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  1. Oct 2023
    1. .

      Within-state paradigms comparing conscious individuals to unconscious or minimally conscious individuals have revealed posterior area activity to show the most difference between consciousness and unconsciousness or minimal consciousness (there is a "posterior hot zone" which may be indicative of the NCC).

    2. However, neuroimaging experiments can sample brain activ-ity systematically and noninvasively in healthy volunteers (Pol-drack and Farah, 2015) and, with appropriate methodologies,they can also provide valuable information about the functionalspecificity of brain regions (Moran and Zaki, 2013; Poldrack andFarah, 2015).
    3. .

      Compared with case studies (lesions) and electrical stimulation studies, neuroimaging studies are less accurate in determining the exact brain regions that contribute to consciousness. Neuroimaging often covers multiple brain areas, some of which may not be directly involved in modulating content-specific NCC.

    4. Figure 1.

      The NCC and related processes represented in a diagram of the brain. Content-specific NCC are represented in red, full NCC are represented in orange (as a union of all content-specific NCC), neuronal activating systems and global enabling factors modulating full NCC activity are represented in green, processing loops modulating some content-specific NCC are represented in beige, sensory pathways modulating some content-specific NCC are represented in pink, and outputs from NCC are represented in blue.

    5. For content-specific NCC, experimentscan be carefully designed to systematically investigate possibledissociations between the experience of particular conscious con-tents and the engagement of various cognitive processes, such asattention, decision-making, and reporting (Aru et al., 2012; Kochand Tsuchiya, 2012; Tsuchiya et al., 2015; Tsuchiya and Koch,2016).
    6. Several complementary methods can be used to distill the trueNCC. For the full NCC, within-state paradigms can be used toavoid confounds due to changes in behavioral state and taskperformance as well as to dissociate unconsciousness from unre-sponsiveness
    7. .

      Recent research has placed emphasis on distinguishing "background conditions" that indirectly generate consciousness from neural processes that directly generate consciousness (or distinguishing consciousness itself from its precursors and consequences). Some neural processes, such as processing loops involved in executive functions, activity along sensory pathways, and activity along motor pathways may tangentially affect the full NCC via modulation of the content specific NCC.

    8. The full NCC can be definedas the union of all content-specific NCC (Koch et al., 2016a).
    9. scious percept (Crick and Koch, 1990). Content-specific NCCare the neural mechanisms specifying particular phenomenalcontents within consciousness, such as colors, faces, places, orthoughts.
    10. The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are defined as theminimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one con-
    1. There is an interesting theme of staying true to a center or core of a story which is broadly similar to David Lynch's staying true to the original idea. The difference may be that Lynch is staying true to his own original idea which started the process whereas Coppola is distilling out a core from an original source and then focusing on that rather than having Puzo's own original core.

      Which core is the "true" one?

    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fskc7vBWcbw

      Another video about Coppola's prompt book for The Godfather. Nothing new here.

    1. McCarthy’s tenure atop the House—the briefest in nearly 150 years—was as historic as it was short-lived: He won the office after fighting through more ballots than any speaker in a century, and he was the first to be removed in the middle of a term by a vote of the House.
    1. LYNCH: No. I think a film is digested ideas andprocesses. If you take from things that have gonethrough that process, you’re further away from thesource. Ideas are the most important things. Andthey seem to be lying there in an ocean andavailable. So if you could go in and get your ownidea—now, it may have similarities to many thingsthat have gone before, but you feel it’s yours, andyou fall in love with it. And that’s a very goodfeeling.
    1. Friedman called such benefits ‘neighbourhoodeffects’—the benefits that come from services that aren’t paid for.
    2. economist Milton Friedman, and especially in hisideas on education. Back in 1955 Friedman had turned his attention to educationand written The Role of Government in Education. Education intrigued himbecause of its strange and, for the market model, rather irritating position in themarketplace. It didn’t quite fit into a neat demand-and-supply framework withchoice at the centre.
    1. on the traditional empiricist account we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world 00:11:03 that is we do not experience externality directly but only immediately not immediately but immediately because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes 00:11:18 sense organs and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there well to raise the question how faithful is the sensory report 00:11:30 of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question that's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap 00:11:42 between reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and reality as empirically sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well 00:11:56 known but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • for: good explanation: empiricism, empiricism - knowledge gap, quote, quote - Dan Robinson, quote - philosophy, quote - empiricism - knowledge gap, Critique of Pure Reason - goal 1 - address empiricism and knowledge gap

      • good explanation : empiricism - knowledge gap

      • quote

        • on the traditional empiricist account
          • we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world
          • that is we do not experience externality directly but only MEDIATELY, not immediately but MEDIATELY
            • because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes, sense organs
          • and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there
          • To raise the question how faithful is the sensory report of the external world
            • is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question
          • That's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap between
            • reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and
            • reality as empirically sampled by the senses
              • whose limitations and distortions are very well known
                • but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • Comment

        • Robinson contextualizes the empiricist project and gap thereof, as one of the 4 goals of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
        • Robinson informally calls this the "Locke" problem, after one of the founders of the Empiricist school, John Locke.
        • Robinson also alludes to a Thomas Reed approach to realism that contends that we don't experience reality MEDIATELY, but IMMEDIATELY, thereby eliminating the gap problem altogether.
        • It's interesting to see how modern biology views the empericist's knowledge gap, especially form the perspective of the Umwelt and Sensory Ecology
  2. Sep 2023
    1. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.

      —Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.

      via Doug Brent at https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm

    1. This Be The Verse<br /> by Philip Larkin

      They fuck you up, your mum and dad. <br /> They may not mean to, but they do. <br /> They fill you with the faults they had<br /> And add some extra, just for you.

      But they were fucked up in their turn<br /> By fools in old-style hats and coats, <br /> Who half the time were soppy-stern<br /> And half at one another’s throats.

      Man hands on misery to man.<br /> It deepens like a coastal shelf.<br /> Get out as early as you can,<br /> And don’t have any kids yourself.


      Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse" from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)

      Reference: Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989.


      Compare with The Kids Are Alright.

      Recited in Ted Lasso, S3 https://www.looper.com/1294687/ted-lasso-season-3-episode-11-maes-poem-sounds-familiar/#:~:text=To%20jog%20your%20memory%2C%20the,extra%2C%20just%20for%20you.%22

      See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Be_The_Verse

    1. syntopicalreading

      relationship of synoptical and syntopical

      Did the idea of syntopicality exist prior to Adler? Did it spring from the work of German religious scholars of XIX C who began doing synoptical readings and comparisons of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke in the Bible?

      link to the "great conversation" quote of Whitehead about Plato: https://hypothes.is/a/qb2T7l9nEe6uVVOdez8mKw

    2. Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle,something more is required. This is particularly true of a booklike Commoner's, on a subject-the environmental crisis-ofspecial interest and importance to all of us today. The writingis compact and requires constant attention. But the book as awhole has implications that the careful reader will not miss.Although it is not a practical work, in the sense describedabove in Chapter 13, its theoretical conclusions have importantconsequences. The mere mention of the book's subject matter-the environmental crisis-suggests this. The environment inquestion is our own; if it is undergoing a crisis of some sort,then it inevitably follows, even if the author had not said sothough in fact he has-that we are also involved in the crisis.The thing to do in a crisis is ( usually ) to act in a certain way,or to stop acting in a certain way. Thus Commoner's book,though essentially theoretical, has a significance that goes beyond the theoretical and into the realm of the practical

      Interesting to see this take up some space as an example from 1972.

    3. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to com­municate.

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

    4. RECOMMENDED READING LIST

      Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...

    5. Although not all of the books listed are "great" in any of the commonly accepted meanings of the term, all of them will reward you for the effort you make to read them.

      This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.

      Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:

      Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

    1. this is like 00:24:33 where this like cusp of a moment as we move this from able to work with lab-like data to real life data that we're about to have access sort of like to the new telescope to look out at 00:24:45 the universe and then to discover all the things that were invisible to us before
      • for: making the invisible visible, decoding the language of the biosphere
    1. This is one of the challenges of being reactive to the public mood, rather than shaping it. Donald Trump, too, launched his first presidential campaign by elevating arguments and rhetoric from right-wing media, but he also shaped what the media was talking about. DeSantis has largely followed the trends, and the trends shift.

      While Donald J. Trump seemed to hold say over what was trending and the media was discussing, Philip Bump notices that Ron DeSantis seems to be trailing or perhaps riding the trends rather than leading them.

      Is this because he's only tubthumping one or two at a time while Trump floats trial balloons regularly and is pushing half a dozen or more at time?

    1. The Glass Bead Game is "a kind of synthesis of human learning"[11] in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical thought, are stated. As the Game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper and more varied.[11] Although the Glass Bead Game is described lucidly, the rules and mechanics are not explained in detail.
    1. Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

      Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

    2. Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

      This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

      Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

    1. Spiral Dynamics (SD) is a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies. It was initially developed by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan based on the emergent cyclical theory of Clare W. Graves, combined with memetics as proposed by Richard Dawkins and further developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

      related to ideas I've had with respect to Werner R. Loewenstein?

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      This needs to be deleted

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      This is pure speculation

    3. Pin

      I want to explode this pin. It will change the color

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    1. Mass electronic surveillance by governments revealed over the last several years has spurred a new movement to re-decentralize the web, a movement to empower individuals to be their own service providers again.
    1. t may be that in using his system hedeveloped his mind and his knowledge of history to the point wherehe expected his readers to draw more inferences from the facts heselected than most modern readers are accustomed to doing, in thisday of the predigested book.

      It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

      Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.


      There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

      Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

    1. https://www.ebay.com/itm/335030637598 (The card catalog here appears to be late 1970s/ early 80s and looks dreadful)

      Free standing low table unit with no legs and a single 5x3 section offered in September 2023 for opening bid of $600 and a buy now price of $785.00 with free local pick up in Eugene, OR.

      2023-09-22: Relisting https://www.ebay.com/itm/335040502888

      Cost per drawer: $40 (bid); 52.33 (purchase)


      In the mid to late 1900s, the Buckstaff Company manufactured wooden library card catalogs.

      They still make library carrels and other related furniture, though they no longer appear to make card catalogs.

      See also: http://www.buckstaff.com/index.html

    1. Watch the scale and scope of what you're doing. If you read a book and make a hundred highlights and small notes, DO NOT attempt to turn all of these into permanent notes. You might fell like that is the thing to do, but resist it. A large portion are small things or potentially useful facts that you'll likely never use again or would easily remember, particularly once you've read a whole book.

      Find the much smaller subset (5-10% or less of the overall total of notes and highlights as a ballpark rule of thumb) of the most interesting and potentially long term useful ones, and turn those into your permanent notes. Anything beyond this is sure to cause overwhelm. Also don't think that your permanent notes need to be spectacular, awesome, or even bordering on "perfect". They just need to be useful enough for you.

      If you own the books or keep your brief notes and highlights written down and need them in the future, you'll still have those to search/find and do something with later as a backstop just in case.

    1. 10:00 hero’s journey as non-deterministic, growing possibility of horizons for individuals

      seeing day as potential horizons, facing the dragons of the day

      see in Hobbit, Harry Potter, Star Wars

    1. Why did the chicken cross the road?

      To get to his zettelkasten on the other side!

      But when he got there, he realized he had forgotten the slip of paper with his perfect evergreen note. So the chicken crossed the road once again to retrieve it. But almost as if it were a jokerzettel, on the way back, a gust of wind blew the slip right out of the chicken's beak!

      The chicken tried to catch the runaway slip, but it kept evading him. He chased that slip all over the farm--through the pig sty, over fences, around the grain silo.

      Finally, exhausted but triumphant, the chicken caught the slip and carefully filed it away.

      Moral of the story: Don't count your slips before they're indexed!

    2. Q: Why did the zettelkasten cross the road?

      A: It didn't because Barbara Tuchman, Nicholas Luhmann, Jacques Goutor, Johannes Erich Heyde, and Keith Thomas all recommend only writing on one side.

    1. The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it. 00:19:42 This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego
      • for: epoche - Jean Paul Satre, epoche, question, question - epoche - symbolosphere, Jean-Paul Satre - Nausea
      • paraphrase
        • Jean-Paul Satre
          • The Transcendence of the Ego
          • Nausea (book)
        • both the subject and object are cocreated and emerge simultaneously
      • definition start
        • Bitbol calls this "symmetrical effort"
      • definition end
        • it takes symmetrical effort to
          • extract invariance from experience (objectification and object permanence)
          • stabilize an experiencing pole (construction of self)
        • when some event causes
      • example: epoche
        • reading a book on history
        • you suddenly realize there is no past, no medieval events, just black marks on paper (or on a screen)
      • question
        • Is realizing the epoche the same as realizing the symbolosphere?
    2. according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

      • quote

        • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • author: Michel Bitbol
    3. what about the visual field itself? Can it reveal anything about its being seen by an eye? Yes. Why, because there is a structure of a vanishing point and vanishing lights, 00:06:14 converging towards the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the expression in the visual field of it being seen from somewhere. Namely, from an eye.
      • for: visual field, visual field - clues of a seer, nondual, non-dual, nonduality, non-duality, science - blind spot, science - subject
      • question
        • does the visual field reveal anything about the eye?
      • answer: yes
        • vanishing points indicate that the world is being seen from one perspective.
    4. several varieties of blind spots.
      • for: blind spots, science - blind spots, aware spot, Wittgenstein, Nishada Kitaro, Douglas Harding, BEing journey, finger pointing to the moon, the man with no head

      • paraphrase

        • blind spot by vacancy
          • ie. black area in visual field.
          • contrast with the rest of the visual field
          • easy to see
      • further research start
        • pure blind spot
          • I did not understand
      • further research end
        • aware spot
          • Douglas Harding ( Man without a head) exercise
          • Wittgenstein also commented on this
            • Nothing in your visual field leads you to infer that it is seen by an eye
            • BEing journey
              • point finger to objects in your visual field
              • then point to yourself
              • what do you see? There's no object there
              • it is empty but is the source of awareness
          • Nishada Kitaro
            • As soon as you adopt the stance of objective knowledge, the knower doesn't enter the visual field
    1. In other words, when a recipient clicks the “unsubscribe” link in your email, the recipient’s mail client will send an email to this address. It is your responsibility to receive and process these generated emails.
    1. Harl, Kenneth W. The Vikings: Course Guidebook. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2005.

      Vikings. Streaming Video. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA, 2005. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/vikings.

      annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:e17d7b3a22a4a56be07f2afb64548410<br /> search

      Started 2023-09-18

    1. in a normal distribution, from over here you have the denialists and over here you have the environmental activists. But in between you have a lot of different types of people. And the majority are actually – we know this from opinion polls – they are very supportive of science. They're very supportive of and concerned about climate change. They want climate action. It's just that they live their normal lives, they have many preoccupations in life. 01:01:44 They have their children, their health, their school, their financing, their incomes. You know, many, many things to be worried about. But that's the question: how do we get this majority, the silent majority, to join us? And I don't think that the way to make them join us is to scare them. And I don't think the way to join is to fight with the denialists. I think the way to join... to make them join... is to show that this pathway can get a better life.
      • for: leverage points, quote, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - motivating the silent majority, climate change - priority, social tipping point
      • quote
        • In a normal distribution,
          • from over here you have the denialists and
          • over here you have the environmental activists.
        • But in between you have a lot of different types of people.
        • And the majority are actually
          • we know this from opinion polls
        • very supportive of science.
        • They're very supportive of and concerned about climate change.
        • They want climate action.
        • It's just that they live their normal lives, they have many preoccupations in life.They have
          • children,
          • health,
          • school,
          • financing,
          • incomes.
        • You know, many, many things to be worried about.
        • But that's the question:
          • how do we get this majority, the silent majority, to join us?
        • I don't think that the way to make them join us is to
          • scare them and
          • fight with the denialists.
        • I think the way to make them join is to show that this pathway can get a better life.
      • author: Johan Rockstrom
      • date: Sept., 2023

      • comment

        • in other words
        • the silent majority does not yet hold climate change activism to be sufficiently high on their list of priorities yet to warrant the necessary scale of action
    1. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

      I read the first edition.

      Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

      urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac

    1. Hoekstra, a Shell man and a McKinsey man in charge of EU climate policy?
      • for: climate change policy hypocrisy, fossil fuel lobby, EU climate policy, Hoekstra, Fox guarding the henhouse, Linked In post
      • comment

        • What does it say about the EU's authenticity to deal with the global boiling crisis when they put a fox in charge of the henhouse?
        • this seems awfully similar to the choice for positioning an oil man to head COP28.
        • The fossil fuel lobby is EXTREMELY busy in the opaque back end of politics. We need more light to shine and bring the back end fossil fuel lobby activity out of the shadows to pre-empt future leadership betrayals.
      • future research

        • uncover future fossil fuel lobby’s game plan and future attempts to coopt climate change policy leadership
        • needed in order to proactively preempt the next attempt at coopting climate leadership. It’s difficult when we are simply reacting
      • for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
      • title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
      • author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
      • date: May 16, 2022
      • source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

      • summary

        • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
        • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
        • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology
    1. Underlines and margin notes in an unknown hand are interspersed throughout the texts. Volume I includes a daily devotional page that has been used as a bookmark. The back endpapers of Volume IV has been copiously annotated.

      Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

    1. the conjunction of those two claims the properties exist even when they're not perceived even when they're not measured and they have influences that propagate no faster 00:06:57 than the speed of light that's local realism and local realism is false
      • for: objectivism, materialism, question, question - materialism, question - objectivism, if a tree falls in the forest
      • question
        • How would Donald respond to the question:
          • If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
          • Does he hold the same view as modern consensus of quantum physics?
    1. an overview of the paper
      • for: paper overview, paper overview - the computational boundary of a self
      • paper overview

        • motivated by 2018 Templeton Foundation conference to present idea on unconventional and diverse intelligence
        • Levin was interested in any conceivable type of cognitive system and was interested in find a way to universally characterize them all

          • how are they detected
          • how to understand them
          • how to relate to them and
          • how to create them
        • Levin had been thinking about this for years

        • Levin adopts a cybernetic definition of intelligence proposed by William James that focuses on the competency to reach a defined goal by different paths
        • Navigation plays a critical role in this defiinition.
    1. In 2000, de Bono advised a UK Foreign Office committee that the Arab–Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread). De Bono argued that low zinc levels leads to heightened aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.[19][20]

      an interesting hypothesis, but was it ever fully tested?

      Could tests on other groups with long standing levels of aggression be used to support it? Possible examples:<br /> - The Troubles in Northern Ireland;<br /> - cultural aggressiveness of the Scots-Irish, particularly in America (Hatfields & McCoys, et al.) (Did Malcolm Gladwell have some work on this?)


      References in the article include: <br /> - Lloyd, John; Mitchinson, John (2006). The Book of General Ignorance. Faber & Faber. - Jury, Louise (19 December 1999). "De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast". The Independent. Retrieved 3 January 2022.

    1. 'The Aeneid' Begins (Schedule and Context)

      reply to u/epiphanysherald at https://www.reddit.com/r/AYearOfMythology/comments/16eti72/the_aeneid_begins_schedule_and_context/

      I've not listened to it before, but some may find Elizabeth Vandiver's Aeneid of Virgil from The Great Courses series to have some useful information and background while reading: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/aeneid-of-virgil.

      It's not terribly expensive on their website, but many public libraries will have copies available for free, often including streaming through Overdrive.com, HooplaDigital.com, or other related free platforms.

      Others in their series including those I've gone through from Vandiver before (The Iliad of Homer comes to mind) have been useful/helpful, especially with regard to context and history.

    1. Observing the unconscious, through dreams for example, as predicting the future

    2. 1:41 identifying with a persona, consequence of society/expectations on oneself, & compromising the self

      Persona is fine, as long as you don’t “identify” with it

    1. "Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong

      1. He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.

      2. He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.

    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

    1. Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html

      It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.

      Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.

      There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.

    2. This done, Adler can say that young crit ics of “the System” are not true revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries work within the System — since the System is the Revolution.

      How does the general idea of zeitgeist of the early 70's relate to the idea of "revolution"?

      See also: Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1970)

    1. Nobody, however, who surveys the conventional working apparatus of courses of study, textbooks, recitations, examinations, and marks can have much doubt that in practice the schools are making the mastery of the curriculum an end in itself.

      A statement of "teaching to the test" in 1939!

      • for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
        • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
        • It makes me think of the old cliches:
          • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
          • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
        • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
          • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
          • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
            • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
        • The conversation explores the process of:
          • othering,
          • coopting and
          • abandoning
        • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
        • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
        • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
        • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
        • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
        • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
          • a sense of helplessness,
          • anger emerging from injustice
        • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
        • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
        • Another cliche springs to mind
          • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
          • hence the amplifying role of social media
        • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:
    1. Eckhart talking on how "the flow came back" (striking to write)

      • see note on knowing when to stop working (also reference earlier wu wei annotation)
    1. Movies as portraying limited existence, but sometimes “signs” of consciousness

      • In my opinion, well made movies, show a lot of signs of consciousness. See, for example, LOTR, with the rhoririm charge where there is a collective consciousness forming, or the scene in which Shanks stops Akainu.
    1. Virgil. Aeneid. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. 1st ed. Hackett Classics. 19BC. Reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 2005. https://www.amazon.com/Aeneid-Hackett-Classics-Virgil/dp/0872207323/.

  3. Aug 2023
    1. Whereas ChatGPT may be a bullshitter, Claude can be a co-reader whose output specifically references and works to make “meaning” in response to another author’s words.

      "Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.

    1. Some may not realize it yet, but the shift in technology represented by ChatGPT is just another small evolution in the chain of predictive text with the realms of information theory and corpus linguistics.

      Claude Shannon's work along with Warren Weaver's introduction in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), shows some of the predictive structure of written communication. This is potentially better underlined for the non-mathematician in John R. Pierce's book An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961) in which discusses how one can do a basic analysis of written English to discover that "e" is the most prolific letter or to predict which letters are more likely to come after other letters. The mathematical structures have interesting consequences like the fact that crossword puzzles are only possible because of the repetitive nature of the English language or that one can use the editor's notation "TK" (usually meaning facts or date To Come) in writing their papers to make it easy to find missing information prior to publication because the statistical existence of the letter combination T followed by K is exceptionally rare and the only appearances of it in long documents are almost assuredly areas which need to be double checked for data or accuracy.

      Cell phone manufacturers took advantage of the lower levels of this mathematical predictability to create T9 predictive text in early mobile phone technology. This functionality is still used in current cell phones to help speed up our texting abilities. The difference between then and now is that almost everyone takes the predictive magic for granted.

      As anyone with "fat fingers" can attest, your phone doesn't always type out exactly what you mean which can result in autocorrect mistakes (see: DYAC (Damn You AutoCorrect)) of varying levels of frustration or hilarity. This means that when texting, one needs to carefully double check their work before sending their text or social media posts or risk sending their messages to Grand Master Flash instead of Grandma.

      The evolution in technology effected by larger amounts of storage, faster processing speeds, and more text to study means that we've gone beyond the level of predicting a single word or two ahead of what you intend to text, but now we're predicting whole sentences and even paragraphs which make sense within a context. ChatGPT means that one can generate whole sections of text which will likely make some sense.

      Sadly, as we know from our T9 experience, this massive jump in predictability doesn't mean that ChatGPT or other predictive artificial intelligence tools are "magically" correct! In fact, quite often they're wrong or will predict nonsense, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination. Just as with T9, we need to take even more time and effort to not only spell check the outputs from the machine, but now we may need to check for the appropriateness of style as well as factual substance!

      The bigger near-term problem is one of human understanding and human communication. While the machine may appear to magically communicate (often on our behalf if we're publishing it's words under our names), is it relaying actual meaning? Is the other person reading these words understanding what was meant to have been communicated? Do the words create knowledge? Insight?

      We need to recall that Claude Shannon specifically carved semantics and meaning out of the picture in the second paragraph of his seminal paper:

      Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

      So far ChatGPT seems to be accomplishing magic by solving a small part of an engineering problem by being able to explore the adjacent possible. It is far from solving the human semantic problem much less the un-adjacent possibilities (potentially representing wisdom or insight), and we need to take care to be aware of that portion of the unsolved problem. Generative AIs are also just choosing weighted probabilities and spitting out something which is prone to seem possible, but they're not optimizing for which of many potential probabilities is the "best" or the "correct" one. For that, we still need our humanity and faculties for decision making.


      Shannon, Claude E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

      Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

      Pierce, John Robinson. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Second, Revised. Dover Books on Mathematics. 1961. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, Inc., 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbols-Mathematics/dp/0486240614.

      Shannon, Claude Elwood. “The Bandwagon.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1956): 3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.


      We may also need to explore The Bandwagon, an early effect which Shannon noticed and commented upon. Everyone seems to be piling on the AI bandwagon right now...

    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
    1. Purple is a small suite of quickly hacked tools inspired by Doug Engelbart's attempt to bootstrap the addressing features of his Augment system onto HTML pages. Its purpose is simple: produce HTML documents that can be addressed at the paragraph level. It does this by automatically creating name anchors with static and hierarchical addresses at the beginning of each text node, and by displaying these addresses as links at the end of each text node.    1A  (02)

      Purple is a suite of tools from 2001 that allow one to create numbered addresses/anchors at the paragraph level of a digital document.


      Link: Dave Winer's site still has support for purple numbers.

    1. For context, I don't use a traditional Zettelkasten system. It's more of a commonplace book/notecard system similar to Ryan HolidayI recently transitioned to a digital system and have been using Logseq, which I enjoy. It's made organizing my notes and ideas much easier, but I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on organizing my notesSince most of my reading is on Kindle, my process involves reading and highlighting as I read, then exporting those highlights to Markdown and making a page in Logseq. Then I tag every individual highlightThis usually isn't too bad if a book/research article has 20-30 highlights, but, for example, I recently had a book with over 150 highlights, and I spent about half an hour tagging each oneI started wondering if it's overkill to tag each highlight since it can be so time consuming. The advantage is that if I'm looking for passages about a certain idea/topic, I can find it specifically rather than having to go through the whole bookI was also thinking I could just have a set of tags for each book/article that capture what contexts I'd want to find the information in. This would save time, but I'd spend a little more time digging through each document looking for specificsCurious to hear your thoughts, appreciate any suggestions

      reply to m_t_rv_s__n/ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/164n6qg/is_this_overkill/

      First, your system is historically far more traditional than Luhmann's more specific practice. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

      If you're taking all the notes/highlights from a particular book and keeping them in a single file, then it may be far quicker and more productive to do some high level tagging on the entire book/file itself and then relying on and using basic text search to find particular passages you might use at a later date.

      Spending time reviewing over all of your notes and tagging/indexing them individually may be beneficial for some basic review work. But this should be balanced out with your long term needs. If your area is "sociology", for example, and you tag every single idea related to the topic of sociology with #sociology, then it will cease to have any value you to you when you search for it and find thousands of disconnected notes you will need to sift through. Compare this with Luhmann's ZK which only had a few index entries under "sociology". A better long term productive practice, and one which Luhmann used, is indexing one or two key words when he started in a new area and then "tagging" each new idea in that branch or train of though with links to other neighboring ideas. If you forget a particular note, you can search your index for a keyword and know you'll find that idea you need somewhere nearby. Scanning through the neighborhood of notes you find will provide a useful reminder of what you'd been working on and allow you to continue your work in that space or link new things as appropriate.

      If it helps to reframe the long term scaling problem of over-tagging, think of a link from one idea to another as the most specific tag you can put on an idea. To put this important idea into context, if you do a Google search for "tagging" you'll find 240,000,000 results! If you do a search for the entirety of the first sentence in this paragraph, you'll likely only find one very good and very specific result, and the things which are linked to it are going to have tremendous specific value to you by comparison.

      Perhaps the better portions of your time while reviewing notes would be taking the 150 highlights and finding the three to five most important, useful, and (importantly) reusable ones to write out in your own words and begin expanding upon and linking? These are the excerpts you'll want to spend more time on and tag/index for future use rather than the other hundreds. Over time, you may eventually realize that the hundreds are far less useful than the handful (in management spaces this philosophy is known as the Pareto principle), so spending a lot of make work time on them is less beneficial for whatever end goals you may have. (The make work portions are often the number one reason I see people abandoning these practices because they feel overwhelmed working on raw administrivia instead of building something useful and interesting to themselves.) Naturally though, you'll still have those hundreds sitting around in a file if you need to search, review, or use them. You won't have lost them by not working on them, but more importantly you'll have gained loads of extra time to work on the more important pieces. You should notice that the time you save and the value you create will compound over time.

      And as ever, play around with these to see if they work for you and your specific needs. Some may be good and others bad—it will depend on your needs and your goals. Practice, experiment, have fun.

      Meme image from Office Space featuring a crowd of office employees standing in front of a banner on the wall that reads: Is this Good for the Zettelkasten?

    1. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.
      • Empty the cup: start from beginning (see Alan Watts on this), let go of what you know, let new things come by removing the old
      • calling out fire energy/good aggression from within
      • create balance to this energy, by meditating etc.
    1. Texts are patient conversationalists always waiting for you to write your side of the conversation into the margin before they continue on with their side of the conversation. Sadly, too many readers (students especially) don't realize that there's a conversation going on.

      Link to:<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/bBwyhkN3Ee6nQNPI5xmSnQ - https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q

    2. Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.

      Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas

    3. Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

      Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

    4. I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

      Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

      Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

    5. In fact, it might be good if you make your first cards messy and unimportant, just to make sure you don’t feel like everything has to be nicely organized and highly significant.

      Making things messy from the start as advice for getting started.

      I've seen this before in other settings, particularly in starting new notebooks. Some have suggested scrawling on the first page to get over the idea of perfection in a virgin notebook. I also think I've seen Ton Ziijlstra mention that his dad would ding every new car to get over the new feeling and fear of damaging it. Get the damage out of the way so you can just move on.

      The fact that a notebook is damaged, messy, or used for the smallest things may be one of the benefits of a wastebook. It averts the internal need some may find for perfection in their nice notebooks or work materials.

    6. one early reader of this write-up decided to use half 3x5 cards, so that they’d fit in mtg deck boxes.

      First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.

      Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.

    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      The commons as a social glue

      Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.

      Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ

    4. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    5. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

    6. Do science, technology, industrialization, and specializa-tion render the Great Conversation irrelevant?
    7. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    8. This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16

      Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

    9. This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.

      Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

    1. The Great Gatsby  F. Scott Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Nippoldt (Illustrated by) FRONTLIST October 10, 2023 FRONTLIST | October 10, 2023 9781524879761, 1524879762 Hardcover $45.00 USD, $60.00 CAD Fiction / Classics

      https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1524879762&page=1

      This looks like a fascinating illustrated edition from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

    1. there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • for: progress trap, quote, quote - progress trap, quote Brian Southwell, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
      • quote

        • We are likely to make some gains in personal health, are likely to face some collective concerns in terms of environmental health and
        • are not likely to cope with the alienation and despair that is a part of a life lived largely online.
        • In the latter case, there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and
        • the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • author: Brian Southwell

        • director, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
    1. Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • for: quote, quote - Stowe Boyd, quote - progress trap, quote - unintended consequences, unintended consequences, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap
      • quote:
        • Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • author: Sowe Boyd
        • consulting futurist on technological evolution and the future of work
      • paraphrase
        • In an uncontrolled hyper-capitalist society,
          • the explosion in technologies over the past 30 years has only
            • widened inequality,
            • concentrated wealth and
            • led to greater social division.
          • And it is speeding up with the rise of artificial intelligence,
            • which like globalization has destabilized Western industrial economies while admittedly pulling hundreds of millions elsewhere out of poverty.
        • And the boiling exhaust of this set of forces is pushing the planet into a climate catastrophe. -The world is as unready for hundreds of millions of climate refugees as it was for the plague.
        • However, some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the madness
          • which I call the Human Spring
        • which will be more like
          • Occupy or
          • the Yellow Vests
        • than traditional politics.
        • I anticipate a grassroots movement
          • characterized by
            • general strikes,
            • political action,
            • protest and
            • widespread disruption of the economy
          • that will confront the economic and political system of the West.
        • Lead by the young, ultimately this will lead to large-scale political reforms, such as
          • universal health care,
          • direct democracy,
          • a new set of rights for individuals and
          • a large set of checks on the power of
            • corporations and
            • political parties.
        • For example,
          • eliminating corporate contributions to political campaigns,
          • countering monopolies and
          • effectively accounting for economic externalities, like carbon.
    2. What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip, tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything, including wrongly. The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world. That’s where the digital and the physical connect best. Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with the U.S., Europe and China becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward networks and what runs on them.
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Doc Searls
      • quote
        • What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip,
          • tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything,
            • including wrongly.
        • The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world.
        • That’s where the digital and the physical connect best.
        • Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with
          • the U.S.,
          • Europe and
          • China
        • becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward
          • networks and
          • what runs on them.
    1. ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change – seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm’s own scientists. Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial.

      Exxon knew as early as 1981 of climate change, and since has been actively denying and distracting from the real issue - burning fossil fuels

    1. The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found.

      Exxon knew from their climate scientists

    1. The Massachusetts high court on Tuesday ruled that the US’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, must face a trial over accusations that it lied about the climate crisis and covered up the fossil fuel industry’s role in worsening environmental devastation.

      Exxon must face trial for climate crimes, Exxon Knew

    1. CAN THE BIOSPHERE SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS?

      A global program to regenerate soils, ecosystems, forests and revive life in the oceans can reverse a lot of the damage, fast. The biosphere can solve the climate crisis, if we give it a chance. #climatechange #slowwater #amazon #clouds #regeneration

    1. I propose a six pillar strategy besides the fight against CO2, frontloading climate action based on massive Nature based Solutions (NbS) implemented by everyone, everywhere as fast as possible:

      Rob 6-pillar strategy

    1. why does it in a sense if we think of money as a voting tool why is it that a billionaire has a 00:32:31 billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do
      • for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
      • paraphrase
      • question
        • if we think of money as a voting tool
          • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?
    1. Walter Jehne outlines hydrological processes that naturally regulate and cool Earth’s climate.

      hydrology and water cycles to cool the planet. resources.

      • for: emissions reduction, bend the curve, TPF, W2W, emissions reduction - cultural sector, bend the curve - cultural sector, TPF - cultural sector, W2W - cultural sector, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon inequality

      • comment

        • well written article on the carbon emissions challenges of the cultural sector
        • this is related to the carbon emissions of the luxury industry as well
      • question
        • same question as asked about luxury, since there is overlap with culture industry and luxury
        • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury aspects of the culture industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
      • reference
    1. I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time
      • for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
      • key insight
        • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
        • it means the difference between
          • living in the present
          • living in the future
      • paraphrase
        • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
        • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
        • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
          • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
          • but in the future when I have what I think I need
            • when I'm rich enough or
            • when I'm famous enough or
            • my body is perfect enough or whatever
          • when I have all this then everything will be okay
          • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
          • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
          • Now isn't good enough
            • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
        • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
        • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
        • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
          • the Eternal now
          • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
        • As long as the present is a means to some better end
          • this future when I'm gonna be okay
        • then the present is experienced as
          • a series of Nows that fall away
          • as we reach for that future
        • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
        • it's possible to experience the here and now
          • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
          • as lacking nothing
      • it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away
    2. t the irony of course is that if this desire if this craving for money if this lack project and we could also call it reality project because another 00:13:08 way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole right 00:13:20 because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside that's going to secure this sense of self-insight the tragedy of the whole process of 00:13:32 course is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn it's never going to be enough because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • for: the lack project, the reality project, sense of lack, sense of self, poverty mentality, polylcrisis, polycrisis - root
      • paraphrase
        • the irony is that
          • if this desire
          • if this craving for money
          • if this lack project and
          • we could also call it reality project
            • because another way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole
        • because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside
          • that's going to secure this sense of self-inside
        • the tragedy of the whole process is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn
          • it's never going to be enough
          • because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • key insight
        • the lack project is at the root of our polycrisis
    3. if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress
      • for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
      • key insight
        • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
        • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project
    1. highlights the dire financial circumstances of the poorest individuals, who resort to high-interest loans as a survival strategy. This phenomenon reflects the interplay between human decision-making and development policy. The decision to take such loans, driven by immediate needs, illustrates how cognitive biases and limited options impact choices. From a policy perspective, addressing this issue requires understanding these behavioral nuances and crafting interventions that provide sustainable alternatives, fostering financial inclusion and breaking the cycle of high-interest debt.

    1. It is not unrealistic to forsee the costs ofcomputation and memory plummeting by orders ofmagnitude, while the cost of human programmers increases.It will be cost effective to use large systems like ~. forevery kind of programming, as long as they can providesignificant increases in programmer power. Just ascompilers have found their way into every application overthe past twenty years, intelligent program-understandingsystems may become a part of every reasonablecomputational environment in the next twenty.
      • for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

      • Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

      • Author: Brian F. Snyder

      • Abstract

      • Summary
      • Paraphrase
        • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
        • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
          • climate change,
          • biodiversity loss,
          • population growth
        • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
        • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
          • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
        • Here, we integrate this theory with
          • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
        • and propose a model linking
          • energy extraction from the environment with
          • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
        • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
        • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
          • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
          • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
        • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
        • in all species,
        • but in humans, they are also determined by
          • technology and
          • culture.
        • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
          • the ability of an individual or social group
        • to increase its carrying capacity,
        • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
        • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
          • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.
    1. Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

      Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

    2. I he fact is that there arc some three thousand subheadings. So persons who feel that an official ceiling of 102 ideas would cramp their style can breathe freely.

      According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

    3. It is not quite a five-foot shelf: 1 make it four feet eight-and-a-half — standard railroad gauge.

      the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

    1. what are we gonna do with all these boundaries once this is their set right 01:43:58 what I always say that this esps really need to be linked to actors if they are going to have any bearing in real world and to guide the practice so we can do that by cross-scale 01:44:11 translation try to bring down this you know planetary level kind of our boundaries into actors cities and businesses in particular so when we talk about this cross-scale translation what we are talking about is if the boundary 01:44:24 is transgressed then what we are talking about is how do you allocate the responsibilities equal um equitably
      • for: downscaled planetary boundaries, bend the curve, allocate responsibilities, fair share, science-based targets
      • key insight
        • downscaling to city scale and to business actdors
        • based on Science based targets
    1. I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

      • Has anyone seen them for sale?
      • Made their own?
      • Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
      • Used a third-party company to design and print something?

      In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

      I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

      Other thoughts? suggestions?

      Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/