NATO reserve forces troops interacting with a bomb disposal robot. Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Paul D. Williams
via An Interview with Julie Carpenter – Center for the Study of the Drone.
An Interview with the Professor of Robot Love
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Bok, VIRTUALLY NONTOXIC
VIRTUALLY NONTOXIC
by Christian Bök
Vinyl is as natural as lichen.
–Christopher Dewdney
Plastic is the silly putty, with which we simulate, then supplant, every facet of reality, converting all the varied elements of the planet into one common emulsion. While we sleep, our automatons toil throughout the night, transmuting everything into a petroleum byproduct that resists bacterial predation. Our species might openly mourn this phase of our demise, but in secret, we really exalt the power of its genius, marvelling to think that, in some landfill of the future, long after our own extinction, a single crash-helmet might still endure, sloughed off, like the carapace of some alien crab. Our gewgaws of epoxy resin and nylon fibre do not attest, however, to any advance in our rational prowess, so much as they allude to the breadth of our cultural tyranny. The invention of plastic has given birth to a celluloid spectacle, whose reveries displace the esemplastic imagination of the romantics, filling our hollow skulls with an injection-moulded mentality, as pliable and as durable as any blob of polypropylene. Has not language itself begun to absorb the synthetic qualities of such a modern milieu, becoming a fabricated, but disposable, convenience, no less pollutant than a styrofoam container? Has not the act of writing simply become another chemically engineered experience, in which we manufacture a complex polymer by stringing together syllables instead of molecules? The words of our lexicon have become so standardized that they now resemble a limited array of connectible parts (much like a few Lego bricks, being conjoined); and the rules of our grammar have become so rationalized that they now resemble a bounded range of recombinant modes (much like a new Rubik cube, being convolved). The protean quality of our discourse finds itself vulcanized in our playthings. We see language marketed as an infantile commodity — a toy suitable for kids of all ages, because its plastic coating makes it safe to own and easy to use; nevertheless, we must imagine a more corrosive poetics (something vitriolic enough to dissolve such an acrylic veneer), and if we cannot distill this kind of acid, then let us concoct a more explosive poetics (something catalytic enough to detonate such an acetate finish). We need a lingual variety of gelignite or plastique — the kind of incendiary literature, written only by misfits, who have grown up, still dizzy from the fumes, after having melted a platoon of plastic armymen with a match.
Contents: 65% Dimethyl Siloxane (hydroxy-terminated polymers with boric acid), 17% Silica (quartz crystalline), 9% Thixotrol ST, 4% Polydimethylsiloxane, 1% Decamethyl cyclopentasiloxane, 1% Glycerine, 1% Titanium Dioxide, 2% Silliness.
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Academi
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Article 6
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Beyond the Higgs boson: Five reasons physics is still interesting
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Article 4
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Denial dries up: Americans finally seeing the light on climate change
Looks like Fox News and Congress are becoming ever more intellectually isolated from the American people, perched together on a sinking island of climate denialism.
Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led analysis of more than a decade's worth of poll results for 46 states. The results show that the majority of residents of all of those states, whether they be red or blue, are united in their worries about the climate -- and in their desire for the government to take climate action.
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A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.
via A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious – Wired Science.
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The Eye of the Other: A Sort-Of Chronicle of My Mexican Odyssey
The following was jotted down in my notebook on the night after my workshop, on Tuesday 12th November. It does not represent my present state of mind. Or maybe, by the time you read this, it does (again). Comments from my current state of mind in .
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The Eye of the Other: A Sort-Of Chronicle of My Mexican Odyssey…
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Article 0
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Demurrage
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We are all capitalism; own it.
Lately I have been wondering:
What is power, really? What is knowledge, really?
What exactly is consciousness? Does it occur for individuals or is it mostly a group thing? 1
And finally - why, within a universe of limitless possibilities, did we choose to design such a miserable world ?
It could have been really great.
A perfectly good planet right out of the box - it comes already stocked with everything it needs - a huge variety of plants and animals (included), which, by the way, have this deal where each provides for the needs of the other - a self-perpetuating system of sustainability, if you will.
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Neuroscience and Indigenous Wisdom
There is a way for the neurosciences to yield more fruitful solutions to our current crises, and that is through an active partnership with Indigenous wisdom. Now often referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), TEK has proven relatively successful in helping human societies to live happy, balanced, and sustainable lives. Unlike typical Western sciences, the data from Indigenous wisdom is generated from observations over long time periods in one location and is substantiated by applications to real-world living. Also, rather than attempt to be acultural and objective—a limiting if not impossible feat—Indigenous wisdom embraces a holistic subjectivity that honors authentic reflection on lived experience and relationships with others.
via Native American Commitment to Wellness & Respect Blog: Neuroscience and Indigenous Wisdom.
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Cult Of The God-Men
The myopia caused by modern day “machine culture” prevents the conditioned mind from comprehending any project that stretches beyond its own lifespan. Such things are perceived as purely abstract and may as well not really exist. Duration is cast as an enemy. The pursuit of goals that will only be attained a thousand years hence is regarded as unreal. The Empire always plays the long game. Imperial objectives are therefore considered necessarily immaterial to the culturally stained mind. Yet in the background – expertly concealed by the incessant unreality projection – Imperial power is unaccountably shaping world events.
via Cult Of The God-Men.
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Evolutionary links between the development of language and stone tool technology
Multiple experiments indicate that stone tool manufacture and speech use the same regions of the brain. This suggests that the increasing sophistication in stone tool technology over the last several million years may be used, roughly, as an indicator to gauge the evolution of language capacity. Since language does not fossilize, such a connection, if upheld by further research, would provide valuable insights into not only the pace, but also the pattern of language development, and the evolution of the capacity for abstract thought more generally.
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Article 4
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The Fallen
Wet leaves
Tears
My father's short years
Rain
Explain
Memories of Wars past and present
A red and a white flower apart
Together
Over my heart.
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Chapter 7: Reinstituting the Beings of Metamorphosis
Author: Terence Blake
The movement of deconstruction of the split between subject and object allied to the pluralisation of ontologies continues. We must now apply this ontological pluralism to the irrational superstitions that are thought to characterise traditional societies. Modernity has been constituted in terms of a battle against the superstitious belief in invisible beings and occult powers. The previous chapters have shown that the Moderns are mistaken about the nature and composition of the visible world.
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The Barbarism of Reflection
The trouble with reflection is that thinking about thinking, without the limits just named, quickly shows up the sharp limitations on the human mind mentioned earlier in this essay. It takes only a modest amount of sustained reflection to demonstrate that it’s not actually possible to be sure of anything, and that way lies nihilism, the conviction that nothing means anything at all. Abstractions subjected to sustained reflection promptly dissolve into an assortment of unrelated figurations; figurations subjected to the same process dissolve just as promptly into an assortment of unrelated sense data, given what unity they apparently possess by nothing more solid than the habits of the human nervous system and the individual mind. Jean-Paul Sartre’s fiction expressed the resulting dilemma memorably: given that it’s impossible to be certain of anything, how can you find a reason to do anything at all?
via The Archdruid Report: Toward a Green Future, Part Three: The Barbarism of Reflection.
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Erratic Boulder
Explore this image by clicking and enlarging as its file size is almost to what WP allows.
Erratics are boulders scraped off the bedrock by glaciers and carried by the ice to distant locations. Where this one came from is anyone's guess, but 'somewhere north' is the most probable. They come in all sizes. In this case, it wound up on a high promontory near Dorset in the Haliburton Highlands.
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More Pages to Explore .....
