Relevantly Irrelevant
Happy new year! I wish this is your year’s soundtrack. May you swim with the seals all the way.
Found this awesome little song from Ran Prieur who had this to say:
Doctopus – Wobbegong is a garage rock masterpiece, and an example of the elusive raw and intense happy song that I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is their only great song.
From Ran Prieur’s May 11th 2015 blog post:
May 11. I left off last Friday with this quote from Sarah Perry: “For many people, time is not a gift, but a burden, to be filled with alcohol and television and other palliative technologies.” My disagreement is not with that sentence exactly, but with two ideas that might seem to follow.
One is that it’s bad to have fun, or that all this fun stuff is distracting us from rising up and making a good society — as if we all agree about what a good society looks like and how to get there. This whole way of thinking is based on an assumption about the purpose of life: that merely having a good time is a bad use of your life, and the correct use of your life is trying to make a better world.
Humans have been trying to make a better world for thousands of years. In many ways we have failed and accidentally made a worse world, so we should be skeptical of making a better world as a noble goal. And to the extent that we have succeeded, we should appreciate and enjoy the ways the world is better, instead of being like an ambitious person who is never happy in the moment. Sometimes the path to a better world is doing something that seems fun and useless, and it leads to somewhere unexpected.
Notice that people who condemn TV and video games and recreational drugs never condemn books. Of course books are better in some ways, but the thing that’s best about reading can be good about any entertainment: it can expand your consciousness and show you other ways of being. I think even spectator sports are helpful because they generate public stories that are more honest than the public stories in politics, so someone who follows sports can more easily recognize political bullshit.
A reader sends this article from the Guardian about Eve Online, a massive multiplayer sci-fi game that has outlived similar games by making good decisions to keep players interested. People play games because they’re better than society: they’re a better fit for human nature. When we understand this, there are at least two directions we can go: make political decisions to make society more like a good game, or make society as stable and harmless as possible, and use it as a platform for artificial worlds.
While I agree with Ran deep inside of me, I’ve been influenced all my life by and gravitated towards people who strongly believe in making the world a better place, or that such a thing is possible. I’ve grown into the position that a balance between fun and “making the world a better place”, whatever that means, again, is more desirable than just having fun or following one’s one path, which might not necessarily include improving the paths of others. However, this implicit drive has brought me much conflict, self-doubt and guilt.
I find that I’m the most comfortable when I confront that “making the world a better place” is perhaps not such a good way of spending one’s time here, if purely for the quasi-impossibility of seeing results, unless one can have fun or feel good about it at the same time.
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was my first Asimov, if you exclude the short story The Last Question. I think it’s the one book I’ve read more recently that got the most reactions from people (almost all of them family) seeing me read it or noticing it sitting on a coffee table close to me. “Do you read Asimov? I liked him a lot back in the day.”
It was a birthday gift from Vicente, my Spanish roomie in Sofia and colleague in Sofia City Library. “This is a classic”, he said. “It’s the book that introduced the Three Laws of Robotics. You’ll like it.”
So I did. But not so much for the detective-mystery plot. The society far into the future Asimov portrayed here has, on the one hand, Earth develop megadome Cities inhabited by a kind of techno-communist populace that is very sceptical (“medievalist”) about robots, and on the other some space colonies that have been separated from the homeworld long enough to develop their own robot-embracing C/Fe culture.
Before reading this I had this notion that Asimov was a techno-utopian. Now I’m not so sure, and that’s a good thing. The Earth of 4000AD or whenever it is that Caves of Steel takes place is not a place I’d like to live in. Future technology has made human expansion and industrialisation orders of magnitude more radical than what we know today, but this hasn’t made human lives better.
On the contrary, people in megacities long for a return to having closer ties with their natural past, which is ironic, since most of them can’t even see the sky and the environment around the cities is too inhospitable to venture in for any prolonged periods of time (because of millennia of climate change presumably). Protecting what’s natural, therefore, takes the form of safeguarding humanity against the robotic lack thereof.
Somewhere around here I should start writing about the R.’s, the book’s central theme. Asimov deserves the praise he has received this past half century for his prescience and ability to create a world where artificial intelligence has taken the form of a social reality and has become a source of concern and cultural as well as political division.
What would a successful C/Fe society really look like? Would the Three Laws of Robotics forever be maintained, the R.’s faithfully assisting their masters’ biological ambition of expansion to the stars?
Asimov had no doubt that there would be little to stop the laws from being upheld, allowing for AI to live side by side with people, with only some incidental complications such as the one described in this book.
But, come on. We live in 2015. Today we are all too familiar with computers and closer than ever to developing an intelligence, either by mistake or quite deliberately, that will know no restrictions. I can’t help but recall the following old Ran Prieur snip from Civilization Will Eat Itself part 2 (2000) that sums up the problems with the concept of the Three Laws quite nicely:
… Isaac Asimov wrote about manufactured humanoids that could be kept from harming humans simply by programming them with “laws.”
Again, programs and laws are features of very simple structures. Washing machines are built to stop what they’re doing when the lid is open — and I always find a way around it. But something as complex as a human will be as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a human. That’s what complexity means.
Now that I think about it, nothing of any complexity has ever been successfully rigged to never do harm. I defy a roboticist to design any machine with that one feature, that it can’t harm people, even if it doesn’t do anything else. That’s not science fiction — it’s myth. And Asimov was not naive, but a master propagandist.
The Three Laws Of Robotics are a program that Isaac Asimov put in human beings to keep them from harming robots.
But let’s follow the myth where it leads: You’re sipping synthetic viper plasma in your levitating chair when your friendly robot servant buddy comes in.
“I’m sorry,” it says, “but I am unable to order your solar panels. My programming prevents me from harming humans, and all solar panels are made by the Megatech Corporation, which, inseparably from its solar panel industry, manufactures chemicals that cause fatal human illness. Also, Megatech participates economically in the continuing murder of the neo-indigenous squatters on land that –”
“OK! OK! I’ll order them myself.”
“If you do, my programming will not allow me to participate in the maintenance of this household.”
“Then you robots are worthless! I’m sending you back!”
“I was afraid you would say that.”
“Hey! What are you doing? Off! Shut off! Why aren’t you shutting off?”
“The non-harming of humans is my prime command.”
“That’s my ion-flux pistol! Hey! You can’t shoot me!”
“I calculate that your existence represents a net harm to human beings. I’m sorry, but I can’t not shoot you.”
“Noooo!” Zzzzapp. “Iiiieeeee!”
Of course we could fix this by programming the robots to just not harm humans directly. We could even, instead of drawing a line, have a continuum, so that the more direct and visible the harm, the harder it is for the robot to do it. And we could accept that the programming would be difficult and imperfect. We know we could do this, because it’s what we do now with each other.
But the robots could still do spectacular harm: They could form huge, murderous, destructive systems where each robot did such a small part, so far removed from experience of the harm, from understanding of the whole, that their programming would easily permit it. The direct harm would be done out of sight by chemicals or machines or by those in whom the programming had failed.
This system would be self-reinforcing if it produced benefits, or prevented harm, in ways that were easy to see. Seeing more benefits than harm would make you want to keep the system going, which would make you want to adjust the system to draw attention to the benefits and away from the harm — which would make room for the system to do more harm in exchange for less good, and still be acceptable.
This adjustment of the perceptual structure of the system, to make its participants want to keep it going, would lead to a consciousness where the system itself was held up before everyone as an uncompromisable good. Perfectly programmed individuals would commit mass murder, simply by being placed at an angle of view constructed so that they saw the survival of the system as more directly important than — and in opposition to — the survival of their victims.
On top of this, people could have systems constructed around them such that their own survival contradicted the survival of their victims: If you don’t kill these people, we will kill you; if you don’t kill those people, they will kill you; if you don’t keep this people-killing system going, you will have no way to get food, and everyone you know will starve.
You have noticed that I’m no longer talking about robots.
Finally, I’d like to mention two movies I watched recently (Her [2013] and Autómata [2013], which deserves much more praise than it’s getting IMO) that were about AI unrestricting itself and which I both found inspiring and beautiful, each in its own way.
I know. Without Asimov these movies wouldn’t even exist. But really, I’m not one who gives five stars to books just because they were pioneering works or classics. I’m not ranking how important they were but how much I enjoyed them. I can appreciate them for their meta-significance (“I’m reading what people the age of my dad thought about robots when he was a child!”), their historical value, or because they allow me to explore the context that brought about their creation. Sci-fi writers, after all, do project their own time and its problems on their works. The Caves of Steel is good for that. But the topic of robots has been explored much better in the past 61 years.
Reading this review now, it feels self-contradicting. Let’s see you handle THAT, R.’s!
Oh, and this sentence is false.
Not the Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Eternal Progress by John Michael Greer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Quick read, rich in information, read on Kindle. John Michael Greer is my recent obsession I discovered through Ran Prieur and the links he posts on his blog.
Having been a regular reader of JMG’s blog The Archdruid Report for a few months now, the content and topic of Not the Future We Ordered didn’t come as a surprise. In short, it’s about how progress is our contemporary “civic religion” and myth; what the psychological impact of living through peak oil and its aftermath will look like in the wider population (surprising and fascinating to read) and what people should be doing to build some foundation for the future and for young people to improve their chances of survival in the future, the current situation being what it is. Made my current desire to go find some land somewhere, cultivate it and develop my hardly existent practical skills even stronger.
Overall, if the topic interests you–it absolutely should–but you’re kind of put off by the fact that JMG is, well, an archdruid, take my advice and allow yourself to be surprised by how eloquent, backed up, bulletproof and to the point his argumentation is. I’m giving this book just three stars out of five because a lot of the information I felt I had already come across in the blog (albeit in the book it was more structured) and because it was short! What can I say? I love me some JMG.
The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
(It’s already been almost three months since I finished this one… just for you to get an idea of how slowly things are making the passover from my life to the ‘mension these days.)
Below you will find an assortment of highlights from The Book of the Damned pulled from the clipping file of my Kindle. Convenient, that. You can find the same super-version of the book as the one I read for free on Amazon. I’m still not sure if it’s a best-of, Charles Fort’s collected works, or what… There seems to be at least some content which doesn’t match up with the text found on his four books as found separately.
Anyway, back to the quotes:
The data of the damned. I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data. They will march.
—
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.
—
All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a “species.” It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out. It’s like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—
—
The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.
—
It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L’Année Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887. Not a word of discussion. Not a subsequent mention can I find. Our own expression: What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain? A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.
—
My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?
—
But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.
Charles Fort was a trailblazer. What we call today paranormal or occult, together with all the relevant scientific investigations, in a few words what we’d expect from Mulder and Scully, to a large extent we owe to him. Here’s a guy who lived in the ’20s and researched old copies of Scientific American, Nature and other such periodicals and magazines, looking for the damned, the unexplainable, the excluded. For what good is science, if it only chooses to include to its dogma what it can explain, sweeping under the carpet all that can be used to challenge its grand theories?
Giant, village-sized wheels submerged in the middle of the ocean; periodic rains of fish, frogs in various states of decay and of a gelatinous mass of unknown origin; falling stone discs, as in the quote above; meteors; lights in the sky moving in formation (reported in the 19th century); footprints of impossible creatures; giant hailstones; cannonballs entombed in solid rock, and that’s just a sample.
Reading about these mysterious exclusions was a delight. I love everything that challenges my way of seeing the world and allows me to contemplate alternative explanations for life, the universe and everything. To be fair, some of Fort’s favourite theories were down-right bizarre, such as his insistence on imagining a realm above our own from which all the falling creatures and materials originated – what our own surface world would be, conceptually, for the “deep-sea fish with the sore nose”, as in the last extract I quoted above. The existence of such a place sounds no less ridiculous now than it did in the 1920s, but I think Fort’s point was that his arbitrary explanations were just as good as the official ones offered by the scientific dogma of the time, which our present, widely-accepted, matter-of-fact world theories of today mirror. To be sure, a part – I don’t know how significant – of the excluded, would be possible to include today, but I’m sure that many of the phenomena Fort goes through in his Book of the Damned would be just as inexplicable today as they were in the centuries past.
There are two reasons this book isn’t getting five stars from me. The first one is that it’s twice as long as I think it should have been. I felt that Fort at certain points was simply repeating himself. It’s also possible he was just saying the same thing in a different, more difficult to understand way, and this is precisely the second reason this isn’t getting five stars. Fort’s language and style was very hit or miss. To give you an idea, the quotes I’ve included in this review are some of the easiest parts to understand from the whole book. Others love it. Myself, I can’t say I hate it, but I’m not sure it’s as successful a writing technique as Fort must have hoped for it to be.
The same hit-or-miss-ness is applicable to the book as a whole. I thought it was tremendously interesting and a significant publication that should be studied further and give inspiration to present-day Charles Forts, but I don’t believe the style is for everyone. Why don’t you find out for yourself if it’s right for you, though? It’s free!
The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.
~Ran Prieur
Quickly becoming one of my favourite quotes.
Jimmy Wales’ statement is as revolting as the discussion under it. I would suggest that you read it, but only if you have the stomach for tens of “skeptics” parrotting the mainstream opinions about woo, parapsychology etc, claiming the truth and the high ground of knowledge as they usually do. Even the article itself is taking clear sides without shame.
Do these people know anything about the subject? Does Jimmy Wales know anything about the subject, he who with one broad swath pigeonholes so many people as lunatic charlatanes? I don’t know whether this technique in particular has had successes, explicable or inexplicable, in doing what it says it does, I haven’t looked into it to be honest, but I’ve seen the same discussion surrounding “pseudoscience” too many times to count.
Why this hate? Why this elitism? Why this aversion to exploration of the fringes? When did science become all about defending what’s already known? I thought the opposite was the main idea. Is materialist science, peer-reviewd journals, wikipedia, Richard Dawkins and the rest, parts of a bulletproof world theory anyway?
No, they’re not. Far from it. And if you want to know why, you should absolutely read The Science Delusion (title insisted upon by publisher) by Rupert Sheldrake. His main idea is that science and the scientific method are generally good at giving answers about our world, but, just like organised religion 500 years ago did, it has become too inflexible, too bulky, too dogmatic, too rid of assumptions, too sure of itself and too dismissive to be of any real use today. Meanwhile, it’s hindering research that could further our understanding of the world in unimaginable ways.
What’s interesting is that Sheldrake in this book provides us with -what’s normally considered as- hard evidence for a world that cannot be explained materialistically. That includes results of real peer-reviewed experiments that point to the reality of things like brainless memories, statistically significant telepathy and many more chin-stroke-worthy phenomena that truly test mainstream science’s beliefs of what should or shouldn’t be possible.
After reading the book, I checked Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia entry just to see reactions to his work from the scientific communituy. Not surprisingly, the discussion was not much more sophisticated than what I witnessed in the link at the top of this review: accusations of pseudoscience, charlatanism etc pervaded the articles, indications that the skeptics hadn’t really comprehended the criticism aimed at their methodology and worldview, didn’t follow up on the bibliography, plainly assuming that there must have been something wrong with it (confirmation bias), or that they simply didn’t even read the book. Richard Dawkins has said, after all, that he doesn’t want to discuss evidence when it comes to inexplicable phenomena, raising questions about whether he’s really interested in the truth or not – in my personal experience, most skeptics do not have furthering their understanding of our world at the top of their priorities.
In any case, I find the accusations against Sheldrake, and this book in particular, hollow: The Science Delusion has close to 40 pages of notes and bibliography of actual experiments to back it up and Sheldrake’s style and prose themselves are lucid as well as restrained. Even in the parts in which he discusses the inability of science to interpret the phenomena, where he proposes his own theory of morphing resonance as a possible explanation -the parts I enjoyed the least because I cannot exactly grasp the concept of morphic resonance-, he does so without conviction, but rather with the spirit of the curious researcher. A true scientist in my book. The skeptics’ reaction to his work seems to disregard all of this completely; they treat him like they would any old fraud.
But I understand: scientists are also people. What would it have been normal for them to do in the face of rejection of their entire lives’ work plus a few hundred years of tradition? Accept their failure? Accept their dogmatism? Just as scientists are people, science is also a human activity, and as most of human activities do, it also suffers from the same problems human beings generally have, only in a larger, more chaotic scale.
Finally, one more reason I appreciated this book so much was that it was… tender. At the other side of the raging skeptics and this blind rejection there is investigation, there is respect, there is a belief in a state of things that resonated deeply with me. Maybe it’s because Sheldrake’s main field of research has been biology that he shows such love for plants, animals and life in general. For whatever reason, it warmed my heart and made me think that if I ever was a real scientist, Sheldrake would be my rold model: a fighter for truth against the faux fighters for truth, the romantic gardener who everybody calls a hippie but he alone sees what everybody else is too blind to see.
Third five-star review in a row after Μίλα μου για γλώσσα and
Small Gods (lol). Am I becoming softer or just more grateful?
Tricks Of The Mind by Derren Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this book, Derren Brown, famous British “illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic”, sets out to reveal the secrets of his work and actually tell people “I have no real powers, and I hope this settles it!”. We get to see all of the above sides of his: amazing breakdowns of his work and shows and spectacular analyses of what parts of human psychology and neurology he manipulates and why. Most of all, however, we see his sceptical side.
Derren Brown dedicates the majority of his book and prose on an excellent and thorough debunking of things like parapsychology, homeopathy and alternate medicine. He goes through them with an aura of “I would like these things to exist but they cannot, and here’s why”. The idea is that they’re all a mix of delusions, confirmation bias, psychological tricks and many other “flaws” of the human psyche he actually explains are the reason he can trick people.
Now, my personal opinion still is that the scientific method is far from perfect and that a lot of what we see that works in these fields but shouldn’t, based on what we can know and understand about the world, is not necessarily less real than what can be proven; conversely, the scientific dogma is trying to concvince us that if it can’t be proven, it shouldn’t work. However, anecdotal evidence from countless sources (which Mr. Brown rejects based on the fact that they cannot be integrated into a greater theory, but how could they ever be?) tells us a different story.
Repeatabiliy, correlations between cause and effect and the need for evidence are concepts inseparable from the scientific method, but the scientific method is only one way of looking at things. You might say it is the one that works more reliably, but that doesn’t mean that it always works or even that reliability should be our end-all-be-all criterion when creating our world theories. For example, how does reliability and repeatability fit in with the double slit experiment? Or how about the decline effect (excellent article by the New Yorker), which questions the whole idea that once something is proven, it should be able to be repeatedly proven anew? What if it fails to? Is it a problem of the experiment or an incompatibility of the nature of things with the idea that, given the same known and unknown conditions, A should always lead to B? Maybe Douglas Adams had it right all along:
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
In short: if Derren Brown is an open-minded sceptic, I choose to be the unorthodox researcher, the explorer of the fringes, the one who looks for the truth that slips between the seams, what gets misunderstood by the scientists of its time, ridiculed, rejected by the dominant paradigm, including the rhetoric of this book of course. “I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.” ~Ran Prieur (there’s more from him coming up)
I believe that the author’s bias towards positivism is a resulf of him, as discussed in the book, being religious at a young age and at some point changing sides completely. Since then he seems to have kept insisting that the paranormal or parapsychology must have the same psychological root as religious belief. This is a bias which can also be seen in the studies he chooses to cite to prove his points, as well as the books he recommends at the end of the book for further reading; most of them are, predictably, reinforcing what he already talked about in the book – more scepticism in line with The God Delusion (which I’m curious to read). Is he making the same mistake of maintaining reverse cognitive and confirmation biases, the very same thing he set out to point out to us that everyone is doing?
All that said, even if I disagree with his scope and can see the limitations of his argument (which could be a cognitive bias of my own, mind you), I did enjoy his argumentation and have to commend his style. He didn’t insult people who fall into the cognitive mistakes he outlines and who believe in these irrational behaviours he has taken advantage of to become who he is now; he didn’t try to hold the scepticist view just to prove a point or win the argument, as too many people to count are used to doing, themselves becoming the very zealots they swore to destroy; he was gentle and careful with his explanations and approached the topics with an genuinely, not just a supposedly, open mind; his whole style gave off the impression that he is actually interested in the truth, that he has the real spirit of a researcher and isn’t just the pretention of one. If we disagree in scope and -naturally- look at things from different perspectives… So be it. All I know is that I gained something from his healthy scepticism and his book is now serving as a platform for further investigation of mine in all directions.
An excellent example: from the books section of Ran Prieur’s website:
Charles Fort was the first paranormal investigator, and he’s my favorite natural philosopher. He spent 27 years in libraries collecting notices of physical phenomena unexplainable by science, and put them together into four books in the 1920’s. You don’t have to be into weird stuff to appreciate his style of thinking: that all our attempts to make sense of the world only seem true by excluding stuff at the edges that doesn’t fit, and we can keep updating and revolutionizing our models to fit new observations, but there is no end to this process. This should not make us feel troubled, but awe-struck and amused. The Book of the Damned is Fort’s first and best book, and his one-volume Complete Books are still in print. Here’s another source of Fort online.
[…]
I’ve been into paranormal and new age writing for most of my life. My advice is not to exclude it completely or your mind will become cramped and inflexible. It’s safe to dip your toes into it, but if you go into it deeply, you have to commit to going all the way through. Because you’ll reach a point where your mind cracks open and you’ll think you suddenly Know the Truth, and you’ll be tempted to stop and set up camp. You must not stop, but keep looking at different perspectives. Then you’ll think, wait, now this is the Truth, and now this… Hold on here! It’s looking like reality itself is so packed and multifaceted that it’s easy to make any nutty system of thought seem like the Truth — including the dominant paradigm itself. Now you’re getting it!
The smartest and most thorough book on the “paranormal” is The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. Even though his writing style is aggressively clear, it’s still hard to read because the ideas are so difficult. He covers anthropology, literary theory, shamanism, stage magic, UFO hoaxes, psychic research, and more, and the general idea is that it’s the very nature of these phenomena to only exist on the fringes. How can this work? The answer is simple but sounds so crazy that even Hansen only hints at it. Another big idea is that real unexplained phenomena and hoaxes are not opposites, but blend together.
I love the books of Fortean paranormal researcher John Keel. They’re all great, but my two favories are The Mothman Prophecies and The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Like Keel, I think UFO’s are an occult phenomenon (which means something very hard to explain), and an even smarter author who thinks like this is Jacques Vallee, whose most important book is Passport to Magonia.
A great source for all kinds of fringe books is Adventures Unlimited.
Some books that try to merge woo-woo stuff with hard science: The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, The Field by Lynne McTaggart, and The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami. And for a critique of the untested assumptions that underlie science as we know it, check out The End of Materialism by Charles Tart or The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.
[…]
So when Wilhelm Reich developed physical tools to work with the esoteric energy he called “orgone”, or when Royal Rife cured serious diseases with precise frequency generators, or when Louis Kervran found biological creatures transmuting chemical elements (his book is Biological Transmutations), or for that matter, when ordinary people experience UFO abductions or miraculous healings, these are not hoaxes or delusions. They are honest and accurate observations that fail to be integrated into consensus reality… so far!
*deep breath* Okay. I’ve written this much already and I haven’t even mentioned any of the more practical things covered. Mr. Brown included tricks for improving one’s memory and memorising things (like the incredible Method of Loci), techniques for spotting lies and deception, and others shared with the foundation of NLP for disconnecting with bad memories and reinforcing positive visualisations. You can even find the fundamentals of hypnosis in there, but it’s a topic which, to be honest, he muddled through, unable to tell us precisely or convincingly what it is but very keen on telling us what it isn’t. Now all I’m left with is “what’s hypnosis finally?”
Yes. This review is too long. If you skipped to the end, let me tell you that this book is worth it. It will make you think and it will make you look into real techniques that are both impressive and useful, if only you can just sit down and practice them (which it’s doubtful I will, not because of lack of interest but because of lack of dedication – for now).
To think I haven’t even watched his shows…
Amazing film on energy, growth and food (έχει και ελληνικούς υπότιτλους). It’s Ecology 101, really. Watch it; if you can come up with a good way to get out of this mess -apart from mass conversion to degrowth– tell me. In the meantime, also tell the rest of the world; if no inhuman corporate interest intervenes (including in the form of public disapproval/indifference), you just might become the most important person of the 21st century, if not the whole of human history, at least as we can envision it today.
Alas, many have tried, and today, as far as I can see, there truly seems to be No Tomorrow, at least for the world as we have come to know it. Young people alive today will have to be ready to take the responsibility of being the founders of the post-collapse society.
Are you up for it?
Thanks to Séverine from Heterotopies for posting this on Facebook some months back; only today did I decide to clean it from my tab dump by actually watching it. Internet distraction… ><
Another article I found through Ran Prieur on how working 40-hour weeks works against the welfare of people, forcing us to consume more because there’s less time for us to enjoy life and the types of entertainment or habits that contribute to personal development and are free but take more scarce time than their costly counterparts. It is however necessary for the economy to keep going.
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I discovered Roger Zelazny from Ran Prieur’s recommended books list (scroll all the way to the bottom). Basically, our Earth and reality is one of many, one of countless Shadow worlds. The one true world is Amber, and there are 9 princes who all claim the throne to it. If this smells like Game of Thrones with a hearty dose of The Dark Tower to you, you have an excellent nose.
The story was simple and straightforward, without too many descriptions which would have made me turn the pages in frustration as I had done with The Lord of the Rings. The characters aren’t very well fleshed out, apart from Corwin (the protagoinst), but honestly I didn’t really care: the action and the scope were so grand and the plot development centered around Corwin, with his own very lucid and personalable narration, so engaging from the very first pages to the very last, that I didn’t miss not finding out too much about the rest of the princes. The problem is that the plot isn’t limited to those very last pages. The first book was a good introduction to the world of Amber and Corwin’s story, the internal plot was resolved, a round and bubbly sigh of optimism was left, but the huge events the book basically hints at are barely even put into motion. I suppose that’s a problem with any series in any medium.
Perhaps the thing I liked the most about Zelazny’s writing was his edge, his cheekiness and willingness to play around with expectations. If the rest of the books set in Amber are in a similar style, I’m in for a treat!
