1.Do higher primates have a specialised brain centre or module for generating a “theory of other minds” as proposed by Nick Humphrey and Simon Baron-Cohen?
2.Which comes first, mind or other mind? Did we first develop a theory of our own mind or a theory of another's? Churchland, when discussing the epistemological problem, in his definitive Matter and Consciousness (1988), in the chapter that addresses the problem of self-consciousness, explores the problem of other minds first. This is not especially significant as it is other minds that are the bigger problem. Nevertheless, could it not be that we recognised consistent intent first in others and only then began to apply it to ourselves?
3.It is as if individuals are modalities of the species’ mind.
4.Spinoza: “The mind exists for the body, is engaged in telling the story of the body’s multifarious events, and uses that story to optimise the life of that organism.”
5.Spinoza’s monism shows how idealism can seem feasible.
6.Damasio: “…Spinoza, alone and marginalised, was able to achieve happiness by cultivating curiosity, knowledge and goodness of character.”
7.Damasio (p.85). Sadness = low rates of image production and hyper-attentiveness to images. Happiness = rapid image production with minimised attention span for each image.
8.For Empedocles the four elements of Fire, Air, Earth, Water are worked on by the two principles of Love and Strife.
9.The catastrophists, such as Cuvier, held that the history of Earth was dominated by major catastrophic revolutions. The uniformitarians, such as Hutton and Lyell, held that the history of Earth was dominated by slow relatively uniform changes in an Earth with a static overall history. The great debate was won by the uniformitarians, so much so that the degree of gradualism was overstated and the importance of catastrophes was unduly minimised.
10.Uchronia: no time, as Utopia: no place.
11.Paul MacDonald anecdote, the ultimate disclaimer at the beginning of an essay: “Overwhelming evidence to the contrary notwithstanding… ”.
12.Somebody suggested that the great philosophers were just the dullards who wrote things down.
13.Somebody complained to me that our cities are built around road socialism.
14.Ned Kelly’s goal was a republic of north-east Queensland. Seventeen bullets hit his armour before two charges of buckshot hit his legs and brought him down.
15.Now Howard is calling privatisation ‘ownership in public hands’. War is peace.
16.Paul Keating wore Ermenegildo Zegna suits.
17.What is the maximum amount of people that can hear a public address simultaneously, in real time, without the aid of artificial amplification but allowing the clever use of acoustics, such as an amphitheatre and wind?
18.I would like to see a graph that shows the largest crowd – speculatively – ever addressed by one person prior to the invention of electronic address systems and then charts the jump to the largest crowd ever addressed by one person using this invention but prior to radio and then moves to the largest real time radio audience.
19.Picture world history as a timeline. On the left we have the past and on the right we have the present, up to an arrow pointing towards the future. As the line progresses from left to right there is an increasing capacity for our species to record events and document the ways in which we live in various periods. This continues on to the development of mass media.
20.Will our species’ record keeping capacity, at some point, become near all encompassing? By this I mean that in 2150 our descendants will be able to gain quite an accurate impression of what it was like to live in the 21st century. Digital records will offer a comprehensive documentation of our time and culture and daily lives. This record will be decreasingly accurate the further back you go. There will be a pre-record period, an historical period that, the possibility of collapse aside, may eventually be small by comparison with human history. This period will be open to projection and conjecture and myth, like a dreamtime for the species.
21.Myth as a conquest of temporality.
22.Midrash (Hebrew): each age taking up the ancient sacred stories and retelling them in a way that speaks to the new times.
23.The origin is a blur of possibility.
24.Remember (re-meme): to reanimate as a cultural entity.
25.Conservatives see the eschaton in the past, in the Golden Age, and progressives see the eschaton in the future, in the Revolution.
26.Religion extols the next life to the detriment of the here and now.
27. What was Saint Patrick’s sin, the one he felt guilty about all his life? Saint Patrick, a slave in Ireland, finally gets back to England only to voluntarily return to Ireland. God said to Patrick, “We are sorry that our chosen one has been wronged.” Patrick says, God used the term we as if he were speaking for both of us.
28. Paul Tillich, a German theologian, argued that images of depth were more useful than those of height when speaking about God, declaring God to be the Ground of our Being.
29. I’m struck that the religious instinct, or a yearning for the ‘real’, for a glimpse behind the veil, for God, may be related to language use. With language we make abstractions of the world to package reality into expressible forms. If the thing that I know of as me is a language construct, it is made of the stories I tell myself about myself - “I am Jane. I was born in London in 1979” etc. So personal identity is social identity. It is a functional abstraction of my animal being. Consequently, it never seems quite solid or real and yet I intuit, perhaps as a working premise, that there must be something behind it, an ultimate reality, a ‘real’ that is beyond the abstraction. So is religion a search for a pre-linguist ground for being?
30.Conatus: the universal striving in living things for homoeostasis and self-preservation.
31.Plenum: an integrally connected system of monads.
32.“In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson considered survival of patterns, ideas and forms of interaction.” -The Centennial.htm
33.Abduction (Bateson): a third scientific methodology, with induction and deduction. A method of comparing patterns of relationship, and their symmetry or asymmetry, as in for example comparative anatomy.
34.Sir William Jones (British Judge) in 1786 found remarkable similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
35.Induction is mysterious. What do you teach when teaching induction?
36.The problem of wrongful committal of the innocent is the problem of induction illustrated and a consequence of underdetermination.
37.Underdetermination plays a significant role in the arguments of the anthropogenic climate change sceptics. However, just because there are many explanations for a thing doesn’t mean that some explanations aren’t better than others.
38.Petrol sniffers see little red men.
39.Idea: transdimensional possession. Subject only experiences the extreme emotion of person in another dimension. Crying, screaming, etc.
41.Ground rush. A second of base jumping makes you realise what a second is.
42.The key thing about human consciousness is its temporal radicalism, its speed relative to geological time.
43.Death is no threat. It’s a promise.
44.Gris-gris is graveyard dirt in American voodoo terminology.
45.Leibniz describes death as profound sleep.
46.Perfection seems sterile. Great beauty, say in an individual human, has been shown to be the mean with some significant variation. Life is premised on imperfection, it is not sterile. There is within it the fecund possibility of variation, of malleability, of adaptation.
47.(transcribed from old fragment) …first, the realisation that things just keep on going. The phenomenon causes not despair but a bleak resigned drudgery, then a quiet humility, as if a recognition of commonality, acceptance, an appreciation of the part within that persists. Just continue. This is a force of nature. Come to rely upon it. Depend on it. Be comforted by it. Come to know it as your life. A warm movement through space and time.
M. Plumber
1 comment:
I like it, I Like it.
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