Sunday Mutants

Introducing what may well become a regular feature: Sunday Mutants.

Twitter makes most sense to me as a feed of what interesting people are thinking about, rather than a conversation/social thing (which I think only really makes sense for people working office jobs at the same time.) It is really quite amazing that you can sit on these people’s shoulders in this way and see what they are looking at, so to speak. Still, it is too much information, and most of it I don’t have time to engage with.

I have several twitter lists, making it functional. One for locals, one for thinkers, one for feeds. And one for mutants.

The mutants list is reserved for people who are way ahead of the curve in whatever field they are in. High grade information. Premium crack.

So the Sunday Mutants posts will probably be a linkfest from the far reaches, as, once a week or so, I read and curate the mutants tweets, tracking the bleeding edge of transformation underway in the world. (And throw in any extra stuff that otherwise will lag behind blogging.)

This is a couple of week’s worth.

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* For starters, this Foreign Policy article is one of the most interesting things I have read in ages: Beyond City Limits. Basically arguing that megacities evolving into relatively independent city-states is where we are heading.

* Increasing trend that the TV and the landline telephone are no longer perceived as necessities of life by the public. (More detail emerges in the demographics.)

* Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain. Pretty sharply pointed argument that transhumanist/downloading consciousness arguments are based on woeful understanding/abstractions of how the brain works.
[EDIT: Kurzweil's response. Cheers, Steve.]

* More on the conscious distortion of our social filters on reality: pro Israel groups offering courses in Zionist editing for wikipedia. (Interesting in the wake of a conservative cabal voting down stories it doesn’t like on Digg based on ideology that I blogged last week.)

* Wired interview with Steve Jobs from ten years ago.

Q: Then how will the Web impact our society?

We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Q: The problem is television?

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

There is actually tonnes of interesting stuff in this.

* Oh yeah. All this e-book, e-reader stuff? All that matters is what the kids learn to read on. Obvious when pointed out. The long game is over.

wade davis

is the man.

I blogged one of his TED talks a while back, and since then have explored further. Last year he gave the 2009 Massey Lectures in Canada. They are fucking awesome, and if you snoop around you will probably find the audio available somewhere online (Not sure if it is legit, so not linking; his SALT talk on the same themes is here.) (EDIT: actually, the talks seem I am on about seem to be here fairly legally :) )The lectures are collected into the book The Wayfinders.

His fundamental message – that the diversity of world-views adds to the collective wonder of humanity, and that each of these world-views has astonishing depth and richness and makes a unique contribution to that collective – comes at an incredibly relevant moment in time.

We are facing a cultural mass extinction, and a corresponding impoverishment of the human collective. We face a linguistic catastrophe – around half the languages spoken in the world are going to be dead in a generation. With each language we lose a world-view, a way of understanding and being, a unique set of answers to the questions posed by humans – who are we? what are we? why are we? how do we survive? what does our existence mean?

His grasp of diverse cultures and ability to express them is second to none. His talks are a hell of a ride. Appreciating what is at stake through his examples is literally mind-blowing. The diversity of human belief and behaviour is staggering.

I find it flat out inspiring. There is a massive convergence with my own work on consciousness, belief, and world-views, though from a really different point of entry; and I can see potentials that excite the heck out of me. There is something hugely important here.

on thinking for yourself

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational authorities – who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing and forming our minds to their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability, to inform yourself.

- Timothy Leary

filters, part one

Sort of a bulletpoint braindump thinking aloud, to be returned to: general thesis – that in an information age, what becomes vital is how we filter information.

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There is too much information. We cannot possibly attend to everything that is happening. Nor should we want to.

Most available information is irrelevant to us.

How are we to know what is relevant or irrelevant?

For this we both need an internal sense of what is relevant to us, and external means of filtering what is relevant from what is not relevant.

Most important of these is the internal sense of what is relevant. Do you know who you are and what you are doing? Where you are and where you are going and why? And do you know therefore what it is you need to know, and what you need to pay attention to?

Because until you have this internal sense, how can you possibly navigate the flood of information? There is no way to know what is relevant. And there is no shortage of information clamouring for attention.

We do not currently know how to filter our information. This is true both in the sense that we do not know how to physically filter the information coming in, and in the sense that we do not know what we most need to know.

A feature of information that needs to be balanced here:  If we knew it already it would not be information – the fact of being unknown is what gives it its value – but how are we to discern what we don’t know is worth becoming aware of?

Even though we are not aware of how to filter, we must of necessity already be filtering. We are ignoring most of reality in order to focus on whatever it is we are doing. The corollary then is we don’t know what we are doing when we filter information – it is sort of random. This seems non ideal.

We need to become aware of our existing filters, our existing mechanisms to deal with reality, and how we can adapt them to meet our actual needs.

the rub

“Changing the world is as easy, and as hard, as just changing the way everyone thinks about their world. The really tough thing is figuring out that no-one really gives a shit.”

- Doktor Sleepless, Warren Ellis.

(Every now and again Ellis really nails something. First time since a couple of lines in Transmetropolitan; that I’ve noticed, anyway.)

The best TED talk I’ve seen: Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures

TED is amazing, and this is the peak I’ve encountered so far. Absolutely incredible talk. This can only enhance your life.

Watch it now. If you want to download it you can here.

book four, draft one

Last night I finished a rough as guts draft of a new book (working title Riding The Tiger.) Slim, at around 40000 words, it came out in about 20 days. The length is about right – it is non fiction. I am expecting about 60000 for the final figure, and things tend to get longer in rewrite.

The process was smooth. Almost painless. A combination of writing what I know, plus having done it before, and in particular having the knowledge of how much it will change in successive drafts really frees the process of a first draft. What matters is getting the basic structure and content down. The shaping comes later.

The result was I pushed through much harder than I have previously. It will be interesting to read it back in a wee while and see what I’ve done.

However, writing does tend to override my life. What was I doing? Time to reconnect with the other processes…

Pure lucid genius.

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I Am That by Nisargadatta arrived in the mailbox todayu. Not sure if I have mentioned it on here before, but it is pretty staggering. Nisargadatta was an Indian sage. Uneducated, ran a small shop and hung out at his house, he was universally acknowledged to be freaking amazing.

I Am That is questions and answers with people who came and visited him over the years. He gives pretty much the most straightforward and lucid presentation of spiritual stuff ever.

Declaration of Evolution

Out of everything Timothy Leary said and did, for all the acid of the 60′s, I always thought that this was the most fundamental reason why Leary was regarded by the authorities as the most dangerous man in America. (The kicker is in the 2nd to last paragraph, but the whole thing is well worth reading.)

Declaration of evolution by Timothy Leary, PhD. ———————————————————

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.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That all species are created different but equal;

That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;

That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;

That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

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.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.

These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.

They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.

They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.

They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.

They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’d land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.

In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.

In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.

In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.

In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.

In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.

In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.

For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas. In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.

They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.

In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.

They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.

They have enlisted an army of informers.

In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids. They never admit a mistake.

They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement.

Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier selfapproval. They are bores.

They hate beauty. They hate sex. They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness.

We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness.

We have tried to make them laugh.

We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

on mirrors

Today while wandering around town I listened to Erik Davis interview Antero Alli on Expanding Mind .

Something Alli suggested, which struck me as an interesting exercise in self-identity, was to go for a week without looking in a mirror. Removing/covering bathroom mirrors, and house mirrors. Not checking yourself out reflected in shop windows. Not sneaking a peak in the rear view mirror. Just cutting out all reflections of the self, and seeing what it does to your experience of self.

Part of what interests me is that it sounds like a simple thing but would probably be quite hard in practice. (Presumably using a mirror to aid in putting on make-up is out, too.) But also that it potentially has quietly profound experiential effects.

One consequence of hyper-mediated living is our awareness of our image. We are photographed and stuck on Facebook. Images are flung at us relentlessly through media and we make comparison with ourselves. We craft our style – and even if we outwardly resist succumbing to style, we are aware of that resistance, that we are judged on this scale. It is very hard to be unaware of the visual aspect of ourselves.

Our familiarity with our external form encourages us to identify with our body as us – all of us. Mirrors have existed in various forms for at least a thousand years, but were not commonplace items until recent centuries when new production methods appeared. Another correlation with the shifts in ideas of self that occurred at that time…

Anyway. Would be interesting to do. Who are we when we aren’t looking in the mirror? What were people like when they rarely saw themselves?

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