An island on Earth from 300 miles in space:
More, fantastic, images from 300 miles up.
A cheek cell:
Image map of the Internet:
Neurons in a column:
Dogwood tree branches:
Inspired by Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler
Another neuron image. Next to an image of the universe. Click for original (on Clifford Pickover’s site):
Technorati Tags: images, neurons, space, universe, cell, biology, convergences, island, internet, trees
SPECTROSCOPE
And through the spectroscope we learn about refraction of light. Through the spectroscope we are able to take the light from all those observations. And each chemical element has its unique frequencies when incandescent, and we have been able then to–little human beings on our planet have been able to take inventory of the relative abundance of chemical elements in the sweep-out of eleven-and-a-half billion light-year observation.
SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN BEINGS
That we have that kind of capability, despite our absolutely negligible magnitude physically, that we can we deal with our minds in such magnitudes and do so quite reliably gives us a hint that human beings must have some very great significance in the scheme.
INFORMATION INCREASE
Just making a little jump in information. As humanity on board of our planet entered into what it called World War I, the scientists around the world had ways of reporting to one another officially. Chemists have what they call chemical abstracts. Chemical abstracts are methodical publications of anything and everything any chemist finds that he publishes information regarding, it becomes a chemical abstract. As the world entering World War I, in what we call the 20th century (which is a very arbitrary kind of a counting matter), we had some 100 – I’m doing this off the top of my head from my memory – about 175,000 known substances, possibly almost a quarter of a million substances, by the time the United States came into the war, known to chemistry. But we came out of World War I with almost a million substances known. By the time we entered World War II, we were well up to 10 million and we’ve come out of it now, where the figure is really getting to be astronomical. We can’t really keep track of the rate at which we are discovering more, just talking about differentiable substances, chemically distinct from one another.ACCELERATION OF INFORMATION AND EXPERIENCE
Those are typical of the information release at a bursting rate now, I’m speaking now in relationship to my own life. One life in the extraordinary numbers of lives there must have been on board of our planet. That the information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented.
I’ve been slapped,
If you don’t wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do ‘em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you’ll get to later.
Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause.
Saint Francis of Assisi, as quoted in John H Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age,
“Suppose that you have enough subtlety and science to know all things, that you are acquinted with all languages, the course of the stars and all the rest, what have you to be proud of? A single demon in hell knows more than all the men on earth put together. But there is one thing of which the demon is incapable, and which is the glory of man: to be faithful to God.”
I can read a somewhat dense book at about 250 words per minute. Supposedly a little below average. If, like Joseph Campbell, I were to read 9 hours a day I could read all of these books in 3 months!
That is about 21,000 pages! How many books could I read in 5 years? Look below.
autodidact - /awtodidakt/
noun: a self-taught person.
- from the Oxford English Dictionary
Introduction: Joseph Campbell, Autodidact
From Britannica, “[Joseph Campbell was a] prolific American author and editor whose works on comparative mythology examined the universal functions of mythology in various human cultures and examined the mythic figure in a wide range of literatures.” – source
He left the Ph.D. program at Columbia University for “self-imposed exile”. He studied for five years in the woods–reading 9 hours each day.
Daniel Rourke, from Huge Entity, quotes Carl Sagan in his recent post, On the Nature of This Pale Blue Dot,
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions,
ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…
Check out his blog post. The Carl Sagan quote is much longer.
This reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions,
“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
Technorati Tags: vast, humanity, ignorance, wisdom, carl sagan, kurt vonnegut, war, morals
Are you on auto-pilot?
Tell Mister tally man to tally your ‘nanners!
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More below… (more…)
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
-George Orwell
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust
Viktor Sklovskij, in Literatura i kinematograf (published in Berlin, 1923), p. 11,
People living near the seashore grow so accustomed to the murmur of the waves that they never hear it. By the same token, we scarcely ever hear the words which we utter. We look at each other, but we do not see each other any more. Our perception of the world has withered away; what has remained is mere recognition.
Jeff Hawkins in On Intelligence, page 95,
So several times a second, concurrent with every saccade, your brain makes a predicition about what it will see next. When that prediction is wrong, your attention is immediately aroused. This is why we have difficulty not looking at people with deformities. If you saw a person with two noses, wouldn’t you have trouble not staring? Of course, if you lived with that person, then after a period of time you would get used to two noses and not notice it as unusual anymore.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.
-William Blake
Close observation of the bark was astounding. I reminded myself of the mental patient one sees in films, on the lawn of the institution, drawn next to the inanimate in watchfulness. And here I was, leaning against the brick house, bound by concentration on the microcosmic growth and flow of the particles. A dandelion I glanced down at grew two feet high. Everything was magnified. As I strolled, my attention was wholly grasped by a small dewdrop on the grass. It was utterly captivating. – page 154
Again, same book,
I felt I was there with god on the day of the creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Here, just outside my door was such a forest and I swore I would never be blind to its enchantment again. – page 261
Note to self: Update this. Mention ‘mindfulness’.
This post is highly speculative.
Evidence that seems to show we are not single mental entities, that things are not as easy as “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I exist):
1. When people say “something tells me you’d like this”.
2. Talking to ourselves.
3. Psychedelics.
4. Detached inner monologue.
5. Use of the word ‘I’.
6. Self disorders, multiple selves, ego boundry disorders.
Click for more information on each of the above.