Whooo are youuu?

‘How can I reconcile the fact that visual information from the environment must be filtered through my nervous system before it is perceived with the sensation that I am directly looking at the world?’

Since George Berkeley (1685-1753), Western philosophy has taken direct sense data to be our primary experience.  The nerve firings are our only font of information, and we construct a mental model of the world via a calculation based on purely nervous information.

In the 20th Century, James Gibson proposed that philosophy ought to accept a description based on how we intuitively feel about our perceptions, rather than a calculation of how the perception must take place.  We perceive objects, people, motion — not photons or nerve-firings.

‘Under the Gibsonian framework, perception is not constituted by the processing of sense-data through the bottleneck of retinal immediacy. Instead, the perceptual system is capable of a first-order perception of whole sequences in the environment...

‘There is this impossible divide between between “internal” world of the mind and the “external” physical world. Somehow information crosses this metaphysical gap. Gibson thought it was much more parsimonious and evolutionarily sound to talk about perception in terms of direct pickup by a holistic agent in the environment.

The fundamental question, as I see it, is whether the unconscious low-level processing in my brain should be considered part of me, or part of my equipment.

— From the blogs of Gary Williams, #1  #2 and #3

Argerich

Flamboyant, brilliant Argentine pianist Martha Argerich turns 71 today.  Consider that before she even gets to the point where audiences can appreciate her passionate artistry, she has memorized hundreds of thousands of notes

Listen to Ondine, the first movement of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.  If you’re not in the right mood for the haunting delicacy of the beginning, then sample the explosion of the last minute.

Listen to Jeux d’eau, the piano piece that launched the career of 18-year-old Maurice Ravel. 

Perfect Happiness, by Robert Schumann.     Tocatta Op. 11 by Prokofiev

We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe.

— Ray Bradbury

Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.

Bertha von Suttner

Born this day in 1843, Bertha von Suttner was a radical pacifist whose fiction and lecture tours shocked the public with graphic descriptions of the horrors of war.  Her 1889 novel, Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms) launched her career.  In 1905, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘Ich habe es zu früh erkannt, daß der Schlachteneifer nichts Übermenschliches, sondern – Untermenschliches ist; keine mystische Offenbarung aus dem Reiche Luzifers, sondern eine Reminiscenz aus dem Reiche der Tierheit — ein Wiedererwachen der Bestialität.’

‘Too early, I realized that the zeal of battle is not a stretch toward the superhuman, but an atavism, not a mystical revelation from the kingdom of Lucifer, but a reminiscence from the realm of bestiality.’

Poverty, the prison system, the educational system...all of these phenomena arise from the same root, and not just on the collective level but on the personal level, too...The feeling of helplessness to live a life that’s meaningful, the powerlessness, the wrongness that invades life. It’s no mystery: it’s separation...The revolution that’s necessary is a revolution in how we conceive ourselves, and how we relate to the world.
—Charles Eisenstein

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
—Albert Einstein

Mind controls computer directly

In the last few years a small piece of science-fiction has become science-fact. In a recent study a woman, paralysed from the neck down, was able to move a robotic arm using only the power of her mind. Through this robotic appendage she was able to do something she hadn’t done for many years: pick up a cup of coffee and drink from it out without help.
This life changing feat was achieved through the surgical implantation of a computer chip within her motor cortex (the area of your brain which activates when you initiate a movement). The chip detected activity within this region of the brain, forming what is known as a ‘neural interface’. This chip was then connected to a computer which controlled the robotic arm. After some practice, the participant’s brain adapted to the neural interface allowing her to control the arm. What makes this amazing is that despite being paralysed for 15 years, only 20 minutes of adaptation was needed to manipulate the arm adequately.

— Read more at ScienceBlog

A Night-Piece

——The sky is overcast 
With a continuous cloud of texture close, 
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon, 
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen, 
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light 
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls, 
Chequering the ground—from rock, plant, tree, or tower. 
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam 
Startles the pensive traveller while he treads 
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye 
Bent earthwards; he looks up—the clouds are split 
Asunder,—and above his head he sees 
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. 
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, 
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small 
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss 
Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away, 
Yet vanish not!—the wind is in the tree, 
But they are silent;--still they roll along 
Immeasurably distant; and the vault, 
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, 
Still deepens its unfathomable depth. 
At length the Vision closes; and the mind, 
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels, 
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, 
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene. 

— William Wordsworth

Wisdom from the great sages

“Those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”
— E. M. Forster

Don’t worry.  Be happy.
— Meher Baba

If it’s not fun, why do it?
— Jerry Greenfield

Don’t worry.  Be happy.
— Bobbie McFerrin

Whatever you do, do it in a spirit of playfulness.
— Josh Mitteldorf

Summer

Open wide great jaws of time where laughter swallows gods divine
Blow your tune through trumpet stems and daffodil delirium
Drink the day in draughts that say the green has come to stay
Never hear the magpies squall behind the walls of hay
In penumbra veiled the colony failed to roll their Sisyphean rock
Past the meat-locker feast, that bipedal beast that slanders the afternoon clock

And crystal consonants don’t translate to capture the afternoon’s magnetic haze
Nor do vowels of earthenware and syntax candles the mystery erase
The background hum of metal made from piston paragraph
Waits at traffic lights to skin the rubber from the road
The octopus that inks this song on summer skyline scarf
Knows full well the consequence of doing things by half

Half made lies and half-life ties that knot the neck like noose
Half baked pies and half moon smiles the gap-toothed night let loose
Half a mile of bad road tiled with yellow-brick amnesia
Half a brain to wonder why we swallow this anaesthesia

— Pisces Iscariot

Unmanageably romantic

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

— E. M. Forster  (fr Howard’s End)

The Ball

As long as nothing can be known for sure
(no signals have been picked up yet),
as long as Earth is still unlike
the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair
of other grasses graced by other winds,
of other treetops bearing other crowns,
other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo
has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven’t heard word
of better or worse mozarts,
platos, edisons somewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes
are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness
is still incomparable,
peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions
still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone
still raise voices to high heavens--

let’s act like very special guests of honor
at the district-firemen’s ball
dance to the beat of the local oompah band,
and pretend that it’s the ball
to end all balls.

I can’t speak for others--
for me this is
misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.

— Wislawa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog: New Poems
tr C. Cavanagh and S. Baranczak

Bon anniversaire, Jean-Jacques

Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de meurtres, que de misères et d’horreurs n’eût point épargnés au genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé, eût crié à ses semblables: Gardez-vous d’écouter cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est à personne.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’

— from Discourse on Inequality (1754)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrates his 300th birthday today

British philosophers of Rousseau’s era pictured humans as brutish and selfish, and wrote of the need for strict governments to keep the peace and rein them in. But for Rousseau, man in the state of nature was peaceful and content with the abundance and the beauty round about him.  All depravity was the product of civilization.

Rousseau wrote scores and libretti for 7 operas.  Listen to Menuet et Allemande from Le Devin du Village

On Prayer 

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word ‘is’
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

~ Czeslaw Milosz