as depressing your index finger. Don't believe me? Here are some meta-universes I prepared earlier:

• A telekinetic dog finds a magic lamp in a whorehouse!
• The blundering ex-husband of a wizard and the cousin of an arrogant wrestler raise five kids!
• A ghost discovers the body of a housekeeper!
• A sword-fighting eskimo finds the wallet of the brother of a helicopter pilot in a hospital!
• an infinity of fictions awaits you...

Further more, I intend to show you how these universes, just brought into being moments ago, are as real, perhaps more real, than the universe which you now believe you inhabit. Don't believe me? Here's a meta-hypothesis I prepared earlier...

Pantheistic Solipsistic Simulacra

According to Robert Heinlein's theory of Panthesitic Solipsism (or the World as Myth hypothesis):

The World as Myth idea involves the portrayal of all myths and fictional universes existing as parallel universes to our own and that persons and beings from these various 'worlds' interact with one another.

For instance, in his last novels, Heinlein's characters actually travel to and interact with the Land of Oz. Even our own world is considered an alternate (coded as "One Small Step" for the first words spoken on the moon by Neil Armstrong).

This idea can of course be taken further, as all large things generally are on The Huge Entity. Consider for a moment the concept of the simulacrum, that is, an entity which has ceased representing the object it was first designed to and has since taken on a hyper real identity of its own. A multi-layered example of this would be an art student's photo-realistic landscape painting, modeled on a series of abstractions he drew which themselves were based on a single photograph taken at a particularly serene moment as the clouds parted over the perceived horizon. The photo-real painting is a hyper real clone of a series of copies which themselves only bore relation to a photo which originated from an idealised perspective. The reality we perceive, once filtered by the simulacra of modern, mass produced society, is as far removed from true 'non-fiction' as a science fiction epic. Both your world view and that of the sci-fi author suffer from a poverty of absolute realism, because in truth there can never be such a thing. All belief in absolute reality is akin to naive idolatry.

The characters of myth, of fiction, can often supersede the characters in real life in terms of the realism conveyed therein. What's more, in the pages of a book or reels of the cinema, universes are brought into being with ready made perspectives from which to view them. In the objective, human reality inhabited by all, conflicts in perceptions cause an infinity of simulations to blur into a shared illusion, which itself bears no relation to the world believed to exist by the perceiver:

Reality was able to surpass fiction, the surest sign that the imaginary has possibly been outpaced. But the real could never surpass the model, for the real is only a pretext of the model. - Jean Baudrillard

Metafiction

Understanding this simulacrum of reality can have fascinating consequences, not least in the realm of Metafiction:

Metafiction is ... the term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. It usually involves irony and is self-reflective. It can be compared to presentational theatre in a sense; presentational theatre does not let the audience forget they are viewing a play, and metafiction does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction.

Now, if by mere random logline generation one can spawn new mythological universes into being, and if these universes, by analogy to the simulacrum, bear as much relation to objective truth as the perceptions you call 'reality', could it be possible to formalise your perceptions, by self reference, into a true fiction which you were capable of accepting? That is, just as metafiction references itself in order to question the very nature of fiction, so by reading blog posts such as this perhaps the halo of reality which surrounds you is made to quiver to the point of collapse? Testing out this hypothesis is not easy; once again, the subjective rules all.

Hallucination

I must admit to my rudeness right about now. Trying to convince a selection of your blog's readers that the world they inhabit is entirely fictional is not the best way to extend that readership. Not convinced that you could be living in a fiction? A word in your ear from the world of scientific folk who know about brains and stuff:

The neurological basis for poor witness statements and hallucinations has been found by scientists at UCL. In over a fifth of cases, people wrongly remembered whether they actually witnessed an event or just imagined it, according to a paper published in NeuroImage this week...

..."Most of us, though, have a critical reality monitoring function so that we are able to distinguish well enough between what is real and what is imagined and our imagination does not have too great an impact on our lives - unless the reality check system breaks down such as after stroke or in cases of schizophrenia."

The study found that the areas that were activated while remembering whether an event really happened or was imagined in healthy subjects are the very same areas that are dysfunctional in people who experience hallucinations.

Dr Burgess said: "We believe that hallucinations are caused by a difficulty in discriminating information present in the outside world from information that is imagined. In schizophrenia the difficulty you have in separating reality from imagined events becomes exaggerated so some people have hallucinations and hear voices that simply aren't there." These results indicate a link between the brain areas implicated in schizophrenia and the regions that support the ability to discriminate between perceived and imagined information. - link

Perhaps the schizophrenic absolves themself from the shared illusion of 'normality' by having their perceptions focused on those aspects of the universe we would call 'fiction'. In this extension of my hypothesis, it is not that the schizophrenic is somehow living in an illusionary world, rather, their brain is capable of convincing them that the majority of reality which surrounds them is mere fiction. The schizophrenic, and perhaps 'sufferers' of other such neurological conditions, are able to raise themselves above the illusion we find ourselves so happy to accept, perhaps knowing all along that it is us who exhibit the traits of insanity we commonly subtract from our selfhood. Not being able to distinguish the real, hyper-real and meta-real is perhaps the most distinctly human of traits we possess.

In examining alternate forms of conscious experience the 'meta' of metafiction can be conjoined with any universe you care to excuse me in destroying. Trapped in simulacra, confused by a pantheism of solipsistic world myths, the meta is meta-you, meta-me, meta-humanity, meta-world. An infinite meta-holism which caused you into existence and destroys you as, and when, it so pleases.

Meta-what?

The Fourth Wall

Finally, what will it take to knock down The Fourth Wall blanketing our fictional perceptions? The appeal of a singularly maintained perspective is obvious throughout the human world. True, in the conflict of ideas, in the meeting of distinct minds, entire civilisations have been forged from the cultural commodities given birth within them. But lest we forget the power of fiction to appease our multitudinous perceptions. History is nothing but conformity; the present a convulsive interplay of perceptions, emotions and the symbols which culture determines they convey. It is in the pages of the book where we find our futures, because in fiction we draw the very edges of not just our world, but the myriad of possible worlds our instincts have diverged us away from, and converged us yet closer towards. If all is fiction then let fiction be all. The human entity has had no greater impact on this universe than the worlds which its mind has spawned into existence. If the entire human race were wiped out tomorrow it would be through our art, our imaginary worlds that future-alien-archeologists would duly uncover us. These forms of expression are not a result of us, they are us and we are them.

Lest this blog post roll off into an infinity of possible meta-universes, I implore you to click some of the category links below, explore the Popular-Posts archive, join in The Forum and bury yourself in all Huge Entity attempts to dissolve this world to dust. My arrogance in this suggestion is surely only equaled by my passionate plea for true sanity which I will now make once and for all:

The Fourth Wall is within your grasp; The Fourth Wall is everywhere and everything; The Fourth Wall is the only true reality; you are The Fourth Wall...

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Sci-Fi, Links, Reality, Human, Consciousness, Fiction, Quotes, Ideas, Philosophy, Simulacrum, History, Universe, Perception, Time, Art, Books, Literature, Culture

The Huge Entity Forum has evolved! Care to behold internet-transmogrification as it happens? Then prepare to take a look deep beneath the surface of The Huge Entity. Viewer discretion is advised:

The Internet is Alive - A Forum Discussion:

What? :

The reductionists argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the complexity of the human brain. This network upon which we play is looking complex to me. I think It's keeping Its mouth shut. What would you do if you woke up after being reincarnated as an emerging AI? Presuming, of course, the reality of metempsychosis.

Danieru :

I believe that, to some extent, all things possess consciousness, or the potential for it (a kind of panpsychism perhaps). I also tend to think, after reading about the higher level order arising in chaotic systems such as the ant colony, that consciousness is not manifested purely in the organic lumps of matter we tend to call brains. Consciousness is perceived intention coupled with a degree of self-reflexion. Consciousness is THE hardest subject in the universe to talk about for the very reason why it is so incredible : we are attempting to contemplate the contemplating mechanism itself! Infinity reels in horror at this...

So, briefly, I don't see any reason why the internet is not in some sense already conscious. At the moment, this higher level conscious order requires us to be part of the procedural chaos, but it won't be long before the chaos will begin to order itself. Metempsychosis happens every day in the digital realm....

In related future ponderings - From Posthuman Blues:

Science fiction writers continue to debate what methods we'll use when colonizing a planet such as Mars. Ultimately, we might choose to terraform the world into a facsimile of our own. But we could just as easily decide to modify ourselves to tolerate inclimate conditions. A posthuman civilization could take up residence in orbit and populate the surface with lifelike, semi-autonomous drones. Visiting another locale could be as easy as logging into another body stationed elsewhere on the planet. Two or more personae might even elect to inhabit the same body for the sake of economy.

Such a civilization may seem remote, but the general concept is already in practice; if our telerobotic probes continue to increase in sophistication and brain-power, they'll eventually become indistinguishable from living creatures, at which point we will have effectively achieved the "Singularity" advocated by technoprogressives such as roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil. - link

Take this, add a dash of The Borg, and leave to boil for no more than 100 digital generations... The Internet is the primordial soup which silicon-based scientists will try desperately to recreate in their virtual labs ten thousand years from now. And us? Well, we are the sparks of lightening of course...


Join in this discussion and more in The Huge Entity Forum...

Categories: Science, Weird, Weblog, Future, Consciousness, Links, Reality, Human, Internet, Technology, Philosophy, Singularity, Space, Sci-Fi, Huge Entity Forum

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Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.

"While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"But once you get it, you just feel fabulous."

The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge, he said.

"I think we're exquisitely tuned to this as if we're junkies, second by second." - link

∴ The Huge Entity = Conceptual Blog-Crack!

Dear readers,

I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce the forthcoming departure of The Huge Entity. Everyone needs to accept their addiction before they can hit the cold turkey...

Come August I will be leaving my job (and current life) in Japan. Via various places in Asia I plan to head back to the UK, arriving home who knows when. In the meantime The Huge Entity Forum will supply your daily conceptual fix; a methadone-like stand-in, leading to deeper addiction in the long term (wow this drug metaphor is dark).

Could I have a hell yeah from you people? Check in here and let me know what The Huge Entity means to you. Who knows, if your love is strong enough it might make me travel home faster.

Your favourite idea-whore,



P.S. I'll still be posting regularly until August; don't blink or you'll miss it!

Thanks Velcro City Tourist Board!
Categories: Nonsense, Weblog, Humour, News, Huge-Entity.com, Drugs, Science, Consciousness, Ideas

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Just last week, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Seth Lloyd published a paper in Physical Review Letters estimating how many calculations the universe could have performed since the Big Bang — 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits of data, putting the mightiest supercomputer to shame. This grand computation essentially consists of subatomic particles ricocheting off one another and "calculating" where to go.

As the researcher Tommaso Toffoli mused back in 1984, "In a sense, nature has been continually computing the 'next state' of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do — and, actually, all we can do — is 'hitch a ride' on this huge ongoing computation."

This may seem like an odd way to think about cosmology. But some scientists find it no weirder than imagining that particles dutifully obey ethereal equations expressing the laws of physics. Last year Dr. Lloyd created a stir on Edge.org, a Web site devoted to discussions of cutting edge science, when he proposed "Lloyd's hypothesis": "Everything that's worth understanding about a complex system can be understood in terms of how it processes information."

Naturally a lot of researchers, who consider computers no more than useful tools, react huffily to the suggestion that what they are doing is "old science." So far no one using the alternative approach has been able to match the equations of calculus in predicting, for example, the exact moment of last week's solar eclipse for any spot on the planet.

What the detractors are less likely to emphasize is the track record of traditional mathematical methods in forecasting, say, the recent gyrations in the stock market or the way a forest fire will burn. Here the usual methods of science are stretched to the limit ・and that is where an influential minority of scientists quietly agree on the kind of cure Dr. Wolfram is so loudly prescribing: replacing equations with a different kind of mathematical device called algorithms, simple little computer programs....

....proposing that reality is not continuous but discrete, with a smallest possible length and a smallest possible duration of time. Picture space-time as a kind of grid on which the universe unfolds tick by tick, like a pattern in a kaleidoscope or a program running on a computer.

In expressing their awe at the mathematical nature of creation, physicists have playfully suggested that God is a mathematician. Why not make him a software engineer? The result, says Edward Fredkin, another early promoter of digital physics, "might be the beginnings of a new intellectual revolution comparable to what was spawned by the development of mathematics." - NyTimes & Edge

Has the next great revolution in reality finally made itself known?

This new approach would seem to solve a problem which has been bothering me for a while. When the acceleration of a moving body X increases, so too does its mass. In tandem with this, any entity watching X accelerate would perceive time, in relation to X, begin to slow exponentially. This, very simply put, is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

Looking sidelong at light it appears to us that time has slowed infinitely, meaning it does not exist. That is time does not pass - at all - for the beam/photons of light. Yet, if light could talk to us it would probably be too overwhelmed to speak, as the exact opposite is true. Light would perceive time in infinite extension - time is relative.

Problem: Light exists everywhere simultaneously, yet it exists nowhere, nowhen, never...

A conceptual explosion occurs for me right about here, but wait...

If the universe is computational, and therefore better modeled in discrete packets, then there is a minimum absolute length of time which can exist. This cancels out our view of light completely because at some stage our belief that time has slowed infinitely is off set by the absolute discreet packet of time. On the flip-side of this, if time has not compressed infinitely it cannot have dilated infinitely either. The universe is dragged back into consciousness, kicking and screaming as it comes.

Now, forgive my physics and maths heads here; I'm sure there are important aspects of this idea I am missing, but doesn't this view of reality fit better with common sense? It is not often than The Huge Entity grimaces in the face of Einstein, but today I find myself unable to hold back the slavering raspberry which pierces my lips.

What am I missing here? Surely I cocked up my workings somewhere along the way....


(Mirrored at the Excruciatingly Large Forum...)

Categories: Science, Weird, Reality, Ideas, Maths, Reality, Universe, Perception, Time, History, Consciousness, Physics, Philosophy, Nonsense?

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In the past, both big and small entities have graced The Huge Entity front page. Today we will encounter the largest single object in our galactic neighbourhood - Introducing, The Sun:



Now I got you slavering at the mouth for masses of hot, fiery gas, try and wrap your taste buds around this huge entity:

Astronomers have spotted a huge cloud of fiery gas speeding through a distant cluster of galaxies. They say it is the biggest object of its kind ever seen.

The gas ball contains more matter than a 1,000 billion Suns, and is plunging through the Abell 3266 cluster of galaxies at about 750 kilometres per second. The fireball is about 3 million light years across, roughly 5 billion times the diameter of the Solar System, and reaches temperatures of tens of millions of degrees.

"The size and velocity of this gas ball is truly fantastic," - link & link

Isn't gas brilliant?! I'd love to see a journalist express something that size in whimsical units:

"The gas cloud measures around 3 million light years across. That's about as long as three quadrillion, three hundred seventy-eight trillion, five hundred seventy-one billion, four hundred twenty-eight million, five hundred seventy-one thousand, four hundred twenty-eight and a half double-decker buses!"

(I have to admit that I actually did the math on that figure, so, well... it's as accurate as you're gonna get. Check it yourself if you don't believe me:

Strange units of measurement + Orders of magnitude
+ Online calculator = 3378571428571428.57 buses
That's Huge Entity perfectionism for you!)

Thanks Pruned!
Categories: Science, Space, Images, News, Links, Universe, Amazing, Astronomy, Physics, Nature

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When Fu Hsi, a mythical leader of ancient China, had the 8 trigrams of the I-Ching revealed to him supernaturally he was unlikely to have known the significance they would play on British Ministry of Defence denials some 5,000 years later. Perhaps even you, my intrepid reader, will find little relationship between the patterns perceived in the random spreading of 6 yarrow sticks and evidence of exotic aircraft now reputed to be emerging from revealed MoD documents. Allow me to blend past Chinese traditions with present Western denials in a maelstrom of reality bending intrigue... By using ancient superstitious methods I intend to focus your modern materialistic mind deep into the ether of reality divination:

Welcome to the era of bits of stick which can predict the future! Welcome, to the modernised mystical world of I-Ching Excruciation!

First we collect together our yarrow sticks, making sure their harmony beckons the principles of Yin & Yang into order. Next we must ask a question and shake the yarrows loose, allowing the patterns we read in the resulting hexagrams to act as the divination to our mediocre, deterministic lives. Here goes:

Question: Is the US Air Force building secret spy planes which can cross the sky at 3,000mph?
Due to the unfortunate fact that I do not have any ready-made yarrow sticks to hand, the glorious internet will have to suffice to divine us our answer. Luckily this free online I-Ching reading is available to us. What hexagrams will arise from this modern technological conspiratorial deliberation? Let's shake those conceptual, internet based, sticks of mystical foresight and see:

The present is embodied in Hexagram 40 - Hsieh (¦¦¦¦ - Deliverance): Advantage will be found in the southwest... If some operations are called for, there will be good fortune in the early conduct of them.

The third line, divided, shows a porter with his burden, yet riding in a carriage. He will only tempt robbers to attack him. However firm and correct he may try to be, there will be cause for regret...

The future is embodied in Hexagram 32 - Heng (¦¦¦ - Duration): Successful progress and no error is indicated, but the advantage will come from being firm and correct...

The things least apparent, those below and behind, are embodied by the lower trigram K'an (¦¦ - Water), which is transforming into Sun (¦ - Wind). As part of this process, danger and the unknown are giving way to penetration and following.

- link to my I-Ching reading

HA! So it would seem there is a secret spy-plane thingy. We should act to conduct 'deliverance' of the truth early, somewhere in the 'South West' (presumably around Area 51, Nevada) to sustain our 'good fortune'!

The 'burdened porter' is no doubt the Iraq-War-focused USA - his 'burden' (the super duper spy-plane thingy) will 'attract robbers' if he puts it on show...

And in the 'future' we (conspiracy fans everywhere) should stand 'firm and correct' in our handling of the truth, to alleviate the 'danger' and give way to 'penetration' (?). Sounds a clear cut case to me…

THE TIME HAS COME FOR PENETRATION OF THE TRUTH!

As I pop off to write this up and post it off to the British MoD please ponder for a moment the power of our yarrow-yin-yang companions. If a 5,000 year old divination method can shed light on the activities of secretive, supposedly democratic governments, what then for our post-paganistic, ritual-less society? Perhaps, be it a day or a thousand years from now, the sacred I-Ching will bring us our answers. But for now...

Answer: Yes!
Thank you I-Ching for being our ever vigilant looking glass of truth.

I hope you enjoyed I-Ching Excruciation as much as me and the MoD did... What question should I ask next?

Categories: Nonsense, Weird, Humour, Fun, News, Links, History, China, Technology, Conspiracy, Occult

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Pozzo:

(suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

[....]
Vladimir:

(Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said?

Extracts from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Categories: Books, Weird, Humour, Literature, Culture, Reality, Quotes, Human, Nonsense, People, Life, Fiction

A minority of people with autism have one or more extraordinary intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete objects almost instantaneously - they're often called 'autistic savants' or 'idiot savants'. Now Allan Snyder and colleagues have shown that by placing a pulsing magnet over a specific area of the brain, these kind of abilities can, to some extent, be induced in people who aren't autistic...

...The researchers think that by temporarily inhibiting activity in the left anterior temporal cortex, the TMS allowed the brain's number estimator to act on raw sensory data, without it having already been automatically grouped together into patterns or shapes. In other words, they believe it caused the 'normal' brain to function more like an autistic 'savant' brain. We argue that it removes our unconscious tendency to group discrete elements into meaningful patterns, like grouping stars into constellations, which would normally interfere with accurate estimation, the researchers said. By inhibiting networks involved in concepts, we may facilitate conscious access to literal details, leading to savant-like skills. - BPS Digest

Once again, it is the restrictive capacity of the human brain, rather than its ability to augment a world from nothing, which has captured the science headlines. The valve of consciousness, in the experiment mentioned above, has been loosened somewhat, bringing the flood of reality closer to the brink of its perceiver. Is it possible that by studying autism, and other such neurological 'disorders', the boundaries of the human can be better mapped out? There is more to us than sheer consciousness:

People with autism seem not to daydream in the way that other people do.

When the minds of non-autistic people are "idle", a network within the brain involved in social and emotional thought is, in fact, active. People often drift into daydreams at these times, but when we have to concentrate on a task, we suppress daydreaming.

A team from the University of California at San Diego used functional MRI to show that while this network is more active in non-autistic people when their brains are resting than carrying out a cognitive test, there is no difference between the active and resting brains of people with autism.

"The absence of this activity in autism might mean that they have a different sort of internal thought," says co-author Daniel Kennedy.- A recent forum post on this topic

Whole worlds ebb out from our conscious and subconscious minds. How strong is the dam which stems the tide?

In his classic book of neurological investigations, 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat', Oliver Sacks tells us a story of two of his patients, twins labeled with the idiom of the day as 'idiot savants'. Their infamy stretched far out from Sacks' examination room, into a society fascinated by the bizarre, the unique and indefinable (their story, along with that of another famous autistic Kim Peek, is said to have influenced the movie Rain Man). The twins lived a life of numbers, intrigued by infinities, playing with primes, all the while reveling in their personal universe together, as if conspirators in a mathematical mystery the rest of us would never comprehend. In pondering their mystique Sacks gilds their tale with melancholy:

The twins live exclusively in a thought-world of numbers. They have no interest in the stars shining, or the hearts of men. And yet numbers for them, I believe, are not 'just' numbers, but significances, signifiers whose 'significand' is the world.

They do not approach numbers lightly, as most calculators do. They are not interested in, have no capacity for, cannot comprehend, calculations. They are, rather, serene contemplators of number - and approach numbers with a sense of reverence and awe. Numbers for them are holy, fraught with significance...

...such an arithmetic, in minds like the twins', could be dynamic and almost alive - globular clusters and nebulae of numbers whorling and evolving in an ever expanding mental sky... - link

By instilling such mysterious 'powers' on the minds of healthy people perhaps we are diminishing exactly what it is we are trying to understand. The world of chaos, ever multiplying changes of form and void, appears to be stemmed from bursting in by the vagaries of our consciousness, yet this is no mere 'dulling down' of reality. By controlling our perceptions our brains allow new landscapes of thought to be painted as inner worlds. The twin savants in Sacks' tale may be able to dance amongst the base forms of existence, but to them a poem in 5 - 7 - 5 structure is devoid of beauty, a musical composition in 2/4 time is a mere collection of patterns which they revel in factoring. Perhaps in restricting the objective world the human mind is capable of enriching the inner subjective self, and in doing so, places forever hidden from view the original source of our greatest accomplishments.

The subjective selfhood is not about to be seen on an MRI scan or by flashing a TMS wand over our scalps, yet perhaps it is in this abstract realm where we most differ from the autism 'sufferer'. Our "unconscious tendency to group discrete elements into meaningful patterns" is where art is born. In those mental "networks involved in concepts" the seeds of civilisation were grown. Restriction is the key to complexity.

We should not look upon the autistic as tools with which to better understand ourselves - both our worlds are as distinctly complex and abstractly real as each other; both our realities are valid universes we have barely begun to explore.

Categories: Science, News, Consciousness, Human, Evolution, Reality, Perception, Psychology, Health, Books, Quotes

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Via Metafilter!
Categories: Science, Images, Fun, Nature, Links, Reality, Earth, Interesting, Amazing, Technology, Cool

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Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs beware! The Day of the Beast is here, a once in a thousand year event. Behold the power of the sum of the squares of the first seven prime numbers!

Today is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year (06-06-2006) making this very moment the perfect antidote for your Angelic poisons. But wait! Perhaps in those bountiful numbers a deeper meaning can be uncovered. Some facts to sweeten up this Terrible Tuesday:

• Organic molecules are based on carbon-12, with 6 Protons and 6 Neutrons surrounded by 6 Electrons.
• The sum of the first 144 [= (6+6)·(6+6)] digits of π is 666.
• In ASCII numbering: H (72) + O (79) + L (76) + Y (89) + B (66) + I (73) + B (66) + L (76) + E (69) [HOLY BIBLE] = 666
• The pentagon uses, on average, about 666 rolls of toilet paper every day (?!)
• ....the 666 facts just keep on rolling....

And so, as the Beast of base-10 numbering systems awakes from its thousand year slumber, save yourself a moment to ponder the nature of palindromic, abundant numbers; and say a little prayer for binary-beings of all denominations (1010011010)...

The Huge Entity's got some maths homework to be getting on with; thank God for Antichrists and their numeric equivalents.

UPDATE: The TRUE name of the Antichrist was revealed by Pastor Harry Walther yesterday. Don't be too disappointed with the result...

Categories: Maths, Weird, Humour, News, Religion, History, Jesus, Fun, π, 666, Nonsense

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Next time you go for the proverbial dump consider the process involved in turning one plate of badly cooked meat and veg into a self perceiving, website reading, procrastinating you. It occurs to me that the chance of atoms, manufactured billions of years ago in suns long since expressing their life cycles, would end up as the tip of a runny nose or the coating of a swollen spleen must be nigh on gargantuan. Are humans best understood as the creative intermediary between abstract amino-acids and piles of rotting faeces? 6 billion humans turning a rocky planetary outcrop into festering worm compost via the action of merely thinking.

But let's not let our microbial egos get too big here; your bowels are a lot less you than you may think:

The human large intestine is a 5-foot long, dark, dank and twisting corridor whose repetitive contractions function to squeeze the last remaining drops of water and the final bits of nutrient from feces before expulsion from our bodies.

Aiding the large intestine in this task are trillions of microbes that reside in the gut, where they help digest foods we would otherwise have to avoid. In this way the bugs contribute to our overall health.

Some of these tiny settlers are with us from birth, imparted from our mothers, while others gradually colonize our bodies as we grow. This microbial community is as diverse as any found in Earth's seas or soils, numbering up to 100 trillion individuals and representing more than 1,000 different species.

"This is the densest bacterial ecosystem known in nature," Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience. "The density of colonization of the distal gut is just enormous." - link

You are an ecosystem my friend, and the trillions of bacteria lodged in your gut are merely a miniscule representative for the trillions more which compose your substance.

Take a nose dive straight into self-denial, for without the microbes there's very little you left to claim:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses...

...scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too. - link

...it's time to stop thinking of yourself as a single living thing at all, say the scientists behind the new work. Better to see yourself as a "super-organism," they say: a hybrid creature consisting of about 10 percent human cells and 90 percent bacterial cells. - link

You're a walking, talking Petri-dish. An anatomical configuration. Even the fungi have more claim to your soul than you do... And all the loves you have lost, the human abstractions, each an enduring flutter across the surface of your stream-like life, each of them is an ode to biological ecosystems too. For microorganisms, in multitudinous symbiosis, have helped mankind to give birth, to love, to create, to expel the soul of beauty we hold so dear and rot us to nothing post rigor mortis. The little ones are more important than you...

Get over it and write a Mu-Haiku!


Ode to a trillion unicellular love-machines:

Oh eukaryotes!
Abdominal fungal growth,
digesting my soul.

Write your own Mu-Haiku here...

How in our arrogance we forget the beauty in the insignificant. Their numbers are plenty, their residence on this Earth far exceeds our own and yet in selfish circumstance we believe that we have outgrown them. This arrogance hides their wondrous impact on our lives. Their simple beauty obscures our deepest contemplation daily:

Why is there a 13 to 20 second delay between farting and the time it starts to smell?

Actually, the fart stinks immediately upon emergence, but it takes several seconds for the odor to travel to the farter's nostrils. If farts could travel at the speed of sound, we would smell them almost instantly, at the same time we hear them.

- Facts on Farts...

Mu to that!

Categories: Biology, Weird, Humour, Nature, Science, Fun, Life, Nonsense, Health, Human, Mu, Haiku

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Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

- Albert Einstein

(Via Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves by Cliff Pickover)

Categories: Science, On the nature of..., Reality, Quotes, Books, People, Perception, Universe

Labels: On the Nature of

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