All this talk of climate change; of the continued abuse of hydrocarbon bonds got me thinking. How are we expected to put our oil addicted world into perspective if we haven't got a perspective on the oily substance itself? It's all very well setting targets; cutting emissions; pretending we care. My iPod is made of zooplankton! And I want to know what you intend to do about it!

The universe manufactures new substances like you wouldn't belieeeeeve. Increasingly fiercer temperatures in ever larger suns turned a multitude of hydrogen, over billions of years, into the plethora of atomic nuclei we breathe in today. More than that, you are a carbon, hydrogen, oxygen derivative! The very texture of your compounds is a testament to the suns which exploded many billions of Earth revolutions before you were expelled; BEFORE THERE WAS EVEN AN ORIFICE FROM WHICH ONE COULD BE EXPELLED!!!

So I look around my elongated living space, every glance intensified by the shimmering materials I take for granted. And in the shit encrusted remains of the bird's nest of civilisation which material strikes the greatest chord in my being? That elusive, bendy, snack-crackle-plastic of course, which spreads itself like butter on the surface of society. Innumberable teeny-weeny ancient sea-critters, squished in droves for many a millennia and deposited on the doorstep of mankind in a glorious, oozing mass of black, toxic waste. We plunder the Middle East for zooplankton baby, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

But what of this organic mush, this expensive organ soup? How can we, the hydrocarbon generation, fiddle with our iPods, our smart-cars our Dyson Super-Vortex-Mega-Vacuum-Cleaners without a smile and a wink at our microscopic brethren?

Are we so arrogant as to forget the little guys?

ARE WE NOT SQUISHY TOO?!

Let's write a Mu Haiku...

In Honour of Ancient Ocean-Detritus and its Dark, Oozing Legacy:

Ancient Ocean-Goo,
clogging up the Middle East,
makes iPods shuffle.

You better write one too...

Project yourself, right now, into the middle of the middle of the Middle East. A tanker is guzzling the black gold right from the ground, its driver loads himself into the cabin, fires up the engine and trundles his way through the devastated oil fields. In the back of his tanker he holds more than a gallon or two of the black stuff. He holds a billion years of organic produce; a gut load of Earth's own belly juice; the legacy of a zillion sea critters with a million Earth atmospheres baring down on them. Do we fight these wars for more than profit? Sure we do... It's enough to get the guys in power real excited:

"If they turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace...We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

- Brig. General Looney: Washington Post, June 24, 1996

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, News, Links, Images, Biology, Future, Technology, War, Society, Environment, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

WARNING: Future Dead-Ahead!

Thanks Arenamontanus!
Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Images, Fun, Links, Reality, Human, Future, Singularity, Transhumanism, Perception, Technology, Cool, Consciousness

External Link

On reading Stanislaw Lem's Solaris - a rewarding activity - it might seem that the simulacrum-based goings on can be nothing more than convolouted allegory. So far-fetched are they that one would think their existence, as far as humanity is concerned, is destined to remain firmly in the world of the literary image. But one would be wrong. It seems we may actually be on the brink of one of the more bizarre distopian futures we thought would never happen.

(Minor spoiler warning: a very brief plot summary for Solaris follows, but you'd probably learn as much about it by looking at the back cover. Here goes.)

The story involves some sort of a, well, force - to be appropriately vague - which can probe human consciousnesses and reproduce things and people recorded in the minds it reads. Thus, a man within reach of this force might be visited by a version of a long-lost but well-remembered old friend. The replica would be a walking, talking, - apparently thinking - thing. However, since the source material for the copy is the mind of someone else, anything unknown or forgotten by that someone would have to be left out or extrapolated somehow. Hence discomforting imperfections occur...

I said above that it's an enjoyable thought experiment, but outreaches flying cars and the like in terms of the "that-might-actually-happen" side of things. But I was wrong! The following post regarding the new videogame Battlefield 2142 from Electronic Arts was mentioned on Penny Arcade recently. (It originated on Shack News and was reported on Kotaku.)

"When you open the [Battlefield 2142] box, a big slip of paper falls out first, preceeding any discs or manuals. The slip of paper says, essentially, that 2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records "anonymous" information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other "computing habits" in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads."

From Shack News

Ok, so there could be in-game ads which are a direct result of what I have seen and done online - as my online self, you might say. EA can read the memories from my online mind and regurgitate them right before my eyes.

Of course, those imperfections of Lem's mysterious planet would be even more vivid here. For one thing, the technology would not be super-accurate in guessing what I wanted to see on the billboards of the Battlefield, but perhaps more telling is that the ads I see will be aimed at my real self - not just the online part. However, they'd be derived only from my web-based activities. I would be existing in a world where I'd be treated to a personalized existence filled with personalized entities, all catering perfectly for a crude interpretation of myself created by a being completely unlike me. And, as Lem makes apparent, that would be rubbish.

Oh yeah, and Penny Arcade did a nice cartoon about this story. Take a look.

Categories: Science, Weird, Books, Fiction, Humour, Links, Sci-Fi, Internet, Future, Reality, Human, Robokku

Here be endless streams of symbols given birth in waves. As the seahorse father issues forth his young - disseminating, in the process, the patterns of parenthood - so shear activity in language breaks the corollary of meaning; necessarily bolting into the wilderness of heterogeneous abstraction:

The act of writing is itself transgressive, ... in that the epistemological and linguistic foundations upon which the discrete disciplines are based are constantly put into question, and this is as true for the putatively scientific discourses of linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, or psychoanalysis as for the meditative and speculative discourses of philosophy or literature and criticism. ^[1]

In acting to signify the world through writing one is forced into participating in that world, and by definition, changing its fundamental textures. The mimesis of the amoeba annihilates the act of mimesis itself, for where was one unified whole, now belong at least three: two 'newly' formed amoeba and one 'historical' amoeba. Of course this assumes that the amoeba can be ascribed identity in the first place. Are not such assumptions prone to a Mu response?:

...Contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). ^[2]

The world is you, the act of being in the world reappropriates the world as being defined by you. Writing, blogging, is not mere intellectual masturbation. It is the theft of identity back from the selfish hands of ideology. In maintaining the world we destroy its boundaries. This heterogeneous-all, this 'other', is ours to destroy:

An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows and social flows, simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). ^[2]

Mini-Bibliography:

1 - 'Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard' by Julian Pefanis
2 - 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi


(Mirrored in The Huge Entity Forum)

Categories: Literature, Language, Weblog, Quotes, Books, Internet, Human, Ideas, Philosophy, Reality, Mu, Writing, Simulacrum, Culture

As you may have noticed from the name under the last post there's a new entity in town.

His name is Robokku and information regarding his existence can now be gleaned from The Huge Entity Profiles Page.

A new era is upon us!

(Don't expect it to make any more sense than the last one did...)

Categories: Weblog, People, Humour, Weird, Robokku

Things used to be further away in some popular sense. The world is getting smaller, and not, explained Alan Partridge, due to global warming. Technological progress has resulted in modes of transportation which can move objects like me a long way, quickly. But despite how cool planes are, that whole clunky process of actually moving things around seems a little quaint these days.

Our grinning, binitarian stampede towards digitisation has meant that a hell of a lot of the stuff people actually care about is represented by somewhat soulless 1s and 0s. It’s been boiled down to dry information, replicable almost instantly almost anywhere. I don’t really know where all that data is. Is what it represents somewhere? My music? My pictures? They have a location of sorts – I know how to get at them – but I can’t help but feel that not any of that stuff is anywhere except when I listen to it or look at it, and at those times it’s wherever I am. The data, the 1s and 0s, if you wanted to dig them out, might be apparent somewhere, in something plasticy. But that’s not my music. I can hear music, but I can’t hear the bits. The stuff I care about is nowhere until it is actually produced from the relevant threads of information.

Despite the move from letters to emails, it seems that the stuff we care about is here (there?) in the real world - not in amongst some collection of digits. However, that way of thinking doesn’t always seem to work.

Playing Halo 2 online recently, my team-mates and I had to fight though our opponents and, as usual, take from them a flag. The four of us made a careful approach to the enemy position. We crouched behind the final corner before our target, readying ourselves to start shooting and so on. It was then that I wondered “Where are we?” I knew where I was (or so I thought). I was on my sofa, in my lounge, in Leeds. Two of my team-mates were Australian, though, so I guess they were over there somewhere. Quite far away from me really.

Here, a problem arose: it seemed obvious that we were located in our respective houses, but it seemed just as obvious that the Australians and I were in the same place. We were crouching next to one another behind a crumbled wall, near to some rocks. Furthermore, that wall and the rocks were not really items of those kinds. They were, at best, representations of a wall and some rocks. As such, they were not nearby – no nearer at least than my music and my pictures. The Australians, however, were within earshot. Certain of the interactions I could have had with them were only possible due to this replicated proximity. Without even describing the actual game so much, these interactions included talking to one another and having our representations show up on the others’ TVs. In the game’s terms, we could be seen on each other’s radar and hit one another. Either way, we were in the same place.

And those actions I perform when playing – shooting, running, jumping – define me in some sense. The impression I give the Australians of myself – my online personality – is described only in those terms. No other means are available to me. But those acts are nothing outside of the game. In my living room, I do none of them. My fingers twitch; that’s all.

So perhaps my presence online is not really me. But then again my personality certainly extends into the simulated world: the Australians can get to know me by those in-game actions. So perhaps it is me, but it certainly isn’t a bit of me which is visible in my living room - the twitching of my fingers is no more what I am doing than the 1s and 0s are my music. When I am in the game, I am all over the world – and nowhere, with the rocks and the music.

Categories: Reality, Human, Technology, Future, Perspective, Internet, Robokku

I am currently reading British Philosopher John Gray's - Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions.

I tend to be turned on by anything controversial, but throw religion into the mix, slide in a healthy dollop of political cynicism, whisk that into a dismissal for the entire concept of 'the human race' and my brainbox is just about ready to ignite with pleasure.

Where Gray's earlier tour de force, Straw Dogs, introduced me to his main theories, Heresies succeeds in fortifying them, readily providing a glimpse into the past few years of Grays political and philosophical writings. His style is extremely lucid, concise and self aware. I find it hard not to revel in his ideas.

His main tenets, as I understand them, include:

1. Humanism, and with it 'progressive liberalism', are born of Christian ideologies and as such reflect a religious-like faith rather than a rational materialism.
2. The belief maintained in science as humanity's tool of salvation is naive and, at base, a nonsense. Science can bring change, but progress is an illusion.
3. Free will, and thus morality, are also illusions.
4. Humans are animals driven by natural forces beyond our comprehension. Animals should not be understood as separately existing species, but merely as an ever evolving interplay of forces proceeding one another in rapid fashion. The idea that 'we' can control such nonexistent entities is therefore a farce.
5. Humanity is a rapacious species and a detriment to the planet Earth, Gaia.
6. History is a series of cycles ultimately leading to nowhere.

The liberation inherent in such interpretation is, for me, anything but cynical, yet I find myself at a pause when trying to fully grasp Gray's world view.

Much of the way we understand our reality is semantic. Language deals in symbols cast by culture. Whether this cultural influence is ancient, or whether it comes from a present political ideology is oftentimes irrelevant - the fact is that what we come to understand depends on the very components that make up understanding itself.

How is one to apply Gray's theories to a world which is composed of an utterly mirrored series of philosophies? The rhetoric of society is of the human, of the humane and humanity. In attempting to view this world through a Gray coloured lens am I destined to be forever mired by the irregularity of its appearance?

I'd love to know what you think about Gray's own ideologies. If you haven't read any Gray then take his Wikipedia entry as your starting point: the extended links contained therein will keep your reading list fresh for a while to come.

Is ignorance bliss after all?

History may have no meaning, it is often said, but 'we' can give it one. 'We' are not mankind, however, and the human animal is itself only a passing tremor in the life of the planet. The meaning believers in progress imagine they can impose on history is an expression of their own hopes and fears, and bound to be lost in the drift of time.

Fortunately, the Earth is larger and more enduring than anything produced by the human mind. For humans, the growth of knowledge means only history as usual - if on a rather larger scale of destruction. For the Earth, it is only a dream, soon to end in peace.

John Gray in his introduction to Heresies

Discuss this and other topics in The Huge Entity Forum

Categories: Science, Books, Ideas, Weblog, Links, Reality, Human, Evolution, World, Earth, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Belief, History, Future, People

On Past

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

On Memory

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

On Knowledge

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

On Conversion

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

On Truth

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

All quotes attributed to Walter Benjamin

Categories: History, Weird, Perception, People, Links, Reality, Quotes, Art, Time, Literature, On the Nature of, Interesting

Labels: On the Nature of

Keep clear of the cat if you want baby girls. It sounds like the lamest of old wives' tales, but according to scientists women infected with a common cat parasite give birth to more sons than daughters.

The parasite, toxoplasma, infects around 15% of Britons, but up to 80% of the population in some countries. It is spread by contaminated cat faeces, but also lurks in uncooked pork and beef...

...They discovered that women whose antibody count was high - suggesting a substantial infection - had a much higher chance of having baby boys. In most populations the birth rate is around 51% boys, but women infected with toxoplasma had up to a 72% chance of a boy. Toxoplasma causes congenital defects in newborns and can trigger miscarriages, but a link with the gender of newborns has never been identified before.

Jaroslav Flegr and his team at Charles University in Prague believe the parasite may interfere with the immune systems of pregnant women and make it more likely for male embryos to survive. The research appears in the journal Naturwissenschaften. - Guardian Link

This prime example of parasitic manipulation flies in the face of common sense, yet it is far from the weirdest example of its kind.

Parasitic protozoa Plasmodium directly affects the salivary glands of the mosquito, extending the time taken for the insect to feed. This simple manipulation allows Plasmodium to infect its next host, humans, and thus the Malaria cycle continues.

As with many parasitic organisms Dirocelium denriticum, otherwise known as the lancet fluke, goes through various stages in its life cycle towards reproduction. At one such stage the fluke somehow highjacks the miniscule brains of its ant host, forcing it to crawl to the top of a blade of grass come nightfall. From here it is more likely the ant will accidentally be eaten by a cow, the next host for the fluke. If by morning the ant has not been eaten the fluke will loosen its voodoo-like grip leaving the ant to forage with its kin - that is until nightfall comes again.

Sacculina barnacles can alter the lifecycle of their crab hosts, forcing even the males of the species to cease from normal activity and divert all their attention to the protection of the parasite within their bellies. The crabs will stop growing and reproducing, giving Sacculina the majority of its energy stores in a one way relationship to nowhere.

As alien as these examples of parasitic bonds seem, it takes another step up the evolutionary ladder for us to consider them terrifying. Could a parasitic organism be so blatent in its struggle for existence as to alter the very genetic structure of its host? Viruses such as HIV bind their code into the DNA of the infected, forcing the next generation to carry the burden of a highjacked immune system. Another, more macroscopic, example of genetic manipulation can be found in the relationship between the Cotesia congregata wasp and its tobacco hornworm host. The wasp appears to carry a virus as part of its makeup which can fundamentally alter the interior structure of the hornworm's cells. Much as a person with full blown AIDS the parasitised hornworm's immune system has been genetically mutated to such a degree that its only value is in the production of more members of the parasitic species.

So now the leap of imagination you've come to expect from The Huge Entity:

Somewhere along the evolutionary line of most species a parasitic 'relationship' has been prevelant. Some of these organisms, once intertwined along the evolutionary path, become as if a single, symbiotic organism. The bacteria living in our gut for instance rely on our survival as much as we do on theirs. Even the mitochondria inherent in human blood is thought to have arisen from the sybiosis with another, separately evolved, species. Is it such a leap to suggest that if parasites can alter our behaviour, our genetic structure, and sybiosis can truely be the making of a species, that at some point in human history a similar event occured which was fundamental to our mental survival?

Science alludes to the fact that in a very short period of evolutionary time the brain's functions, and thus the mental capacity, of the homo family line increased beyond 'average' rates of change. The range of human thought, perception and therefore versatility is unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. Without meaning to jump into science fiction territory here, is it not too outlandish too postulate the genetic manipulation of the human form by some external, and thus 'alien' parasitic species?

Imagine if you will a simple virus which a majority of humans carried in their brainstems, much as the Toxoplasma example given in the article above. Let's say that around 20-30 thousand years ago this virus/parasite mutated and somehow incorporated intself into the genetic code of its hosts. Let's also assume that this mutation, however minute, fundamentally altered some working faculty of the brain, driving its host down brand new, unexplored, avenues of thought and thus evolution.

As a mediocre scientist, as an anarchistic philosopher and sci-fi fuelled cyberjunky I offer that this 'theory' is not as outlandish as it first seems. Were I to allow myself the pleasure of greater 'science fictionalising' of this concept I might for instance postulate true, extra-terrestrial origins for such a viral attack. Or perhaps, in a dash of lunacy, I may extend the evolutionary boundaries of this theory right up to the present day. Is it not the aim of all parasites to alter the structure of its host in such a way that the next generation of parasite may benifit from its parents blind intervention? Perhaps the invention of technology was such a pursuit; perhaps external forces in attempting to communicate with our primitive ancestors had to push us to a stage in our evolution where we were capable of understanding their message. Perhaps I go too far with my parasitic voyage into the sci-fi realm, but then again, perhaps some chunk of data coded into my genetic structure allowed me the pleasure to imagine such an unlikely scenario in the first place...

Perhaps...

(All the information about parasites contained in this article was taken from Carl Zimmer's superb book on the subject, Parasite Rex - I recommend it highly.

Buy it from Amazon UK / US...)

Categories: Science, Weird, Sci-Fi, Consciousness, News, Links, Evolution, Ideas, Human, Nature, Insects, Animals, Amazing, Technology, Singularity

I have a fascination with the borders of fiction and how we draw them. Here we find the relationships between author, reader and character builds the substance of each fictional world. How much does the author's knowledge reflect that of the reader's? How is tragedy, conflict and enlightenment reliant on knowledge the reader has which the characters do not? Is not the author the greatest of magicians, waving their wand of fiction, using slight of hand to distract the reader, to disguise their characters?

Think of the last book of fiction you read. Where did the power of knowledge lie within this venn diagram:

I submit to you that most fiction plays with relationships which fall inside 3 of the 4 crossover points:

1. The author and reader share narrative knowledge which the characters do not: Tension, tragedy and comedy may arise.
2. The author forms the inner life of the characters, but this knowledge remains largely hidden from the reader: Creates mystery, disbelief and relies on slight of hand.
3. The Unknown!
4. Author, reader and characters have same knowledge: Tends to occur at the resolution of a traditional text. The illusion of this knowledge is another powerful tool the author may wield.

So yes, 3 has been left intentionally blank, and for good reason. For here, in the merging of reader and character, we find knowledge which the author may never gain access to. Here lies interpretation, misrepresentation and imagination. Here fiction comes under the control of the perceiver, worlds form distinct from their manufacturer: here be the no-man's land of creativity.
Could it be that the future of fiction resides inside this region? Interactive fiction, such as that made real in video games and augmented realities, belongs in the hands of the perceiver. The reader, the interacted upon, becomes at once the maker, the magician and the resolution to the narrative. Here the character controls their author; here evolves the protagonist as omniscient God of their own world; here lies the future real.

How are we to best explore this Realm of The New Fictions?

Categories: Fiction, Weird, Literature, Surreal, Ideas, Reality, Human, Simulacrum, Imagination, Consciousness

Here Lies the Value of Truth:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Here Lies the Value of Mankind:

Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

Extracts taken from Friedrich Nietzsche's 1873 essay 'On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense'

Categories: History, Quotes, People, Fiction, On the Nature of, Ideas, Human, Reality, Language

External Link

A pictorial example of North Korea's current weapons arsenal
(not to scale)

Categories: News, Weird, Humour, War, Links, Asia, People, Korea, Technology, Nonsense

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The brain: that gathered walnut of grey matter, lodged inconspicuously in the skull cavity of each and every one of us. Peer deep enough into these zones of thought; feeling; memory; dreams and each tiny pulse of inherent beauty appears as nothing more than the electrical impulses of furry little neuronal nodes, each playing chaotic games of cause and effect with a handful of neighbours in a never ending stream of activity.

Sidetracking for a moment the philosophical implications of this mass of electrical chaos one is faced with the insane realisation that thought equals electricity, a fact not lost at the cutting edge of neuroscience:

Recent research has undermined two basic assumptions about how the brain processes information. One is the view of neurons as drones single-mindedly carrying out specific tasks. Cells can be retrained for different jobs, switching from facial expressions to finger flexing or from seeing red to hearing squeaks...

...Neuroscientists are also questioning whether the firing rate serves as a brain cell's sole means of expression. Rate codes are extremely inefficient.... What counts as a genuine signal is a surge in the firing rate of a cell from, say, 2 to 50 times a second; variations in the intervals between successive spikes in a surge are considered irrelevant. But just as some geneticists suspect that the junk DNA riddling our genomes actually serves hidden functions, so some neuroscientists believe that information may lurk within the fluctuating gaps between spikes. Schemes of this sort, which are known as temporal codes, imply that significant information may be conveyed by just a spike or two... - link

An analogy which springs to mind (excuse the pun) is that of music, and more specifically, the discursive patterns inherent in much of what we call music. From Wikipedia:

Discursive repetition is "at the level of the phrase or section, which generally functions as part of a larger-scale 'argument'."

Yet it is not merely the notes and the combination of these notes which we are interested in here. It would appear, as in the creation of patterns in the brain, that the silence, the gaps between discursive phrases make as much impact on the overall 'argument' of music as the notes themselves. Here we find the character of the piece, in the very aspects of music the composer spent their time avoiding. Creativity in this sense, and consciousness in that of the brain, are as much formed from the lack of activity as they are from its summation.

There are further implications on the nature of consciousness which result from patterned activity in the brain. Epilepsy has long been known to arise from the synchronisation of groups of neurons in the brain which do not normally interact. As the firing of these neurons increases in chaotic complexity so the epilepsy sufferer will edge closer towards a seizure [ref]. During such attacks consciousness can seem gripped by waves of synchronicity shooting through regions of the sufferer's brain, waves which oftentimes lead to violent loss of control relating to most functions of thought. Here though is where my interest is sparked, for in the seemingly random chaos inherent in these seizures many sufferers have reported discovering portals into alternate realms of consciousness. It seems no coincidence that epilepsy and religious / spiritual visions appear to be linked. From V.S. Ramachandran's 'Phantoms in the Brain':

"I had my first seizure when I was eight years old," [Paul] began. "I remember seeing a bright light before I fell on the ground, wondering where it came from." A few years later, he had several additional seizures that transformed his whole life.

"Suddenly, it was all crystal clear to me, doctor," he continued. "There was no longer any doubt anymore." He experienced a rapture beside which everything else paled. In the rapture was a clarity, an apprehension of the divine - no categories, no boundaries, just a Oneness with the Creator. All of this he recounted in elaborate detail and with great persistence, apparently determined to leave nothing out...."

Could synchronicity hold the key to understanding how our minds work? It appears so, and as current research continues so the realms of this 'science of chaos' grow ever wider:

Some evidence suggests that synchrony helps us focus our attention. If you are at a noisy cocktail party and suddenly hear someone nearby talking about you, your ability to eavesdrop on that conversation and ignore all the others around you could result from the synchronous firing of cells. "Synchrony is an effective way to boost the power of a signal and the impact it has downstream on other neurons," says Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute. He speculates that the abundant feedback loops linking neurons allow them to synchronize their firing before passing messages on for further processing. - link

Perhaps the religious zeal inherent in so many epilepsy sufferers is a result of this synchronous 'focus'. The control wielded by portions of our brain in turning the chaos of reality into a manageable existence seem to leave these gaps open for our exploration. If the cosmos, in all its infinite complexity, is allowed to disorder the brain so the barriers of consciousness break down to expose a 'spiritual realm' beyond. The question for science to grapple with now is not how does our brain augment reality, but how does it constrict it. If we desire to understand the workings of the brain, to draw its computational outlines, so we should ready ourselves for the arenas of consciousness our minds may be given access to.

Could understanding the brain, its synchronicity and its methods of taming chaos give use access to layers of reality long thought to be separated from this world? And, if the answer is yes, are there limits to the kind of manipulation we should put our conscious, finite and mortal minds through?

"There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly...."

Fyodor Dostoevsky on the nature of his epileptically induced hallucinations

Discuss these ideas further in The Huge Entity Forum...

Categories: Science, Weird, Consciousness, Quotes, Ideas, Reality, Nature, Religion, Human

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo !--not a Place,
Yet name it so ;--where Time & weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mair sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being ;--
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,--unmeaning they
As Moonlight on the dial of the day !
But that is lovely--looks like Human Time,--

An Old Man with a steady Look sublime,
That stops his earthly Task to watch the skies ;
But he is blind--a Statue hath such Eyes ;--
Yet having moon-ward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald & high,
He gazes still,--his eyeless Face all Eye ;--
As 'twere an organ full of silent Sight,
His whole Face seemeth to rejoice in Light !
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb,
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

Extract from Limbo by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Categories: Religion, Christianity, Quotes, History, News, People, Death, Human, Poetry

Labels: On the Nature of

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"Cheshire Puss," she began, rather timidly... "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where..." said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

After a much needed break from the blog drawing board I am back, intent on tempting The Huge Entity out of its slumber and getting those ideas moving again, yet I find myself at a pause.

Where is there left to go?

This question never vexed me before, because I never intended on an end to my ramblings, but as my new life has been directed so a blog without a purpose seems mundane. Over the coming weeks I will fall headlong into the activity of a Masters Degree and without meaning to directly I am sure much of the purpose of this will find its way onto this website. To bolster this purpose further it is my pleasure to announce a second member to The Huge Entity team! His shadow has yet to be cast, but I have high regard for the consistency of his ramblings in the 'real world' and expect his online presence to be nothing more than glorious.

Here's to humans, their minds and the the ridiculous ideas they value the most...

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Categories: Weblog, Weird, Future, News, Ideas, Reality, Human