Blu's unique combination of graffiti and animation depicts a parallel dimension that intersects our own, a space/time full of dissipative beings, like ourselves, whose bodies inter-penetrate the environment and co-evolve with their consciousnesses.
Muto is a 7.5 minute epic journey of personal transformation and human interaction spanning two continents.
Reductionism is a threat to the evolution of consciousness.
Reductionists can accept only one explanation for reality and they attempt to dominate all realms of discourse, from religion to science.
At its worst this manifests in various forms of fundamentalism (Capitalist, Evangelical, Wahhabi, Darwinist... whatever). Some of these guys will kill you if you disagree with them.
It is not religion, science or politics that is the problem, it is the blind clinging to a single ideology. This is the reductionist rather than the holistic view. This is how a Christian like Hitler or an atheist like Stalin can both send millions to their deaths.
People who want to retain the freedom to use their own brains need to stand up against fundamentalism and reductionism wherever they encounter it. http://kaosphere.ca
This is a very sincere call for sanity and open mindedness for those who seek grand unifying paradigms.
It is a response to the assertion that "Science leads to killing people" by Holocaust surviver Jacob Bronowski, formulated in 1973 . This video is a clip from his famous documentary series: The Ascent of Man, episode 11 - Knowledge or Certainty.
Pretty heavy, huh. But you have to wonder about the doublethink of that pacifist bomb maker, Szilard (his name even has a bit of JK Rowling "Death Eater" feel to it).
Maybe science's "if it can be done it should be done" approach is not to blame. But then perhaps it's worth pointing out that, even for scientists, the lure of knowledge=power can make good people justify bad decisions.
Bronowski talks about his friend Leo Szilard, his views on science, ethics and the human condition.
A little background on Leo Szilard: He was a Hungarian-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. As a survivor of a devastated Hungary after World War I, and having witnessed the subsequent terror of the Reds and the Whites, Szilárd developed an enduring passion for the preservation of human life and freedom, especially freedom to communicate ideas.
He hoped that the U.S. government, which prior to World War II had staunchly opposed the bombing of civilians, would not use nuclear weapons because of their potential for use against civilian populations. Szilárd hoped that the mere threat of such weapons would force Germany and/or Japan to surrender. He drafted the Szilárd petition advocating demonstration of the atomic bomb. However with the European war concluded and the U.S. taking heavy casualties in the Pacific, the new U.S. President Harry Truman sided with advisors and chose to use atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the protestations of Szilárd and other scientists.
Pat's particular beef is religion, but I think his ideas about absolute certainty can also be applied to the blind adherence to any dogma; whether its politics, science, economics, or iApple iProducts.
These are tools for consensual paradigm building (for controlling large groups of people), but they become obsolete over time and shouldn't be pulled out on every occasion (eg. iPod for a hammer, mythology for international relations). Their relevance varies over time and space.
Your mind and its ideas should be treated like hardware and software. They should upgraded regularly or, if you are a real geek like Pat, totally hacked.
Have you ever noticed that Bush and Bin Laden share more beliefs with each other than they do with any normal, thinking human being?
The dysfunctional Father God, the linear view of history with a predestined end date, the need to deny this life for some future reward. For them these are not metaphors, but facts.
Trying to explain the world today using these medieval theologies is like trying to use a map of Texas to get around in Iraq.
An enlightened person is one who recognizes that thoughts are just a map and are not to be confused with the terrain.
Dawkins explains why it's natural to imagine there is a God. He also justifies in scientific terms Aleister Crowley's assertion that "Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted".
The very creation of reality is an act of the mind. That explains the intelligent designer, its You Mr. Believer.
This video is great evidence of how one person was able to transform her own brain. The video above doesn't seem to play, click this link to view it: Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight. What she describes is much like a shamanic journey or a near death experience, but from the point of view of a neuroscientist.
Lucid Dreaming
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It must be something about the way my brain came wired.
As a child, I lucid dreamed chronically. And at will. I could drop myself
into a 'day'-dream if I c...
As the world becomes more complex it becomes increasingly difficult to predict what will happen next. This can be disconcerting to people who are raised to expect "order and good government". In fact this "new world (dis)order" is closer in its behavior to natural systems such as biosphere than it is to the orderly machinations we associate with civilization. A study of this kind of chaos reveals it to be the manifestation of a higher order. Although culturally bogged down in linear thinking left over from the now outdated Newtonian "Enlightenment", science, the arts, even religion can provide us with the tools to understand, and benefit from this emerging order. I believe that to adhere to unchanging linear models is to have a fossilized mind. To avoid extinction we must be prepared to co-evolve with our technologies. This site is dedicated to that process. Your comments and observations are welcome on the blog. As a first principle I recognize that no paradigm can claim the ultimate ontology and so we will abide by physicist/philosopher David Bohm's principles of "scientific irony". By this I mean that there is no one truth and and I take everything with a grain of salt.
