http://borce.tigros.net/occultism/Chaos/raw-prometheus.pdf
I can e-mail the book for anyone interested, just let me know: felipevenancio@gmail.com
Peace!]]>
The fox wanted the grapes but couldn't reach them so he convinced himself that they were sour
You know that something is important when you really don't want to hear it.
The Enlightened are always laughing...bastards.]]>
What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations we asked over 70 of the world's most brilliant scientists for their ideas.
In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.
Delve into those visions of the future by author in the story list of this special report, or navigate forecasts by topic here:
Life: Ageing, alien life, consciousness, ecology, embryology, environment, evolution, genetics, health, humans, language, neuroscience, oceans, psychology, sex and social science.
Space and technology: Artificial intelligence, communications, computing, cosmology, space and technology.
Physical sciences: Chemistry, energy, materials, maths and physics.
]]>
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a time-capsule as "a container used to store for posterity a selection of [entities] thought to be representative of life at a particular time." With this is mind, we thought it might be interesting to assemble our own time-capsule and, this being the web-lead information age, bury that capsule online, in an enormous web-garden.What ideas will future generations glance back at and laugh in contemptuous hindsight? In 50 years time which contemporary cultural memes will be deader than the proverbial Dodo? Lying in the digital darkness of our internet time-capsule these questions, and more, will have to wait 50 years of technological shifts; of societal upheavals; of cultural fermentation before they can be answered.
Let the concepts bury themselves as we set to work...
Featuring short musings from the most original minds in the universe:
All concepts open for discussion...]]>
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures...
...But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises...
- full BBC articleAm I cruel or just perverted in that I laughed profusely at this story...
Welcome to a vision of our David Lynch inspired future!]]>
Where Gray's earlier tour de force, Straw Dogs, introduced me to his main theories, Heresies succeeds in fortifying them, readily providing a glimpse into the past few years of Grays political and philosophical writings. His style is extremely lucid, concise and self aware. I find it hard not to revel in his ideas.
His main tenets, as I understand them, include:
1. Humanism, and with it 'progressive liberalism', are born of Christian ideologies and as such reflect a religious-like <em>faith rather than a rational materialism.
2. The belief maintained in science as humanity's tool of salvation is naive and, at base, a nonsense. Science can bring change, but progress is an illusion.
3. Free will, and thus morality, are also illusions.
4. Humans are animals driven by natural forces beyond our comprehension. Animals should not be understood as separately existing species, but merely as an ever evolving interplay of forces proceeding one another in rapid fashion. The idea that 'we' can control such nonexistent entities is therefore a farce.
5. Humanity is a rapacious species and a detriment to the planet Earth, Gaia.
6. History is a series of cycles ultimately leading to nowhere.
The liberation inherent in such interpretation is, for me, anything but cynical, yet I find myself at a pause when trying to fully grasp Gray's world view......
(FULL POST can be found on The Huge Entity main page...)]]>
To understand the mind's evolution, it is probably best to forget everything one knows about human history and human civilization. Pretend that the last ten thousand years did not happen. Imagine the way our species was a hundred thousand years ago. From the outside, they would look like just another group of large primates foraging around Africa, living in small bands, using a few simple tools. Even their courtship looks uneventful: a male and a female just sit together, their eyes meet, they breathe at each other in odd staccato rhythms for several hours, until they start kissing or one gives up and goes away. But if one could understand their quiet, intricately patterned exhalations, one could appreciate what is going on. Between their ballon-shaped skulls passes back and forth a new kind of courtship signal, a communication system unlike anything else on the planet. A language. Instead of dancing around in physical space like normal animals, these primates use language to dance around in mindscapes of their own invention, playing with ideas...Extract from 'The Mating Mind : How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature' by Geoffrey Miller]]>
Another bomb in Baghdad, another soldier killed in Kabul. A remembrance service for the dead of a battle long ago, a rogue state testing missiles for a conflict yet to come. Warfare is all around us, but for me it has only taken place in distant lands. I grew up during the cold war and live in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, but I have never experienced war first-hand and pray that I never will. Not so for millions of others throughout the world and throughout history.War is our very nature. Our conflicts with our environment tends to increase our conflicts with each other. This is a well known connection, shown to have occured at the collapse of many civilisations, both large and small . Everyone knows that many wars of the 20th and early 21st centuries have been fought over our weakening grasp on non-sustainable energies. Do you think the trigger finger of the West will grow more itchy as the energy/climate crisis continues?Why so much war and violence? Perhaps we are an inherently violent species, prone not just to interpersonal violence but also to what the anthropologist Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University, New Jersey, has described as "organised, purposeful group action directed against another group involving the actual or potential application of lethal force" - that is, war. Reports of apparently planned, deliberate killing by chimpanzees in one group of those in another, as described in Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson's 1997 book Demonic Males, have led some to fear that this is indeed the case - that a murderous instinct is an indelible part of our evolutionary heritage. If chimpanzees are taken to reflect our earliest ancestry, and warring tribes such as the Yanomami of the Amazon region - made infamous by Napoleon Chagnon's 1968 book subtitled "The fierce people" - are representative of the pristine traditional society of modern humans, then it may indeed appear that war has always been with us. If so, we must conclude that it will remain for as long as our species survives upon this planet.
Such a bleak conclusion is all too easy to reach when there is so much war around us and in our history books. That does not mean it is right. Like us, those killer chimpanzees are members of the modern world, and they may have been responding to unnatural conditions created by habitat restriction. The other species of chimpanzee, the bonobo, appears to lack such aggressive instincts, and resolves tension by sex rather than violence. The bonobo has just as many credentials to be a model for the human past. Similarly, some argue that Yanomami warfare is a product of European contact rather than a "natural" state for that society. Even if it is not, there is no reason to treat the Yanomami as typical of our prehistoric forebears. The only way to know about the past is to look at the evidence from the past itself.
The Archaeology of Warfare does just that....
[...]
I was particularly impressed by the study of tribal warfare on the North American Great Plains prior to European contact, which showed a correlation between climate change and conflict intensity, and also with the analysis of warfare and state development in the Oaxaca valley, Mexico. This focuses on the development of Monte Albán, a site where the brutal slaughter of captives was dramatically recorded in galleries of carved stone images. Such carvings remind us that an ideology of conflict frequently becomes embedded within the culture of a society: the young become socialised with the virtues of violence and the elite become dependent on war to legitimise and sustain their position.It is when ancient ideologies of conflict meet new technology that levels of death and destruction often become extreme. Mark Allen of California State Polytechnic University provides a superb account of the changes in Maori warfare, finishing with how the ancient pattern of fighting for revenge - sustainable for many centuries when this was done with clubs - led to between 20,000 and 50,000 deaths in a couple of decades after muskets were acquired from Europeans.
What these and the other studies in this volume show is that we cannot rely on recent history to understand the nature of warfare and the depth or otherwise of our violent nature. Archaeology provides an essential long-term and global perspective for exploring the interactions between social organisation, cultural values, environmental change, economy and technology in the cause of war and as the consequence of war. The archaeological record suggests that there were long periods when warfare was either absent or sporadic in human society. Unfortunately these appear to have been long, long ago, and the (pre)history of humankind indicates that by the time the bombs in Baghdad have ceased, they will have started up elsewhere. - New Scientist link (sorry, sub only)
War dominates our headlines, our economies and our other political activities worldwide. Could it ever be different without altering the very nature of mankind (ala Brave New World)?
I love the Bonobo's sexual method of conflict resolution. What would a human world evolved from a more Bonobo attitude be like?]]>
This question is so large that it has not been approached directly even in the humanities disciplines, which have presumed rather than interrogated it. Each of the fundamental categories of humanistic research—history, philosophy and criticism of the arts—investigates a basic or elemental feature of human being. Philosophy is particularly interested in the limits of human autonomy, of the capacity for self-determination, self-awareness and self-regulation that is central to our conceptions of free will, reason, the capacity for self-regulation and moral accountability.
[...]
Aspects of the question of autonomy are being taken up not just by philosophers but by investigators in cognitive science, genomics, biochemistry and the technology of bioinformatics. In all these fields, the presumed autonomy of the free human subject is being interrogated and complicated. The presumption of singularity that informs history is also being pressed hard by those working in computational science, animal intelligence, genetic engineering and evolutionary biology, all of which are making it harder to speak in traditional ways about the splendid self-sufficiency of the human species.
And creativity—the most splendid of all properties of human being, according to the humanities—is now being itself redefined by linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and even software development, which are assigning new meanings to this term, meanings that do not necessarily funnel back to the individual human being in a state of inspired frenzy.
Autonomy, singularity, creativity—each of these terms names both a long-standing concern of the humanities and a set of contemporary projects being undertaken in the sciences.
Many such projects—from the relatively familiar such as stem-cell research and the Human Genome Project to the more exotic, such as attempts to upload the component parts of consciousness into a computer, bioinformatics, and advanced nanotechnology—appear to have serious implications for our basic understanding of human being. These projects may well force us to modify our understanding of traditional moral and philosophical questions, including the definition of and value attached to such presumptively nonhuman concepts as "the animal" and "the machine."
[...]
We stand today at a critical juncture not just in the history of disciplines but of human self-understanding, one that presents remarkable and unprecedented opportunities for thinkers of all descriptions. A rich, deep and extended conversation between humanists and scientists on the question of the human could have implications well beyond the academy. It could result in the rejuvenation of many disciplines, and even in a reconfiguration of disciplines themselves—in short, a new golden age. - American Scientist]]>
The Protagonist: What can you tell me?
I am fascinated by the concept of 'The Protagonist'. Whether this be in fiction, mythology or used as a metaphor for how one perceives oneself (your 'life' being the narrative within which you exist) I desire a few new angles on this ancient human construct.]]>
- Do you know of any theories / research / writings on the protagonist?
- What books / movies / myths etc. have you come across from which a protagonist is COMPLETELY absent?
- Or any such fiction/mythology with an interesting spin on the traditional protagonist?
Basically anything which comes to mind would be fascinating, thanks a lot...
In past posts I have touched on the idea that we are all the protagonists in our own reality narratives. These realities interrelate in surprising ways which either enrich or contradict our individual, subjective perspectives. In organised religion can be found a selected framework through which a shared narrative is weaved. Myth is a powerful force rendering our existentially meaningless lives into a stronger composite than any one of us maintains alone.Perhaps in Christianity Jesus is the leading protagonist. In his story Christianity's followers catch reflections of themselves which dimly accentuate their favourite curves, their preferred self maintained attributes. The myth is a powerful force indeed.
Modern scientific enquiry renders theological concerns nigh on extinct when we ask materialistic questions:- Why do we die?
- How old is the Earth?
- What is matter?
The true understanding science can bring us in these areas is unsurpassed in the history of human thought. Yet if we attempt to analyse our subjective worlds with this scientific framework its power remains accessible to a relative elite.
I have grown to loath the word 'scientists' of late, so padded full is the media of this gross generalisation. Thus a rarely understood mass of society casts a single, collective shadow from which a lonely protagonist is wrought. All work in the sciences then, as far as our media tells us so, is maintained as the work of one 'super-science' - a conglomerate's power with a fake protagonist's glory; knowledge but no myth.
This is dangerous.
I believe that the current failure of the scientific community is in understanding their potential. If science is to overcome the dogma of religion - a problem which can only grow exponentially with time - a myth needs to be wrought.
In the hyperreal communities of the internet I see the potential for the greatest over-arching narrative in the history of humankind. Through the interplay of chaotic forces far beyond the reaches of our understanding religion of all kinds places the cogs of our society into various working machines of change. Today, as the time scales inherent in change become narrower and narrower, mythological structure has not the time to emerge. Science the protagonist, standing so heroic in many areas of our world story, still appears lost in a sea of chaotic forces none of us are capable of grasping. This allows religion to strike back, raise its head in pride and laugh in the face of scientific adversary. Dogma may shield us from the lies, but surely it ties us together tighter than any myth-less narrative.
- So I ask you:
- How should the scientific community construct the narrative to end all narratives?
- Will the internet act as its theological framework or is society best maintained in the flesh and bone relationships religion has manipulated so well?
- Could their ever rise a scientific-messiah from the chaos of modern, objectively governed society? and, if the ultimate narrative does arrive, what form will/should it take?
and finally...
Which I did, thanks, which leads me to the crux of the matter, what is the one thing in the word which you would risk it all on? I'm takling something (someone?) you would die for, to give your own existance to see this one goal through]]>
We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least. So why do we do it?It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.
"It's tied in with self-esteem," says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. "We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."
Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others, researchers say. People are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds, Feldman's research shows.
[...]
"People almost lie reflexively," Feldman says. "They don't think about it as part of their normal social discourse." But it is, the research showed.
"We're trying not so much to impress other people but to maintain a view of ourselves that is consistent with the way they would like us to be," Feldman said. We want to be agreeable, to make the social situation smoother or easier, and to avoid insulting others through disagreement or discord.
Men lie no more than women, but they tend to lie to make themselves look better, while women are more likely to lie to make the other person feel better.
Extroverts tend to lie more than introverts, Feldman found in similar research involving a job-interview situation.
- Link to 'Why We lie'Self deception is a fascinating phenomenon and has been used by philosophers aplenty to examine the consistency of selfhood and the nature of consciousness. Sartre used the phrase 'bad faith' to describe a mental state humans often compel themselves towards. Existential reasoning lead him into the seeming infinite loops which arise in our consciousness. Consciousness denies freedom which denies itself, blind selfhood rolls off into infinity. From Wikipedia:
Bad faithIs this evidence that the lie is where we find reality? Without it, it seems, a consistent self could not be maintained. Animals appear to deceive, but in the ability of humans to deceive their own self perhaps we see glimpses of our inate power. In denying our objective world the human is naturally thrust into a state of inner reality, a solipsism reliant on the depth of lie one envelopes oneself in. Where do the human, the lie and the real interlink? Is all a lie?]]>A critical claim in existentialist thought is that we are always radically free to make choices and guide our lives towards our own chosen goal (or 'project'). We cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even a armed mugger's victim possesses choices: to hand over his wallet; to negotiate; to beg; to run; to counter-attack; or to die.
Although we are limited by our circumstances (our facticity), these cannot force us, as radically free beings, to follow one course over another. For this reason, we choose in anguish: we know that we must make a choice, that it will have consequences, and that some choices are better than others. But for Sartre, to claim that one amongst our many conscious possiblities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, 'I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family') is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance - a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity.
Intentional Consciousness and Freedom
For Sartre this attitude is manifestly self-decieving. As human consciousness, we are always aware that we are not whatever we are aware of - we cannot, in this sense, be defined as our 'intentional objects' of consciousness, including our facticity of personal history, character, bodies, or objective responsibility. Thus, as Sartre often repeated, 'human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is': it can only define itself negatively, as 'what it is not'; but this negation is simultaneously the only positive definition it can make of 'what it is'.
From this we are aware of a host of alternative reactions to our objective situation - i.e., of freedom - since no situation can dictate a single response. Only in assuming social roles and value systems external to this nature as conscious beings can we pretend that these possiblities are denied to us; but this is itself a decision made possible by our freedom and our separation from these things. It is this paradoxical free decision to deny to ourselves this inescapable freedom which is 'bad faith'.
- Link to Sartre and Bad Faith
i personally have always been dubious about the surprising redness of my little brother's hair - no one else has red hair that we know of. Thankfully red hair is coded for by a recessive allele so i dont have to call my mother a slag outright.........]]>
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”
Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.
- link to full article
- link to a more detailed exposition on Pianka's own website
- some myths about Ebola are outlined here
- Do you agree with (at least some) of Pianka's arguments?
- Is it possible to reject his opinion without falling back on the obvious position that 'all human life is sacred'?
"The minds of geniuses are full of copious and original associations." ~ William James
"Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite." ~ Victor Hugo
Have you ever been lucky enough to be close to someone whom you considered a genius?]]>
The £5 million centre will bring pioneering embryo screening techniques for the creation of "saviour siblings" to Britain.
Dr Simon Fishel of the Care at the Park clinic
In addition, it will offer testing for up to 100 inherited gene disorders such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.
Embryos found to be carrying rogue genes will be discarded and only "healthy" embryos implanted into their mothers.
- link to full articleOK, so we could get into debate here about the moral implications of consciously altering the gene pool. We could talk about the gaps that may arise between an elite who will have access to this technology and and underclass who won't.
What interests me though is the implications such private commercial enterprises will have on the status of the human.
Of course the example given in the story is the first in a long line of overblown moral outrages to hit our headlines, but inevitably, just as the contraceptive pill, the heart transplant, the test tube baby became integral parts of our modern health system so too will health 'services' far exceeding the present power of this one.
It is naive to believe that mankind will fully control the future evolution of our species. Matters beyond our understanding, beyond even the minute extent of our mortal lives, will eventually carve the species of homo sapien new furrows down which it will run. Yet here, for the first time in history, those furrows will be carved, in part, by the hand of capitalistically governed enterprise.
History is replete with conscious control over the direction of the species. Whether through religious inclination (i.e. Jews may only have children with other Jews), social alienation (the upper classes and lower classes of Europe generally breeding separately for thousands of years; the slave labour of the colonial era; the eugenics movement of early 20th century America), dictatorship (Hitler's extermination of the Jews) or otherwise, man has pushed its genetic development, at the most basic of levels, in consciously dictated directions.
Now it is the turn of big business to wield this control.
Economic venture, capitalistic gain, globalised interests, the whim of the consumer, of fashion, of the stock market - could these be the new influences on the human species? And if so, what implications does this have for the identity of mankind?]]>
The increase in life expectancy enjoyed by many societies is a triumph of modern science. Our understanding of the human body and how to repair it when it breaks down have continued to push "old age" into the distance - and researchers intend to keep pushing.
But the claims made by Dr Aubrey de Grey, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, that lifespan can be increased by over 1,000 years, have proven too much for some; and a dispute has now broken out within the gerontology community.
The argument, which has been played out through academic journals, and most recently at a "life extension" conference, has culminated in the unusual step of a cash prize on offer for anyone who can disprove de Grey's science.
- Link to full articleMore on the long bearded de Grey can be found here...
Stem cells hold great promise for new treatments for many conditions as they have the ability to become many different types of adult tissue.
But at present the most flexible type is found in human embryos - and their use is mired in controversy.
- link to full articleWooooaah there! Did they say 'the human testicle'?
And here was I thinking science had enough horizons to cross already.
If it came down to it, would you let your bollocks, or the man in your life's bollocks, be harvested for stem cells?]]>