The Huge Entity is alive! Between 2007 - 2009 I took up residence at Space Collective . The posts there express ideas I was having between the end of huge-entity.com and the beginning of my current site, machinemachine.net (also, from the end of my MA through…

I reach into the shadows behind the screen and retrieve a small, semi-transparent plastic bucket. I dip into the bucket and fish out a human brain. I have no idea to whom the brain belonged. I can't tell if it's male or female, black or white, or, with and…

Read Part I of this piece here: The Infinity of Definition ... Creative interpretations which invoke an emergent multiplicity move meaning away from the Cartesian; the digital, allowing an analogue curve of definition to develop. According to Barthes, this…

Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. ~ John Berger, Ways of Seeing The perceiver's position in an architectural, or merely physical space, determines the…

The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms... life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from…

On The Solar Anus : It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form... all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in…

Boxes are plain, powerful things that govern our lives. Once boxed, other, awkwardly various items become movable, stackable, dustable, understandable, loveable and, crucially, ignorable. A boxed item sneaks into invisibility. Clearly labelled, prominently…

You heard about a book. Intrigue darkened in its normal consistency and gripped you. Something about the book’s ability to project the reader into the world of another mind. A world with characters leading implausible lives between a chapter, a page, a…

I am a box. I’m not joking! And not just any box, but a regular cuboid of 103cm along each side. I am made of wood. Not just any wood, but cheap, medium density fibreboard. Prone to splinters and easily damaged, it has made living my life as an ordinary…

Controversial French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard , known for his fierce criticism of consumerism and excess, has died in Paris after a long illness at the age of 77. He first attracted worldwide attention in 1991 with his book The Gulf War…

I've recently become a PODCAST addict. My iPod overflows with lectures on Quantum Theory; video talks about religion, evolution and the destruction of tribal cultures; conversations about authors, philosophers and ancient Indian mathematics. The era of…

In Praise of In Praise of Shadows My brief Wikipediations tell me that Junichirō Tanizaki was one of Japan's favourite authors of the twentieth century. I gather that he captured the tests of identity brought on by Orient's shift towards Western ways - the…

I have a terrible tendency to read several books simultaneously, causing much mental overlap and leaving the floor of my room a constant litter of half-read compendiums. At the moment, the book which has most prominently grabbed my imagination is Michael…

On Confrontation The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort…

Where does technology end and our idea of God begin? Human beings evolved to perceive a distinction between 'ourselves' and 'our technology'. Increasingly though, our technological achievements are becoming extensions of our bodies, our identities and our…

( ... or 'A Small Problem With a Short Answer to a Small Problem With Objective Journalism' ) The Journalist wants to communicate to his readers some facts. He does not want to taint the reality of what he describes with the personality of his description.…

According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge the aim of art is to: ...transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which…

There are things which by their very nature are so dependant upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist... Humankind is almost pure potential as it emerges from the formative hand of…

The year two-thousand and seven!? Honestly? 2006 was a good year, especially from a Huge Entity perspective. From a badly organised clump of Internet ooze evolved a mighty idea-beast, dead-set on chewing up the putrid remains of any concept it came across. In…

German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on religion as a need and the difficulty of satisfying it : Faust avoided Gretchen's question "Do you believe in God?" But what should someone say who refuses to avoid the question and yet isn't naive? I believe that on the…

On God Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not Omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? ~ Epicurus On…

Feast your brain on these aged items, ordered from least to most old! Oldest Baby Age: 17 months 11 days Title: Baby August Description: The result of the longest recorded human gestation, Baby August was the oldest newborn ever. Oldest Human Artifact in…

"...I received from Oxford the manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths . Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel;…

The world is too complicated. There's no way we can take it all in at once. Our brains get confused . They have to be a little creative with the truth in order to make it manageable. We have to dumb things down. Some of us more than others. That's fine. We…

WARNING: Future Dead-Ahead! Thanks Arenamontanus !

On reading Stanislaw Lem 's Solaris - a rewarding activity - it might seem that the simulacrum-based goings on can be nothing more than convolouted allegory. So far-fetched are they that one would think their existence, as far as humanity is concerned, is…

Submit to the blog! Here be endless streams of symbols given birth in waves. As the seahorse father issues forth his young - disseminating, in the process, the patterns of parenthood - so shear activity in language breaks the corollary of meaning; necessarily…

Things used to be further away in some popular sense. The world is getting smaller, and not, explained Alan Partridge, due to global warming. Technological progress has resulted in modes of transportation which can move objects like me a long way, quickly.…

I am currently reading British Philosopher John Gray's - Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions . I tend to be turned on by anything controversial, but throw religion into the mix, slide in a healthy dollop of political cynicism, whisk that into a…

On Past The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. On Memory Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the…

I have a fascination with the borders of fiction and how we draw them. Here we find the relationships between author, reader and character builds the substance of each fictional world. How much does the author's knowledge reflect that of the reader's? How is…

Here Lies the Value of Truth: What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem…

The brain: that gathered walnut of grey matter, lodged inconspicuously in the skull cavity of each and every one of us. Peer deep enough into these zones of thought; feeling; memory; dreams and each tiny pulse of inherent beauty appears as nothing more than…

"Cheshire Puss," she began, rather timidly... "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where..." said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you…

There are times when the capacity for change overwhelms the identity of a subject. Qualities ascribed to an entity somehow anticipate their forthcoming metamorphosis, essentially prompting their own demise; manifold idiosyncrasies mutating themselves into a…

The Huge Entity Forum is now stable and ready to oil the machinery of your ideas! The only forum on the internet devoted to large ideas, enormous perspectives and tantilising realities needs your lively debate. Come and make it your second home... Current…

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident…

George Dyson asks: Are we learning to manipulate life or is life learning to manipulate us? A plausible scenario for how we arrived at life as we know it is that primitive organisms were infected by self-replicating parasites, learned to adopt those…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Via Metafilter!

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…

I have almost finished reading Cliff Pickover's demiurgic reality-guidebook ' Sex, Drugs Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes and the Quest for Transcendence '. It's been a ride I'd recommend to anyone interested in destroying this…

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…

Via BoingBoing !

Abstractions abound here on The Huge Entity . Thoughts multiply, recombine and surface anew as entities of shimmering complexity. After some of these thoughts grow shadows, luminous and independant, awaiting their own responses; dealing in their own echoes…

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth…

Aliens! Wide-eyed, short-statured, extraterrestrially-elongated aliens! In a universe as vast as this one (assuming you aren't one of those un-evolved creationist types) alien life of some form or other appears to be a statistical certainty. Yet, in an…

Infinity defies absolute definition. Perception of the infinite, for anything other than a mind which is itself infinitely composed, is an oxymoron. And yet, in historical conceptions of the infinite, or at least the imperceptibly extended, can be found…

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism . The presence of the 'Other Half' a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common…

The Excruciatingly Large Forum is ALIVE! Feed it your brain today: • Panspermia: Seeds of Change • Best Science-Fiction Novels • Cultural Semiotics • Co-evolution: shaping them as they shape us? • Request for Nudity • Music Absorbtion • Thinkers Lay Out the…

What's the coolest way to stretch the vageries of conscious perception to their absolute limits? How about the detection of elementary particles so weakly interactive that most can pass straight through the entire planet Earth without a blip? Welcome to the…

In every human brain, there are as many neurons as there are galaxies in the known universe — about 100 billion, drawn from 10,000 different cell types and woven into a three-dimensional tapestry, with threads of neural interconnections that number in the…

The ideal of 'the city' has stood as the most physically accessible representation of Utopia since the days of Plato's Republic ; the mental playground from which philosophers and writers have played with the subject of human: Plato (through Socrates)…

The amygdala is at it again! ...Researchers used Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans to analyze the brains of 72 healthy, right-handed adults (36 men and 36 women). The subjects were instructed to relax with their eyes closed while being scanned. When…

Dwayne M. over at Weber's Polar Night poses an interesting question today, one which has me reaching for my Baudrillard with gusto: From Wikipedia ... Colossus: The Forbin Project is an apocalyptic science fiction movie based on the 1966 novel 'Colossus' by…

In humans, intelligence develops over time. A child learns primarily from the guidance of patient adults. Without strong social--that is, cultural--inputs, even a potential wunderkind will end up a bungling bumpkin as an adult. We now have evidence that this…

Imagination and creativity are the parts of our personal conscious lives most able to manifest themselves in the objective world around us. The variety of tools, both physical and cognitive , we use to channel those creative urges is truly astounding. The…

www.huge-entity.com turns 365 days old today... Where were you when it all started? The Huge Entity rears back its shaggy maine of nonsense clod fur, cracks wide a pair of blood speckled jaws and lets the universe know its power; truly alive where once t'was…

Rejoice! For the 3rd month, 14th day, 1st hour, 59 th minute, and 26th second (3.1415926) of this year has past us by.... What does it all mean? Happy π day ! At the simplest level Pi ( π ) is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and at…

On the Exile of Mankind The people became numerous... The god was depressed by their uproar Enil heard their noise, He exclaimed to the great gods The noise of mankind has become burdensome... - from the ancient Sumerian epic Atrahasis Having come from the…

Philosophy is odious and obscure, Both law and physic are for petty wits; Divinity is basest of the three, Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile, 'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished Mephistopheles ... - Sc. I of Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe The…

The internet has become a vast system for the evolution of conceptual memes of information. Mankind's evolved tendency to relish rumour, to gravitate towards gossip becomes viral in the hyperreal communities of cyberspace. As raw information becomes the only…

The Book: Know : Encounter : Own "My books and stories are intellectual and conceptual mazes. I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are and how we look into the world, and world as illusion, etc.), because the situation is…

A Huge Entity presentation on the nature of identity... Featuring short musings from the most original minds in the blogsphere. Contents 1 2B ll ~ 2B by Cutie Programmer 2 Living in a Multiverse by Reality Carnival 3 The Tipping Point by BPS Digest /…

Mu Machinery by Daniel Rourke The Huge Entity The machinery concerned with human experience is a bundle of cells so intricate in its complexity that it took over 13 billion years for evolutionary processes to manifest its structure. We each maintain that the…

Pushbutton Automation by JK DunneIV There is a mystical “I” awakening. It is being stirred by events unseen and of uncertain origin. When it wakes up what will it be? Inexistence is a nice concept. It works in that soporific marketing kind of way because…

As 'You' Like It by Jaime Morrison The Nonist don't take this personally but your depth of sensation, though perhaps impressive echoing as it does in the enclosed space of your own mind, is stunted. comically so in fact. your five senses, on which you rely…

A Mind Program Called Ego by Thomas Herold Quantum Biocommunication Someone gave me a book from a famous Indian author entitled 'Who Cares?' . In this book Ramesh Balsekar explains the mystery around the ego and why it's all an illusion. Reading this book…

Compared to the Cosmos by Brian Hines Church of the Churchless BrianHines.com Like you, my goal every day is to make something of myself. A successful, knowing, active, loving, happy thing. The problem is, on the scale of the universe the value of each of us…

A Reflexive Everything by Daniel Poynter Hyperaware Consciousness 'You' do not exist, and you don't love Family Guy, lip syncing monkeys and free Internet porn. If you exist in the traditional Western way - dualistic and distinct from your environment/body -…

Our Baryonic Nature by Mac Tonnies Posthuman Blues Mactonnies.com Astronomers are learning that the vast majority of the universe's matter takes a form that eludes casual analysis. We've found that we're an anomaly; if there's such a thing as a "galactic…

Burden of Proof by Gerry Canavan Backwards City More Reasons Why You, The Reader, Don't Exist 1. Unitary consciousness is an illusion . As Daniel Dennett explains at length in Consciousness Explained , what you mistakenly think of as a single voice of…

The Tipping Point by Dr. Christian Jarrett Mind Hacks BPS Digest "That's not like you to behave like that!". How many times have you heard that exclamation? It's nonsensical of course, because 'you', in the sense of a consistent, predictable, reliable…

2B ll ~ 2B by Christopher Willcock Cutie Programmer The universe has no neurons. A true statement? What sigh and what groan -- what lark upon high draws this little reckoning? A universe exists and certainly a scientist within. A conceptualizing scientist --…

Living in a Multiverse by Cliff Pickover Reality Carnival Pickover.com In our own region of the universe, we've already developed computers and the ability to simulate lifelike forms using these computers and mathematical rules. I believe that one day we will…

In our semantically governed, symbolic understanding of reality we often maintain that true -identity is possible, that the whirling sensations called 'you' somehow cease at the surface of your skin, all else being distinct. Of course the Buddhist conception…

"Scholars have long debated whether our native language affects how we perceive reality -- and whether speakers of different languages might therefore see the world differently. The idea that language affects perception is controversial, and results have…

The Earth is a Mandala , a multi-angular construct of mental space and the thing you label ' up ' is a completely arbitrary point of reference . Quit living in ' A Hemisphere ' . Triangulate your position in the icosahedral net and get with the program (baby)…

On Duality: "...out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings." -…

'String Theory' posits that our universe arises from the vibrations of tiny, infinitesimal and multi-dimensional strings of energy resonating in a higher dimension of reality. A beautiful, if complicated idea resting on the very tip of the physics…

Next time you start reading a work of fiction try focusing your mind from this perspective. Who knows more: you or the story's protagonist? The idea of the protagonist extends beyond fiction into the 'real' world. You are the protagonist in the narrative of…

The world is a reflection, cast by the remnants of light photons scattered onto the only point where your brain makes physical contact with the outside world: your eyes. Yet with such abundance of reality mirroring humans still find the concept of reflection…

The Huge Entity has traveled, rested and been reinvigorated. Regular posting to resume again soon... For the time being please feel free to use this post as an idea banner; a concave mirror focusing your musings to a penetrating, burning spear of intensity.…

Antonius Block: Is it so hard to conceive God with one's senses? Why must He hide in a midst of vague promises and invisible miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don't believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot?…

As this year draws to a close and my first trip home in 18 months looms large ahead of me, the concept of time has been made prominent in my imagination. 2005? What does it mean? That 2005 years ago some bloke in some nonsense-scripture was allegedly born to…

"The available scientific evidence tends to support the view that the mystic experience is one of internal perception, an experience that can be ecstatic, profound, or therapeutic for purely internal reasons. Yet for psychological science, the problem of…

As far as conspiracy theories go, this has to be one of the most interesting I have come across: "Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future".…

According to Freud there have been three great scientific revolutions that completely re-drew the boundaries which border human reality: Copernican : Where our geocentric perspective of the cosmos was revolutionised by the concept of the human world, the…

Inspired in part by all lists everywhere here are the top 5 books that shifted my perspective on the world, on reality, on the self: Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon Spanning over billions of years of cosmological evolution and delving Godlike into the very heart…

...Baudrillard expanded on his theme. "We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland," he said. "And the same for art. The…

I posted this over at Metafilter and thought it would look kind of nice here too... I changed the links here to point to past articles at The Huge Entity . Go on, reminisce a little: If the universe is a hologram and the healthy human brain a valve of…

By Purchasing Online Nonsense Creates $ , you get... The realisation that your life is worth nothing unless I say it is! Confidence that my bank account is growing. The freedom to live the life I tell you to. A new self-image that expands my goals and dreams.…

"UC Berkeley physics professor, Raphael Bousso, is trying to break down the mysteries of the universe with a concept called the holographic principle. Physicists stumbled on the idea while studying black holes. It is a concept, which ultimately questions…

See the blackness. Feel the blackness. Be the blackness... From unraveling the fundamentals of Brownian motion to patching together new forms of reality from relativity theory, Einstein has made more physicists horny than any other person in history, and now…

On epileptically induced ecstasy: "There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it…

Current estimated human population on Earth: 6.52 billion people Taking a rough guess that around 50% of the world's population is asleep or unconscious at any one moment this means that: Since you started reading this post roughly 2067 human years have been…

"Ideas that could further exploration in space are coming from a surprising source - animals such as ants, fish and squirrels. The future of space exploration could lie in biomimetics, where engineering meets biology. In effect, it steals nature's…

Southern Japan revels in their insect devastation. The supermarkets seem to hold host to a wide variety of poisons, traps and sprays designed to cause insects a breakdown in their existence. On a recent shopping trip there amongst the cockroach neutralisers…

"Scientists have discovered that schizophrenia sufferers are not fooled by a visual illusion and are able to judge it more accurately than non-schizophrenic observers. The study by UCL (University College London) and King's College London suggests that in…

Have your dreams turned into a 4-frame comic masterpiece by Jesse Reklaw over at his Slow Wave website. The archives are well worth a glimpse, bringing into clear focus the surreal comedy of her readers' unconscious. I only wish I remembered my dreams better,…

If you thought religion grappled with a multitude of concepts that border on the insane , you should take a look at The Huge Entity archives sometime. Is there some sort of higher purpose behind the pulsating nonsense this blog continually erupts? What have I…

In the past year I have read a heap load of books (my job gives me a ridiculous amount of free-time) most of which were superb. And so in recognition of my affliction for thrusting information into other people's faces, here are some of my favourite quotes…

Every night I die. Causation departs the wide eyed experience, inner motions shuffle mental chaos into a semblance of order. A flash of colours, a distant homogeny of previous selves relate in the stasis of dreams my memories and realities. Consciousness…

In the 17th Century early 'scientific' analysis was undertaken of the Biblical account of Noah's Ark to determine exactly how large it must have been. From this figure they calculated a precise number of animal species that could exist on the planet's surface…

I love the Mind Hacks website. Constantly updated with cutting edge, brain related topics, today being no exception... Want to get up close and personal with the base of your very own consciousness? The winning illustration from The National Science…

Multiple Universes, the sci-fi addicts favourite muse. Everyone knows about them, at least the vague idea, but how can scientists possibly justify their existence? Surely it's science gone bonkers? Well not entirely. It just so happens that the most…

Some big thinkers got together this week at the annual TED Global conference to figure out some stuff. You know the kind of thing 'big' thinkers grapple with don't you? The future; the moral implications of new technologies; reality and all that jazz. Famous…

Following my post last week about the infinity of Pi / π , the record for reciting its infinite sequence of numbers from memory has been broken, by a Japanese mental health counsellor no less! According to the BBC News website: "Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed…

"In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal's 125th anniversary with a look forward -- at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today." Are…

"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary…

I just had to re-post this as it was so popular last time. Enjoy (again)... As I've been ranting on about reality, perception and the human mind for the past few days I thought I'd give you a glimpse into how much of reality your brain completely makes up.…

As my regular 2 or 3 readers may know, I have recently been on a mission to blur the lines composing human perception. Reality as a construct of the brain , reality as a simulation , reality as simulacrum . Where next? Dreams: everyone has them, everyone is…

Following from Friday's post on scientist's attempts to build a computer model of the Universe I came upon this New Scientist post about building a computer simulation of the Human brain: "An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human…

"Scientists have recreated a vast segment of the universe inside a computer and written a brief history of time, black holes and galaxy formation. The Millennium Simulation - the biggest exercise of its kind - required 25 million megabytes of memory. But it…

"Experts have dated the UK's oldest rock art, at Creswell Crags in the midlands, to more than 12,800 years ago... The complex of caves at Creswell Crags has preserved evidence of human activity during the last Ice Age. " "The man in charge of the Hubble space…

True perceived reality is a nonsense. In this mass produced, mass perceived world we inhabit one is often brought to the deceptive conclusion that we live on the brink of some progressive, maybe final understanding; a wave of truth about to sweep our modern…