Richard Doyle
A Talk At Penn State University
Carnegie Building #3
4-5:30 pm
February 5, 2008
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Out of the [lamination of selves], Zebra, which is supra- or trans-temporal, came into existence: pure energy, pure living information.
Valis, Philip K. Dick
“My alphabet starts with this letter called YUZZ.
It’s the letter I use to spell YUZZ-a-ma-TUZZ.
You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found
Once you go beyond Z and start poking around!
So, on beyond Zebra!” Dr. Seuss, __On Beyond Zebra__
This seminar will review the recent history of the life sciences and their re-encounter with mind - from Schrödinger to the present - in the hopes of informing diverse creative practices emerging at the nexus of consciousness and evolution, e.g. biotechnology.
Research and theorization over the past ten years on the thermodynamics of living systems suggests that such living ecologies are teleologically attracted to the increased dissipation of information. Consciousness, once viewed as an evolutionary oddity or epiphenomenon, can now be viewed as an "attention sink" integral to this telos, and can be defined as the differential perception of thermodynamic futures of implicate ("potential") combinations of ecosystemic interconnections at scales ranging from the cosmic to the quantum. This perception, clustered or "laminated" together in patterns, "is'' the evolution and devlopment of subjective experience and has transformed the planet, where a "thinking stratum" evolves: biologist V.I. Vernadksy dubbed it the "noösphere." Here collective self reference and its infinite regress evolves, enabling a massive increase in the production of entropy. Evolving strategies of information compression, this process becomes holographic in nature, replicating the subjective unfolding of the implicate order in a larger scale dissipative structure of planetary and perhaps cosmic dimensions.
a sloppy link: Peacefeather telepresence
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