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Geek Scholarships Available
Established by Congress in 1986, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation operates an educational scholarship program designed to provide opportunities for outstanding U.S. students with excellent academic records and demonstrated interest and potential for, careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. In the spring of 2008, the Foundation will award scholarships to students who will be college juniors or seniors during the 2008-2009 academic year.
In order to be considered for an award, students must be nominated by their institution.Each scholarship covers eligible expenses for undergraduate tuition, fees, books, and room and board, up to a maximum of $7,500 annually. Scholarship monies not used during one academic year are not transferable to the succeeding academic year. Junior-level scholarship recipients are eligible for a maximum of two years of scholarship support, and senior-level scholarship recipients are eligible for a maximum of one year of scholarship support. To be eligible, a student must be a current full-time sophomore or junior and must be pursuing a baccalaureate degree, have a B average or equivalent, stand in the upper fourth of the class, and be a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or U.S. national.
Penn State Campus deadline is December 3, 2007. National deadline is January 31, 2008
mobius periodically intentionally abandons his wiki, lets it go fallow. Gotta let the void build up for yins, while mobius shuts up long enough to mutate!
mobius: Colbert "Tased and Confused"
date: November 4, 2007
sign: Scorpiolicious
tendency: Scorptacular
title: "Tased & Confused" Materials: remixed\"half baked crap\" by mobius. Instructions: Google image search, brow remix by The Gimp. Instructions: Work pixels into a soft paste by imagining Stephen Colbert's Brow, Tasered. Whirl. Pinch. Prepare in N servings as Multimedia Wiki Composition. Repeat.
"Skull & Bones" as Jolly Roger in Drag, or: The Sound of One Taser Clicking
The more mobius collectively ponders the "Don't Tase me Bro'" video collage, the more it appears to demonstrate in spectacular and thoroughly embodied fashion somethin' mobius and most of yins already knew: Politics understood as the circulation of broadcast mediated discourse evaluated according to its own terms on the irony/complicity continuum is simply not equipped to respond to the throughly synesthetic effects unleashed by the shift from broadcast to peer to peer ubiquitous media such as this here wiki. How did the pit of your stomach feel when you heard the screams? Kerry felt the same thing from Meyer's questions, as did much of the audience. In short, Myer exuded the wrong kind of informed rhetorical intensity, even a warrior eloquence in dealing with attempted interruptions, and a man who may have won the 2004 presidential election could not effectively manage him, accustomed as he has become to the carefully scripted production values of broadcast, that is copy protected, media. Smiling, stage struck bystander faces tell the whole story: Dude, doesn't he know this is scripted? How'd he get in?
No [peer to peer rhetorical interaction whatsoever can link Andrew Meyer, or any other anonymous questioner, to the mediaplex and its heavily filtered 24/7 infomerical for "politics." The medium by which this scripting is preserved is the taser.
The taser is the medium is the message.
The sound of one taser clicking announces that the very function of broadcast media becomes to evaluate, judge, separate, render dubious and/or undecideable, truthy, all political acts that emerge from the silicon rhizome. "Skull & Bones", in this context, becomes just a shorthand, a cryptonym, a shibboleth, for all the narratives of interconnection that tend to be produced by ubiquitous media. It also nicely resonates with the flag that such ubiquitous open source media does indeed proudly raise, so we'll take it. True, many raised their cell phones but not their bodies in response to Myer's tasing, but this demonstrates only that
they have not yet completed what William Burroughs called the Storming of the Reality Studio.
The onlookers, in peering into the cameras, demonstrated that they did not understand. They did not understand that they were confronted not by the monotheistic eye of Broadcast Media, but by the compound eye of distributed media that has not yet realized its power. I wonder how they got that idea? Stephen Colbert, whose face often assumes such ironic contortion that he appears as if continually tased and confused, took the opportunity of Meyer's screaming to deploy on screen special effects worthy of John Madden in instant replay, as we were all collectively urged to focus our attention on the symptom most preferred by The Official Copyrighted Opposition: the "solitarity" and utter docility of University of Florida onlookers, who, Colbert mused, wished they could be at home blogging about it. That's right, you heard it on Colbert first, it's the impotence of the infosphere before the grandeur of Real Politics that sent 50,000 volts searching for ground through Andrew Meyer's body. If only Broadcast Media would make a Comedy show about it instead and focus on an ironic response pre-digested for us that focuses on our utter collective docility before the public torture of an anonymous questioner even while it simulates audience interaction with features such as the (SimWiki'd) Word of the Day, Beeyatch!
As with Howard Dean before him, broadcast media prefers to cover Andrew Meyer only when he is screaming. Above all, this mediaplex demands that we focus our precious attention on it, pay attention to it and only it and its production values. Dean's sin was to demonstrate the power of the Internets to raise money quickly, and Broadcast media,er, doctored their feed to make him sound, literally, rhetorically, like the "angry" man they kept claiming he was. This "angry man" - an obvious rhetorical technique for casting Dean as a "terrorist" about to go off in a rhetorical explosion - casting seems so odd in retrospect, since Dean's anger is really only a crankiness he shares with that other avatar of a pragmatic foot stomping truth telling Doctor, yes, his name was "Bones":
What was Andrew Meyer's sin? Mobius gently suggests that it was his very anonymity that proved both horrifying and useful for sending the rhetorical message that has become tedious in this now waning society of (Intellectual Property) control: Do Not Question My Authority Person Who Has Not Been Properly Screened and Subjected to Production Values Better than Wikipedia! We are Really Really Evil and Will Hurt You and Perhaps Shoot You if You Accompany Us While Hunting. Cheer up, though: When they have to start tasing us, you know that the power is waning. For his part, mobius now returns to his broadcast media-fast and ponders the tiny internal light between his eyebrows and above his nose, and wishes you all a taser free day of safe, incessant and thoroughly Peer to Peer questioning. End Fnord.
Don't Tase me 'Bro: mobius gently weeps for our Barely Rhetorical Republic
Friends, perhaps you have been more in tune with Ordinary Reality and have already seen the youtube posting above. It grieves mobius to see this, to hear this man's suffering, and to see that the crowd fails in its rhetorical obligations and sits there while a man is tasered for attempting to ask a question on many of our minds. I know - the footage has been compiled with multiple camera phones, Andrew Meyer allegedly barged to the front of the line, he dared to mention a (likely nonsensical) conspiracy, his friend had a camera ( who didn't!?) - all of this is irrevelant to 50,000 volts of electricity used in response to, yes, a question. The taser makes a sickening sound, and it sends, along with Guantanamo and Abu Grahib, a very clear message to the political unconscious of this country: Ask a question, get tortured. This is pracically indistinguishable from Pinochet's use of torture in Chile, and has the same rhetorical effect: Do Not Question Our Authority! In Fact, Do Not Question!
Please, listen to mobius for a moment, he speaks as a scholar of rhetoric and not as a being with any specific political stakes in this fallen reality besides a desire for a constitionally protected right. He seeks only to mitigate suffering: Meaningful and effective political discourse is essentially messy; it does not have rules and replays like Monday Night Football. Being impolite has become a banned poltical act. This is political correctness meets John Ashcroft, and it means that we no longer have an effectively functioning system of public discourse that can admit a continuum of non violent discussion. Whatever you have to say about Meyer's rhetorical tacics, there is no justification in the context of A University for even ending the discussion let alone tasering him. Universities have the obligation to be sanctuaries of free speech, erring on the side of "too much" if necessary. But Universities, now very much part of the War on Terror, only exist as free institutions of inquiry and discourse when students and faculty are willing to defend that historical mission, and the crowd sat by, and even applauded.
Here's an axiom for the Control Society: If the crowd does not defend the commons, it disappears. Here's another: If the University does not defend Inquiry, it disappears. The much discussed and extraordinarily potent wisdom of crowds did not show up. And one fact is beyond dispute: Kerry and Gore both stood by while an election remained in question. And if this footage means anything, it means that Gore and Kerry both radically underestimated what was at stake, and that if they were worthy successors to Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and their other, yes, Bros, they would have realized that the time for gentlemanly politics is over. Kerry sez he was trying to avoid a riot: There are worse things than riots - political events which make up the very history of this country and its former freedom of speech - and the utter pacificity of our polity in the wake of the Gore and Kerry submissions is most certainly one of them. Everyone, gently, slowly, with a smile on your face, stand up and take back the commons. You have nothing to lose but your tasers.
Car Replacement Solution Involution, or "Avast Ye Sustainable Futures!"
mobius has been stricken by bike lust of the most specific - not to say peculiar - kind: mobius, ever the afficionada of appropriate technology - as in his recent reading of William Gibson's Spook Country while on tour discussing telebiometrics - has begun to focus his thermodynamically tuned attention on [cargo bikes. mobius pulls a Burley Bee for groceries, terrorizing the Farmer's Market, and opening tiny Temporary Autonomous Zone's in a jiffy, and this is a most effective and easy car replacement solution. I do not need a car with the Burley and the bus. Other members of the mobius collective insist, perhaps out of preference, on continuing to use the car, though it could be sold for a nice chunk of college fund. It's a fun dance, though, a game to make mobius use the car, until the thermodynamic tipping point is reached, the household affective entropy spikes slightly, & mobius slides his butt into shotgun. mobius thinks of it as surfing - they are going that way anyway, so if he jumps aboard it's no more energy, just a lack of bike time. But why, mobius still has not found the proper words and tone to ask, why are there any car trips necessary anyway?
Still, mobius's household telos is towards the selling of the car, so further car replacement solutions beckon. It would be crucial to be able to carry mobius's two children - ages 16 months and 7 years old - and the Burley can't really fit them both comfortably. Christiana Bikes( see above), a cylconaut outfit from the Danish Collective of the Same Name, is a super cool solution because the kids ride up front, in eyeshot, but it does not seem possible to buy one in the US. mobius will work out an import/export scheme if he can. In the meantime, a bamboo trailer with a seating compartment might be the solution, and mobius saw some junked kids' bikes near a dumpster down the street with wheels that may be just the thang.
The idea is to put a Kid Cabin on the trailer, make it comfortable, hitch it up, start to pedal...
And then mobius saw that, of course, Eugene Oregon has pioneered this for us, producing Human Powered Machines like the one below:
But the wait is the lengthy, and who knows what they cost, so first I will get some bamboo.
The Future of the Consensus Reality Illusion or, "The Map is Not the Territory", Again
It's my analogy and I am sticking to it: It's the ending of an epoch, the bottom of the ninth inning of a game that is no longer in any doubt. It's not even close. Yet the MediaPlex wants you to please oh please keep paying attention to it. Yes, that's it, look at the, screen baby. No, not the one you can type on and revise. You will stare at the one that is finished, not Unfinished.
We interrupt your awakening with More of the Same. It has a beginning and end, It has been decided. We are extremely important. Your future is on our hands.
Do you find it remarkable, do you slouch into a bubbling wetware LaughterPlex when you realize that "consensus reality" is made up of people who spend an average of 28 hours per week staring into an entrainment device, having veritable visions of consensus reality? Consensus reality seems like a surreal night time soap - Think "West Wing" on OxyCotin and you will begin to understand - because it is produced in the same way - by hacks who start spewing non-sequiturs after they work through the two or three archetypes they seem capable of imagining in their adled screen addicted noggins,and then they go to reruns, and reach for more oxy...
And there are no atheists in foxholes because when the vision machine starts to break down, homo sapiens start having visions of their own. The Richard Dawkins Illusionhe seems to think he exists! doesn't seem to grok the fact that having visions of the Whole is a highly adaptive activity when the paradigms begin to crash, That's ok - he doesn't exist anyway! That is why he is called Richard Dawkins, because "Richard Dawkins" is just the name we give for a tiny segment of All That Is that isn't really separate from All That IS.\"That is Why He is Called Richard Dawkins\"
Thus I have Heard.
mobius is much struck by an incredible feeling of opportunity.
"We R...Illuminated by an Inner Light'"
Mobius is visiting the cradle of liberty to talk about psychedelics, and now realizes why he has felt called to read William Penn of late. mobius lives in Penn's woods, works at Penn State, so you would think he would have read a bit about the one for whom his University and state is named. Yet despite being born in that City of Brotherly Love, only this am did mobius query, in response to a faint inner urging, the triplet "William Penn light" on the google oracle. mobius had a hunch that Penn was a psychonaut, one who sought a vision of the Inner Light. And indeed it is so. Of said Light, a divine principle essential to all living beings, Penn wrote
Anaxagoras's divine mind; Socrates's good spirit; Timaeus's unbegotten principle and author of all light; Hieron's God in man; Plato's eternal, ineffable and perfect principle of truth; Zeno's maker and father of all; and Plotin's root of the soul....
In this context, where Penn urges us toward involution, a beholding of the inner light common also to meditative and, yes, psychedelic conditions:
"Therefore, O friends, turn in, turn in, I beseech you...."
In this involution can be found spiritual security, one that accords with Timothy Leary's guide to navigating the sacred technology of LSD:
"In the introverted state, the self is ecstatically fused with internal life processes (lights, energy waves, bodily events, biological forms, etc.)."
Leary's comparison, drawn from the Tibetan understanding of the Clear Light found in Aldous Huxley's work, is nonetheless strikingly resonant with Penn's formulation of salvation by Light within:
"Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual redundancy. The mind in its conditioned state, limited to words and ego games, is continuously in thought-formation activity. The nervous system in a state of quiescence, alert, awake but not active, is comparable to what Buddhists call the highest state of dhyana (deep meditation). The conscious recognition of the Clear Light induces an ecstatic condition of consciousness such as saints and mystics of the West have called illumination...The first sign is the glimpsing of the "Clear Light of Reality, the infallible mind of the pure mystic state" - an awareness of energy transformations with no imposition of mental categories."
So too does Penn's pen resonate over 350 years with the example of timothy leary, who somehow smiled continuously in and out of 36 jails, hounded for his yes sacred practices:
"...this leads to an acknowledgment of eternal rewards and punishments, as they have good reason; for else of all people, certainly they must be the most miserable, who for above forty years have been exceeding great sufferers for their profession, and in some cases treated worse than the worst of men, yea, as the refuse and off-scouring of all things."
A Sporecast or a Pollencast? Black Walnut Message Fractal to Planetary Lungs
Friends, familiarize yourself with the Black Walnut tree. A chemical weapons deployment system for self proliferation and territorialization, the black walnut manifests a plant intelligence some botanists find uncanny: "Strangely, walnut roots transmit a growth-inhibiting chemical which keeps many other trees and plants and even its own kind from growing near it." Black Walnuts grow lacunae as much as they grow nuts and the most prized wood in the world. Black walnuts create open spaces for their solar arrays which bend and twist toward Sol from planet three. Damn, that's some extraterrestrial Plant intelligence if ever I did see some! Starship Earth Indeed!
Seriously, mobius's lungs are telling him a story, again. It's the Eternal Return of the Allergen, an involuntary tuning into Plant Intelligence. Whether it is a sporecast, pollencast or dreamcast, each night mobius awakens at 4 am with extraordinary histamine levels and bronchial awareness. And what with the Sudafed Prohibition, mobius can't cram enough Big Pharma Antihistamines down his gullet to last through night to stave off thePND. His bloodstream devoid of decongestants favored by humans since they were Neanderthal, mobius's prone lungs begin to bubble like a frat house bong. This is not the sort of awakening mobius seeks.
Learning not to gasp, I sit upright, breathing deliberately and with intention with and through mobius's diaphragm. Thank Gaia for breath practices, an opening of the Central Channel. I drink hot black coffee and eschew an inhaler. I don't have one anyway as they seem to encourage lazy breathing practices. My Rx is biking. My RX is swimming. A question arrives: Can we open our minds enough to welcome the hypothesis that the human allergic response spiking toward infinity represents the noisy reception of a message from Plant Intelligence, Gaia's distributed familiars? Perhaps the message is: Lowered BioDiversity Alert! The fractal structure of the lungs - and new paradigms of thinking about respiration that are likely to result from this new visualization of breath - encourage us to remember the scalar self similarity of mobius's inside and outside. "As Above, So below", sez the old alchemical dictum, and we might add, with mobius, "As outside, So Inside." And Outside, as it were ( this is the place all the Big Pharma Commericals Warn you to avoid, ACHOO!), lowered biodiversity seems to increase, among other things, ragweed pollen production.
If you read reports from ayahuasca drinkers - and you should - you will see that they frequently have recourse to the notion of "plant intelligence" when narrating the phenomenology of ayahuasca experience. Here Plant Intelligence is a cognitive and affective information processing system that, in alliance with human subjectivity, declares an extraordinary intertwingling with Gaia - the recognition and awareness of our, yes, mobiusness. Maybe as biodiversity plummets, allergen levels rise and remind us of what are doing to our celestial abode, a registration of environmental (biometric?) information on the human scale. Hence the frequent trope of "mama" aya drinkers use in their attempts to describe the experience becomes understandable as we recapitulate our awareness of the Mothership Earth through the motifs of the last such developmental grok we were asked to make. This notion of black walnut or mamahuasca as a transmission system for Gaian Intelligence may be too much for you to accept, and is likely to be in that category of epistemological events Information Physicist Steve Wolfram might describe as "[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htmlirreducible]". Here's some doggerl that might make the point:
mobius brings up aya because one story his lungs seem to be telling him, again, is that it is time to travel back to Peru for some treatment. mobius's life long asthma was treated most efficaciously in dialogue with a wand wielding bird deity accessed through the plant gnosis of ayahuasca and the caring wisdom of Norma Panduro. Think about it, it's no stranger (and likely more advanced) than dosing yourself on Valium and getting in an MRI chamber..Anyway, it looks like mobius will find some time in his upcoming sabbatical to travel down to visit his teachers. In the meantime, if you are wondering if the phrase "Plant Intelligence" makes any sense, think "black walnut". But be careful with the leaves - they might give you a reaction!
More proof of my Martian Ancestry Emerges! According to wikipedia, "Grok" is a Martian word featured in science fiction author Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Now Grok is one of mobius's most treasured words in the word horde, up there with "ecodelic" and "neologista" and, well, "wiki." And well before I ever read Heinlein - and you have read Heinlein,lately? - mobius groked the meaning of grok, as if he were a native speaker. Here 'tis:
Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.
Gee, mobius wonders, I wonder how I chose the name mobius?
What's this class about? "An analyst’s job was to take these raw pieces of intelligence and find patterns in the noise." Yet as Lilly found, one projects ideals of G*d into the white noise, and the pattern may be a Naricissus remix. By emptying the cache periodically of habitual thoughts, we grok the noise differentially, forgetting the last pattern in the past noise. Is amnesia then a symptom of awakening?
Happy Sputnik Day! In honor of this sacred anniversary of our first attempt to "slip the surly bonds of Earth", let us all release from our gravitational thrall, and float!
When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.Timothy Leary, "A Declaration of Evolution"
The evolution of human consciousness into new collective forms through our increasing awareness of interconnection is a real and palpable phenomenon. Just try it! Many philosophers are still debating the very existence of consciousness, mistaking its radically distributed nature for a lack of existence. This mistake misrecognizes an aspect of the being of the self (emptiness) for non-being. The fact that no "I" pre-exists discourse and its networked instantiation is proof not that the self does not exist - since we obviously experience it every time we reflect upon it, as Descartes saw - but that the self is an emergent effect of an ecosystem operating as a Whole at another level of abstraction and scale. The periodic feeling that "Eventually, everything connects includes the connection between the self and said ecosystem, as we become increasingly aware of our intertwingled relation to the planet and the cosmos. To wit:
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures."
Once we have worked through our horror at Emptiness, we see that the Whole includes even emptiness as an attribute, and we learn to love emptiness by intergrating its practices into our lives. An awareness of the Whole follows and our increasing verification of its existence teaches us how to tune ever toward It, as we learn gradually to comprehend and interact with ever greater levels of complexity by letting go of our self and apprehending the Self which the self mirrors on a different ( fractalled?) scale. By training ourselves to think and perceive these interconnections, we can experience states of insight and consciousness ( literally, "thinking-with") not available to us if we experience and actualize only our separation from each other and the biosphere. "Evolve" means "unfold", and you can unfold other aspects of your self through training in intertwingling. And as always in this 13.7 billion year unfolding from the Big Bang, it's time to evolve!
"We were deliberately trying to brainwash since we knew that seven or eight million people were taking LSD and we were deliberately trying to brainwash them into hopeful, utopian, positive, loving experiences. At the same time the drug enforcement establishment was running around saying, "Take LSD, jump out a window," "Take LSD, become homicidal," "Take LSD, go to a mental hospital"...I admit we were brainwashing. We were trying to brainwash people to become better, to believe in themselves and to
But the narcs were brain washing, too, and they inevitably controlled more of the media than we did and for those who were fnord foolish enough to listen to them, yeah, they had bad trips."
This is what you do: put an inch of water in the bottom of a pan and put it on the stove and turn up the heat and eventually the water boils. Now this is something we've all seen. On the way to boiling, there is a pre-boiling stage in which bubbles begin to rise and if you could look into the water when it first begins to heat and actually see the motion of the water, then you would see that there are these so-called vortices, or Benard cells, like little stacks or cylinders of water within which there is a heaping motion going on, where the water streams up on the outside of the cylinder and then turns and goes back down again through the middle and then up on the outside and down through the middle, round and round. Like, for example, say you had a rubber bagel that you could turn so that you pushed down in the middle with your thumbs while pulling up around the edges with your fingers. That motion is called a Benard vortex and it's happening in the water as it heats up before it starts to boil.
So when the heat is very low there are no Benard cells and when you turn up the flame a little bit higher there is a certain moment when the difference in temperature between the top of the water exposed to the air and the bottom of the water exposed to the flame reaches a critical value where a catastrophic bifurcation takes place. Now before that bifurcation there are no Benard cells and after it there are Benard cells. A certain number of them fit together as a hexagonal lattice of vortices, all held together by mathematics alone. There are no partitions to keep the boundaries between the vortices stable, and yet they stabilize into a perfectly still picture of Benard cells.
Now, as you increase the flame a little more so that the temperature gradient between the bottom and the top of the water is increased, there is a further bifurcation in which the boundaries between the Benard cells are no longer static, they begin to waver a little bit, vibrating back and forth: that's a further bifurcation, a subtle one, in that what's happening is very subtle, and it doesn't make that much difference if you turn up the heat a little more, the waving of the boundaries of the cells becomes more pronounced and eventually is pronounced enough to be visible.
So there's an example of a classical bifurcation sequence with two events: the first one is a catastrophic bifurcation in which the Benard cells appear out of the blue; and the second one is a subtle bifurcation in which the boundaries begin to oscillate. If you turn up the heat some more, you get true boiling, which is chaos and that's another bifurcation.
In response to "vast volumes of email", the "Blue Sky Bifurcation" prophesized by the very title of this page has occurred, Mobius, responding to claims that his wiki prophecy of a "blue sky bifurcation" had been confirmed, held a press conference Friday from his Secure Central Pennsylvania Location.
And this fact alone makes wikis yankee dongle dandy, dudes and dudettes. We R - A Recombinant Nation of Immigrants! Wiki is the medium is the message, yes, and that message is One Hundred Ten Percent "Merican.
Here's a some doggerel in our honor of a national penchant for mixmasterness and intertwingling. I call this one "Phooey on the Frontier Hypothesis":
Discussion: Go ahead, try and make it ordinary. At most, a sacred practice made ordinary - a mass collective devoted to worldly, and hence ordinary things - becomes profane.
0.1. The Sacred cannot be captured by the term "faith"
Discussion: If The Sacred could be so captured, it would be ordinary. See 0.0
0.15 '[Religion]" refers in English to the set of all human behaviors and practices associated with the attempt to connect ( or re-connect) with the sacred. The patterns formed within this set of all human behaviors can be characterized as a particular religion, although patterns blend into each other ( e.g. Jesus is a figure within both Christianity and Islam)
Discussion: Even the dubiousness of the etymology (see [Religion]) attests to the ongoing searching practice (divining) associated with the desire for self transcendence or overcoming associated with the "rereading" of tradition ( Cicero) or "re-connecting". Doubt, often viewed as antithetical to religion, is a fundamental aspect of it
0.2 "Religion" refers to a set of practices larger than "faith"
Discussion: While "faith" is an attribute and practice highly valued by many religious traditions. it is only an aspect of these religious traditions. Just as one cannot reduce category of "religion" to "sacrifice", "ritual", "exclusion", "bliss" or "delusion" ( etc), one cannot reduce the diverse practices of religion on Earth to "faith."
0.3 The use of the word "faith" to connote the sacred is itself a religion
Discussion: The use of the term "faith" as the Way of all religions substitutes some religious practices for all religious practices. Rhetorically this is known as synechdoche, the substitution of part for whole. The practice of using the synechdoche "religion is faith, faith, religion" is a member of the set of all human behaviors and practices associated with the attempt to connect (re-connect) with the sacred. Ergo, the Use of the term "faith" to substitute for "religion" is a religious practice, as a patterned rhetorical response with the set of all religious practices, is a religion.
0.4 "Religion" refers to a set of practices larger than "belief."... (See 0.2 annd 0.3)
Mobius is starting to think Rumi might also have Martian-Irish Ancestors. Who else could bear witness to the numinousity of Vermicelli while loving the word "quiver"? Check this Rumi word Talisman, man:
“I want vermicelli,” we say.
“I want ravioli. I want halvah. I want fritters. I
want fruit. I want dates.”
We name these one by
one, but the root of the matter is a single thing:
the root is hunger.
Don’t you see how, once we
have our fill of but one thing, we say, “Nothing
else is necessary?” Therefore, it was not ten or a
appointed by God, for they hide the single reality.
There is a saying that the saint is one, humankind
is a hundred, meaning the saint’s
whole attention
remains upon the one truth, while people are scat-
tered over a hundred appearances. But which
hundred? Which fifty? Which sixty? Lost in this
world of mirrored reflections, they are a faceless
people without hands and feet, without mind and
Soul, quivering like a magic
talisman, like
quick-silver or mercury. They do not know who they
are.
Angel Degraded!
September 24, 2007 ( aka mobius year Zero)
Mobius, Awakening in Ecstasy, Declares All Available Means of Persuasion "A Creative Commons For Composing Multimedia Wikidelic Communities in Respornseability to Global Ecosystemic Distress!"
In a PressRelease Sunday, mobius ( aka DJ TallyEssence) called on the Spirits of All of His Bardic Ancestors for guidance in this moment of global distress, Issuing a Declaration. " No single Event has triggered My Awakening, besides of course All That Is." Sez Mobius from his Secure Central Pennsylvania Location. "Do Not seek more information about this Event in any of your habitual MediaPlex outlets, though the story shall eventually leak through its lipid pixel'd Sport Ute membrane by the Emerging Wave of Informatic Force (the so called "Eureka Effect" on the noospheric level) forming in collective Anticipatory respornse as we Collectively Meditate Upon and Gaze Into the Katrina Mandala."
Mobius continued, consulting his teacher Professor Challenger for support. "Our Planet Shall Quiver like a Glistening Translucent Quantum Eggsac Unto New Realities Where we Remember That The Earth is Alive." Mobius declared Intellectual Property Restriction on any and all materials, including genetically modified organisms and synthesized molecules resulting from the focused attention of human consciousness in love, a CopyWrong in the Context of Our Attempt to Tune The Planet Toward Sustainability. Mobius added that this Declaration also Extends to Certain Songs By Peter Frampton For the Purposes of this Declaration.
END TRANSMISSION
From an RFID Industry text: Ecosystemic Metaphor Crash Alert
One of the themes that was repeated over and over was the complexity of the NFC ecosystem, which includes an uncommon variety of stakeholders: phone manufacturers, network operators, card issuers, public transportation companies, contactless transportation ticketing providers, payment processors, media vendors, and merchants and retailers, among others.
DJ Mobius Releases Digitally Re-Mastered Edition of John Lilly Re-Enactment Schemes!
Friend, I have experienced remarkable effects in meditation through visualizing myself splitting down the middle and proliferating unto infinity from every vector like an n-dimensional lotus fractal. My attention becomes a search engine browsing toward Nada, nothingness, the Zero, Emptiness, A Diamond Void Theme Park that makes me laugh as I shudder with the awareness that Everything Really Is One Manifesting out of the Void, which is an aspect rather than a negation of the One. A certain aspect of me dies, again. In short, I have been living with slices of Lilly's "Before the Beginning", and it has some seriously tight metaprogramming routines you may find useful. Check it:
Become a Metaprogramming Re-Enactor Today! It is an incredibly simple thing to metaprogram ourselves if we will run the software of the Perrenial Philosophy and love (yes, actively do it right now!), become pure of heart (actively let go of toxins, drop a Creative Commons License on Yer Ego) and humble ourselves before something awe-ful like the cosmos or a plant or a dewdrop, a phantom a flash of lighting, a pre-historic animated Irish Martian, a friend!
Ubiquitous Talismanic Computing in the Spectacular Police State
OncoMouse ( mobius's source for the tumor rumor) talks out loud ( ok, "out wiki") about the roving band of armed crusaders working as soldiers on the domestic front in New Orleans. It maketh mobius feel all funny inside and out when I read from the CIA's Book of Psyops in Guerilla Warfare:
"Implicit terror always accompanies weapons, since the people are internally "aware" that they
can be used against them, but as long as explicit coercion is avoided, positive
attitudes can be achieved with respect to the presence of armed guerrillas
within the population."
The psy opos manual basically teaches troops how to transform guns into talismanic objects, weaponizing an entirely other domain than the Newtonian one of bullets and bodies. The logic of this "terror" is found more in the traditions of magic, where the difference between words and things is actively, ABBRACADABRA, smeared, than the traditions of classical science, where the description of a system must not effect the system itself. No wonder Harry Potter is so poopular! Cybernetic science and quantum science, through the tropes of "feedback" and "problem of the observer" respectively, both break with this tradional understanding of the rhetoric of science. These "reality creation" or "reality tuning" rhetorical perspectives are mirrored in the political realm when a gun becomes less an object for hurling projectiles and more a broadcast of information and, in particular, an information broadcast that develops into the production of subjectivities:
"All these acts have as their goal the creation of an identification of the
people with the weapons and the guerrillas who carry them, so that the
population feels that the weapons are, indirectly, their weapon to protect them
and help them in the struggle against a regime of oppression." ( italics by mobius)
It's not as subtle as the queen of diamonds, and somehow, I think the New Orleans convention center has become a more powerful talisman and mandala than n thousand troops or police. But this treatment of the gun as a rhetorical device makes clear that these broadcasts are continuous in our own environments with the presence of police, or their images on television, literally becoming ubiquitous. Yes, power comes out of the barrel of a gun! What message was being broadcast when S.W.A.T. hit the airwaves in 1975? From historical accounts, it would seem the show was a response to the excellent ratings of the televised shoot out between the Symbionese Liberation Army and a SWAT unit. And here we get yet another brainwashing/media connection, as Media heiress Patty Hearst was reprogrammed into Tania.
"Damn, she woulda looked real good in a Queen of Diamonds outfit," sez Shaw..."That Grrl can carry a Gun!"
But if the SLA battle got the best ratings and launched the show featuring Tania (captured on Bank Surveillence cameras in her debut), what was the first SWAT operation on US soil? In short, what was the Pilot? Even while it is clothed in the Infantile-Objective voice so treasured by Wikipedia "neutralists", it tells an incredible story about the use of military weapons and tactics to be used - in putting down a peasant rebellion in the US:
While military units have been used to quell riots for millennia, the first recorded implementation of civilian SWAT in the United States was employed by the Delano Police Department when, in 1965, they followed Faribairn’s in response to the demonstrations revolving around the UFW (United Farm Workers Union) and their activities in and around the farming community of Delano, California on the border between Kern and Tulare Counties in the great San Joaquin Valley, far north of Los Angeles. Caesar Chavez' United Farm Workers were staging numerous, often violent, protests in Delano, both at cold storage facilities and in front of non-supportive farm worker's private homes on their sidewalks and city streets. Delano PD answered the issues that arose by forming the first-ever U.S. civilian units using special tactics and weapons. Television news stations and print media carried live and delayed reportage of these riotous and violent events across the nation.
Don't you love stories about how quelling peasant uprisings with the National Security State helps launch compelling crime dramas featuring military gadgets, now released on DVD?
Mid September
mood: corporate meat
Rx: Get on the bike, grab the mike
Sounds: Tangerine Dream, "Electronic Meditations"
Tumor Rumor
This cute french bulldog named Leon got sick from his authentication technology, or so this story based on this study sez. It seems that the bodily envelope, like Bartleby, prefers not to wear subcutaneous RFID chips. Whooda thunk it? Apparently not Verichip, the company pushing the technology for FDA approval. The Wired Story suggests that Verichip knew about the studies, but perhaps they simply didn't do their due diligence, and the study didn't get published until 2006. Online Open Access science would significantly increase the uptake of studies like this, making it slightly harder for companies to look the other way or skimp on their due diligence during the FDA approval process. Open Source Telebiometrics Si, Biometrics non? Either way, Leon now replaces Alba the transgenic albino rabbit as the leading edge of post-vital evolution and poster creature for the strangeness to come.
'And, O Subhûti, if a noble-minded Bodhisattva were to fill immeasurable and innumerable spheres of worlds with the seven treasures, and give them as a gift to holy and fully enlightened Tathâgatas; and if a son or a daughter of a good family, after taking from this treatise of the Law, this Pragñâpâramitâ, one Gâthâ of four lines only, should learn it, repeat it, understand it, and fully explain it to others, then the latter would on the strength of this produce a larger stock of merit, immeasurable and innumerable. And how should he explain it? As in the sky:
Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble.
A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud--thus we should look upon the world (all that was made).
Thus he should explain; therefore it is said: He should explain.'
Thus spoke the Bhagavat enraptured. The elder Subhûti, and the friars, nuns, the faithful laymen and women, and the Bodhisattvas also, and the whole world of gods, men, evil spirits and fairies, praised the preaching of the Bhagavat. (32)
Thus is finished the Diamond-cutter, the blessed Pragñâpâramitâ.
No doubt it is a field effect of having a growing family, but damn I have been thinking alot about my Ancestors lately. "Thinking about" is not quite the right phrasing, though, because All That Became Before Me becomes an attention attractor for me in something approaching a Haptic Gaze Smack. This is like a dream vision between moments that I first and foremost feel with my whole body at once,and it reminds me at once that I AM a whole body, despite the categories and language with which "I" continually apprehend, live and love. As my son Jackson would say, "Wham!" I flash on all the joy struggle comedy and tragedy of the epicly twisted evolutionary quest out of which we have manifested. I flash, yes, on my father, who lost his father, or my mother, with whom my flesh itself was continuous. But I also experience, in a very embodied way that feels like a sudden apprehension of the eternal, continuities that are evolutionary in scale, ranging back past chanting, herb gathering bards who Somehow Survived with their songs and wits, and a little help from their ecosystemic friends. Back past tusked grazing beasts and sniffing, probing rodents, past flower petals oozing with perfumed insect communication and seduction, past whirling diatomic crystal dancing, DNA transduction twisting back unto itself, Wyrd. And then it stops, and I think, this is a past me, a Pattern with which I Connect and of which I am only partially conscious. Narrating this as a "past life" or "DNA communciation" is an interesting thought experiment I have been pursuing rhetorically, in the tradition of MetaProgramming ala John Lilly and Robert Anton Wilson. And this am mobius suddenly grokked that I am a reincarnation of the Great Gazoo, a Celtic interdimensional being pretending to be the Lucky Charms leprechaun pretending to be a cartoon character from the Flintstones, a prehistoric animated Irish Martian if you will. Debugging showed me, though, that Gazoo was birthed on the animated dimension in 1965, mobius was of that aforementioned mother born 1963. Back to the Grokking Board!
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It's a Wiki World After All?
In my quixotic quest to provide reliable information and enlightening discourse about emerging biometric technologies, I have returned to wikipedia and pasted in the definition of telebiometrics adopted by world Standards Organizations like the IEC, ISO and ITU. While this doesn't make the definition perfect or even correct, it is a place to start in a publicly available encylopedia that otherwise does not inform users of the existence of this emerging technology. Biometrics is increasingly represented as a technology that we interact with as individuals at a dedicated biometrics theshold like Disneyland, but the real "leverage" of biometric information comes from the cross referencing of multiple "modalities" ( e.g. iris scan, fingerprint) from multiple locations. Remembering the wiki'd network effect of meshed biometric information is part of our due diligence on these technologies as they emerge. Could wiki be practice for navigating a world slouching toward the magic kingdom?
Falling/ In Love With Gaia/The Drag on One Face Falling
mobius is intensely and paradoxically encouraged by the current show at Jack The Pelican, a collection of art devoted to falling:
Will progressive thinking and civilization as we know it really survive the Bush years? We just don't know. Sometimes, what we do doesn't have any impact whatsoever. Nobody's listening. The forces are just too strong. We do not have control. We succumb. There is no choice. Nothing even to hold onto, as it all goes down. Yes, the sensation of falling can be among the most frightening. We prefer to believe that succumbing to greater forces is not necessarily negative. Anyone fall in love lately?
Mobius is intensely and unavoidably encouraged by this clear sign that more and more of us are letting go. Can you feel the freedom of creatively affirming empty mind? "We just don't know." And instead of rushing in with more of the same old attempts at knowing the world as if it were an object external to us, in our radical declaration of empty mind, we gaze upon images that act and hack directly on our nervous systems, seeking not knowledge ( we know enough not to do that), but the wisdom available only through the leap of transformation, falling for,in, love.
In short: let go, you have nothing to lose but your egoic chains!
The above tondo by Penn State painter(and FOM) Robert Yarber featured in the show exemplifies images threatening to blur the separation between an image and the comportment of a body perceiving it, a body first and foremost moved by the image. During the Stock Panic of 1987, a Yarber painting was removed from an Exchange because it seemed to provide, well, too much direction to confused traders, and the image above has been put under lock and key in an attempt to contain its talismanic capacity to induce corporeal motion with nothing but an image:
[Yarber}...is the falling artist of the last fifty years. His images were so ubiquitous in the 1980s, during our formative years, that MTV purchased one of the very paintings in this show to be the star of one of their early 90s print campaigns. Once the ad hit the newsstands, they received a spate of letters from concerned parents, suggesting it encouraged teen suicide. They politely withdrew the campaign and returned the painting. It has remained in storage ever since.
Jack the pelican "prefers to believe" that falling is not negative, but in responding to their preferences, they exude less "belief" than a propensity for greater and greater interconnection: "Anyone fall in love lately?Be the change you wish to see in the world, and watch the World let go of its fanasies about itself as separable from our collective ecosystemic selves. Letting go, we find that we float in a latticework of interconnection.
Mobius's intensifying optimism twists his face into a shape strangely like the drag on one face falling.
From Ecodelic! ( Doyle, UW Press, 2008)
Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment. Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no attainment, they abide by means of prajnaparamita. (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~mooncharts/heartsutra/english.html)
While a section named more explicitly as a mantra follows this treatment of the emptiness of consciousness besides its own beholding, the repetitio of NO that composes this passage should remind us that even here, in the most straightfoward description of Buddhist ontology and epistemology, rhythm has its say, marking the temporal and hence transient passing of even this sutra: “There is no attainment and non attainment”, and the those seeking diamond mind abide precisely by chanting these rhythmic patterns of continual reversal: “Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.”
On this reading that is a chanting, the Heart Sutra’s insight into mind consists of a repeatable recipe for reminding readers of their recursive role in their apprehension of worlding. One can choose to empty their mind through the simple repetition of words until they become devoid of meaning and instead resonate. Therefore all acts of consciousness begin to be understood as acts of creative freedom, since at the very least one can intentionally induce emptiness. This can entail working at and through the sutra ( literally, “thread” or “path”), as the reader focuses their attention by looking at as well as through the langauge of the sutra. Soon she notices the form of the content describing emptiness, and the content of the form that seems to empty itself through (formal) repetition. In the first two lines above, one rhetorical form of reversal, chiasmus, follows upon another: Form is emptiness; Emptiness is also form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.” In such a context, the awareness that one sees through a glass, darkly, must not recoil onto an epistemological certainty regarding a true, non-bardo consciousness. Instead, one must meditate on and repeat practices of emptiness to avoid filling in one bardo with another, blocking the clear light with an ego whose attention is ensnared by the prospect of the truth. In this context, the diamond mind Clear Light of the Bardo Thodol resists Eliade’s description of mystic light as an inseminating vision that gives life, and instead must be seen as a metaphysical Temporary Autonomous Zone that allows for an openness to immanence that does not seek fulfillment.
Here's a video wiki tutorial:
It says it is in plain english but is actually in video and cut-up.
I am puzzled! You write to say that biotelemetrica seems to have spun you for a loop, yet you created your [London Bridge wikiname and put it in a sensible place. ( Unlike your namesake, now in Arizona as indicated in picture above). Kudos! Now, perhaps your first post could be about what was loopy and spinning and/or "pretty hard" about the process of wikifying yourself despite this evidence to the contrary. Or am I misunderstanding? Other posting on this topic are more than welcome. In fact, let us make a page and call it WikiBlockages, for all those ways in which wiki fails to interconnect us in practice. Perhaps you were feeling a bit of the semantic shock of your name sake, which now stands in Arizona, like wiki, forever in new context?
My experience and analysis suggests that getting on pbwiki is less difficult for most students than ordering a book online from Amazon.com. Nonetheless, many very bright and capable people say they have difficulty. Do you think that it is something about the wiki, or is it the practice of engaging ANY new interface that is the issue? I have come to the conclusion that when students get frustrated in their attempts to wikify, it is because of the latter rather than the former. But as a Wiki Scientist I am always on the look out for ways to falsify my assumptions, so if you can provide a description of the difficulty versus BlogSpot, why that would be a very valuable post! Perhaps your feedback could lead to a further perfection of wiki!
Thank you for your present and future compositions!
Your teacher
In the ego-free state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum; At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.
"These different realities, more correctly designated as different aspects of the reality, are not mutually exclusive but are complementary, and form together a portion of the all-encompassing, timeless, transcendental reality, in which even the unimpeachable core of self-consciousness, which has the power to record the different egos, is located." Albert Hoffmann
In fact, wherever information – or comparison – is of the essence of our explanation, there, for me, is mental process. Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference. A sensory end organ is a comparator, a device which responds to difference. Of course, the sensory end organ is material, but it is this responsiveness to difference that we shall use to distinguish its functioning as "mental." Similarly, the ink on this page is material, but the ink is not my thought. Even at the most elementary level, the ink is not signal or message. The difference between paper and ink is the signal.Gregory Bateson
It's raining again, so I finally pulled the digital shopping trigger on these fenders, and en route I found out yet more evidence for the radically exergic character of bicycles: It turns out that if you are a member of any bike advocacy group, Planet Freddy will give you free shipping. Mesh this with the fact that a human being on a bicycle is the most thermodynamically efficient mode of transportation on the planet, and you can see that riding a bicycle helps you pedal toward ever increasing efficiencies in the processing of your (energy)budget.
I am going to include within the category mental process a number of phenomena which most people do not think of as processes of thought. For example, I shall include the processes by which you and I achieve our anatomy – the injunctions, false starts and self-corrections, obedience to circumstance, and so on, by which the differentiation and development of the embryo is achieved. "Embryology" is for me a mental process. And I shall also include the still more mysterious processes by which it comes about that the formal relations of our anatomy are recognizable in the anthropoid ape, the horse, and the whale – what zoologists call homology – i.e. along with embryology I shall include evolution within the term "mental process.
Along with those two big ones – biological evolution and embryology – I include all those lesser exchanges of information and injunction that occur inside organisms and between organisms and that, in the aggregate, we call life.
In fact, wherever information – or comparison – is of the essence of our explanation, there, for me, is mental process. Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference. A sensory end organ is a comparator, a device which responds to difference. Of course, the sensory end organ is material, but it is this responsiveness to difference that we shall use to distinguish its functioning as "mental." Similarly, the ink on this page is material, but the ink is not my thought. Even at the most elementary level, the ink is not signal or message. The difference between paper and ink is the signal.Gregory Bateson
"Consciousness may then not just be a globally-modulated functional monitor of attention, subject helplessly to the physical states of the brain, but a complementary aspect to physical reality, interacting with space-time through uncertainty and quantum entanglement in a manner anticipated by Jungian synchronicity." Chris King
Instructions for Vision 1: The Source (Eyes closed, external stimuli ignored)
O nobly-born, listen carefully:
The Radiant Energy of the Seed
From which come all living forms,
Shoots forth and strikes against you
With a light so brilliant that you will scarcely be able to look at it.
Do not be frightened.
This is the Source Energy which has been radiating for billions of years,
Have I been understood? When we wiki, we engage in the destruction of old patterns and the cultivation of new ones. " A blank space, a lacuna, a blank portal to the noosphere is destroyed and connected in one event. Wait: We bring even the blankness into being. When we wiki again, and again, we practice this Way of Creative Destruction so that we are well trained in it, and it is worthy training, an arche logic of the cosmos for these past 13.7 billion years in thermodynamic telos. When we wiki, we need not "express ourselves" - indeed, this frequently gets in the way of actually writing in response and resonance with another. Instead we cut ourselves up by creating links, opening a space, drawing attention toward our zone of shareability. In short, the void, the end or goal of a wiki post, a gutter for another, is an achievement, an endpoint, an accomplishment, the result of a long epic towards a silence willing to host us, togetha. An attractor space for all of us as we become aware of a sustainable collective mind.
Below, I form a gutter between an image of an RFID chip and a painting based on chapter 11 of the Gita. This is where Arjuna gets to behold the intolerable awe-ful splendor, the "vision of the cosmic form." It is an awe-some sight, a synesthestic spectacle to behold Krishna in his blue krishna-ness. And Arjuna comes to behold this vision because of his desire for it:
O Supreme being, as you have said yourself to be, so it is. But I still desire to witness your splendid form, O Best among men (Krishna). . .O Lord, if you think that it can be seen by me, then show me, your imperishable form, O Lord of yogis (Krishna). ( italics by mobius)
This desire opens the doors of Arjuna perception to the imperishable form of All That Is:
O Gudakesha (Arjuna), in my body here, look at the whole universe, moving and unmoving and whatsoever else you wish to see, al gathered in my body...But you cannot see me with this natural eyes you have, I shall grant you the divine eyes. You can witness my divine power with its help.
Sanjay Said: O King (Dhritarastra), after speaking in this way, Hari the Supreme Lord of yoga revealed to Arjuna his Supreme and divine form...Many mouths and many eyes and many amazing visions and may divine ornaments and holding many divine weapons in hand...Weaving divine garlands and clothes, wearing many perfumes and ointments, endowed with wonders of every description, without boundaries, with face turned towards all directions in the world....Even the splendour of a thousand suns, arising at once in the sky can hardly watch the splendour of the great being....There the Pandava (Arjuna) with the whole universe with many divisiom combined together in one, in the body of the God of the gods.
Then, Arjuna, filled with amazement his hairs, standing on end, bowed down to the lord, hands folded with supplications.
In response to The National Biometric Challenge of of August 2006, The National Standards Institute released Embark, a Multimodal Biometric Application Resource Kit]. This Public Domain software seeks to foster "plug and play" interoperability for biometrics. This interoperability is particularly important if identity authentication ( as it should) is to work with multiple modes and layers - e.g. an Iris scan as well as a fingerprint as well as the traces this iris scan and or fingerprint has left elsewhere in a widespread and secure network. Embark makes clear that what must be grown to actualize biometrics is first and foremost a network. Mobius has written elsewhere about a scheme to propagate such a "peer to peer privacy network", but being NIST, this software responds to a National Biometrics Challenge. On these pages I will try and further develop my arguments that it is ironically only through a commons - and not a nation/state - that a robust biometrics network can begin to meet the objectives of the National Biometric Challenge. Code word is: shibboleth.
It's hard not to laugh. Nearly impossible in fact. If you pick up a copy of any of Timothy Leary's 1970's works of Science Faction - such as Neurologic, What Does Woman Want? or Game of Life, you'll see that Leary Was the Greatest Writer of Science Faction of All Time. Granted, the category of Science Faction - a category mobius would be proud for his own mutinous bits and bytes to sit within like an orgone box lined with alien fur or wear like a latex suit with haptic tantric transducers, dunk you very much - is a class with perhaps fewer members than you have channels on yer friggin flat screen, but with neighbors like Giordano Bruno, Terrence McKenna, Every Writer from Lovetron, and the whole cast of Huxley's Perrenial Philosophy, we'll take it. Science Faction: It's what you NEED to evolve: FLEXIBLE enough to keep completely open mind. PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY enough to inhabit the mind states necessary for such open mind. FEARLESS enough to imagine a Green Buddha Future Operating Backwards Through Non Linear Time. Is there a CONSPIRACY? THERE HAD BETTAH BE!
Science faction yes gets nothing but the facts, and mostly it gets - nothing. That is, Science Faction ( like William S. Burrough's "Factualists") seek to evolve an epistemology beyond the limitations of "externalist science",as well as beyond the limitations of "belief" (Robert Anton Wilson, Lilly). "tHE oNLY wAY OUT IS IN SEZ BURROUGHS.
The Nöosphere must not be conceived as a space separable from our ecosystem. It is that in which we are embedded. Peirce seems to have called it Universal Mind. Huxley sampled Aurobindo and called it "mind-at-large." Are we becoming aware of this attention collective, collectively? Perhaps. And perhaps it helps to navigate the nöosphere with the help of High Indifference
Yes, this wiki is often intentionally and hyperbolically vague. Cuz get this: Vagueness is a crucial part of any balanced evolutionary breakfast! That's right, don't hate the vague but dwell with it. Explore it, don't ignore it!
JUly 27, 2007
Need some hierarchy?This text contains the image below if you find yourself jonesing for context and want to move beyond the visual and associational mandala below.
Here is a great candidate for our new cosmic myth. It's an elegant summary of the ecological interpretations of The Second Law of Thermodynamics. And: The myth needs to be filled out with archetypes, characters to make said myth psychologically grokable ( and hence repeatable) by human subjectivity becoming aware of its fundamental purpose. It is not yet known what effects this recognition of the teleological underpinnings and vectors pushing on and composing the evolution of consciousness will have on that consciousness, but self reference ( pace Godel and Turing and Hoffstadler) - has certainly proved interesting in its past effects. So trot out your favorite character here, and outfit Hir in thermodynamic roleplay, working ever toward dissipation of greater and greater amounts of energy. Ironically, ( and these new readings of the Second Law are replete with multiple layers of irony), sustainability makes sense precisely as a way of degrading more energy'' in the near and long term. To wit: We need to learn how to actively migrate away from fossil fuels if we are to move on to ecstatically squander and degrade energy in the rest of this galaxy and beyond.
"This leads to a deep question, shared by all human cultural traditions, from the dawning of shamanism, through Vedanta to the Tao and even in the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition, that mental states of awareness and subsequent happenings are interrelated. If historicity is interactive with both the quantum realm and the existential condition, what are the consequences for science, society and cosmology itself? Our description of reality here suggests that the physical universe has a complement - the subjectively conscious existential condition. Such a view both of the cosmological role of evolution to sentience and the brain as an interface between the cosmic subjective and the physical universe puts us right back into the centre of the cosmic cyclone in a way which Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leonardo and Albert Einstein would have all appreciated. Consciousness may then not just be a globally-modulated functional monitor of attention, subject helplessly to the physical states of the brain, but a complementary aspect to physical reality, interacting with space-time through uncertainty and quantum entanglement in a manner anticipated by Jungian synchronicity."
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