Information and Ideas

This is an example of the kind of conversation that is absolutely urgent now in many aspects of our lives, it was urgent 20 years ago, it is perhaps now simply an anachronistic talk between two "old men who don't understand the new world" that some will simply dismiss as unimportant because it was conducted in 1988 which is before much of the technology that they think has shaped their ideas was invented.

But, as is a tendency of the mind, they confuse the result with the cause. Technology is a result of ideas and thought and the mind. It ultimately depends on it. Any system, be it philosophical or political or even scientific, whose premise is that it rests upon new technology is a system that will ultimately crumble to pieces. All "new" technology will be old very shortly. Those who build systems that posit some "new" way of thinking or living based on some supposedly "revolutionary" technology will ultimately be buffeted by intellectual chaos as the "new" technology they thought their culture was based on becomes obsolete. Or they will resort to the pseudo-progressive presentism that currently reigns among many "new atheists"(see between minutes 2:10 and 2:20) and they will elevate current scientific ideas and theories to the panacea of all human wisdom, never to be surpassed, thereby stultifying true scientific progress for future generations who must first smash the false idols of "high technology" before they can breakthrough and CREATE through ideas, the higher technology of the future that will dwarf anything that exists today.

True scientific progress depends not on the elevation of "science" and certainly not technology into a guiding beacon for every aspect of our culture from laws to art to education. Science depends upon human creation and creativity leading to ideas. To elevate CURRENT technology and science, which is by definition transitory and hypothetical, into a position of influence under which it was never designed to labor, is to ossify science into its current place and ultimately destroy it as if turning a roaring river into a stagnant, stinking, tepid pool of filth.

And here is the great Carlin seeming to argue with me and agree with all at once!! I love him for both errors :) and a collection of serious thinkers on the topic....

The beauty and ultimate reality of mind as opposed to brain is that it operates on so many different levels at once. It is true that physical stimulants directed at the brain cause physical reactions in the brain. But is this stimulus/response the end of the story? This is the data that we can measure and collect scientifically. But what occurs within the mind after the brain has collected the information and the physical response within the brain has been recorded?? If the brain is just like any other physical organ, like the liver say, why is it that brains react in such different ways to the same stimulus?? If the brain is simply a piece of matter whose reactions can be perfectly measured and predicted like any other bodily organ why is it that brains can resist impulses created by stimuli at all? Why is it that no two people, virtually, act the same way when they feel love, or hate, or pain, or hunger?? If it all was simply stimulus response then individual identity would be virtually non-existent. But we know empirically that individual identity exists.

The answer may lack strict definition. But we must say that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain is the physical matter in your head in which physical reactions can be recorded. Mind is the process by which one assimilates all of those reactions into patterns corresponding to the needs and desires of the individual person. This process perhaps can be observed physically by observing reactions in the brain. But simply knowing the reactions of the physical brain does not tell you how the individual person will mentally assimilate and arrange all those reactions. It would be like recording the stone's impact on the pond but ignoring the ripples and movements of the water after its impact.Like the movements of water, the "knowing of thyself" cannot be measured because it is in continual movement. It is this movement of Mind, this pattern that is shapeless but directional that is the essence of your individual being

Sometimes the mind just needs to rest and let go....retreat and advance, retreat and advance,.....drift, drift drift, then imagine a pattern it wants to create and let 'er rip!! Wait, wait wait and then smash the paradigm and bring on a new one. I still love this song after alot of years. Life is about moments not events. Moments are internal, events are external. Moments are the mind's response to events.Rage, as long as it is controlled, is an underrated emotion.

watch me crash and burn in various ways on twitter as I systematically destroy what is left of my vocabulary in a sea of trite comments, irrelevant info, and silly acronyms, and loads and loads of the most mindless YET MODERN AND TRENDY bullshit :) @jhog667

There is no website more dedicated to the dissemination of useless, irrelevant information designed more to obfuscate the truth than reveal it. Other than perhaps this one :) It's amazing to me so many on there are the most literate intelligent people and they just bathe themselves in that trite, warm feeling of separation masquerading as togetherness and friendship. What porno is to sex twitter is to words. But I am a hypocrite so both have their uses :)