Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Things I ponder in bed at night:

1) If I sleep pointing to the north as opposed to the south, will I dream different dreams?

2) What happened to Dorothy's parents in the Wizard of Oz?

3) If I eat a hamburger with the bun facing down instead of up, will it taste different?

4) How much information can be contained in a cubic inch of light?

5) Is the darkness in a totally dark room transparent or opaque?

6) Where do butterflies sleep at night?

7) Is there a synonym for the word "synonym"?

8) The word "word" is the only thing that is what it is also an instance of.

9) If you carry an empty box across a room, do you also carry the space inside of it?

10) Money is just a socially agreed upon symbol. It isn't real in itself.

11) Where do the bubbles in boiling water come from?

12) If light traveled backwards, would we be able to see into the past while remembering the future?

"It is possible that the noosphere contained thought patterns in the form of very weak energy until we developed radio transmission; whereupon the energy level of the noosphere went out of bounds and assumed a life of its own. It no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information (the ‘Seas of Knowledge’ which ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and the information-rich material therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other ancients called the Logos. Information has, then, become alive, with a collective mind of its own independent of our brains…"----Philip K. Dick, Man, Android, and Machine

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Never underestimate the power of rearranging things. Everything that is spoken and can be spoken comes from the arrangements and rearrangements of just 26 letters of the alphabet. All compounds are formed from the arrangements and rearrangements of just 118 atomic elements. And all the traits of the human genome arise from rearranging chains of just 4 nucleotides g,t,a, and c. Yet the potential for novelty in these systems is well nigh infinite.

Occasionally something comes along that is so well-imagined and beautifully composed that it doesn't even matter if it's not real or true. We call this the experience of Art, Literature, Poetry, Music, and Film. Why can't our lives be this way?

Life is a parasitic infection of Time inside of matter. It is a highly contagious and sexually-transmitted disease. An incurable fitful fever symptomized by pain and hallucinations. A terminal condition always resulting in the death of its pitiful victim.

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."----Loren Eiseley

70% of our bodies are made of water. When people die we cremate them and keep the 30% of solid matter that is left. Meanwhile their water evaporates into the atmosphere. Why don't we instead capture this sacred water that is more them than the ashes and then pour it back into the sea? Or water a garden with it? That to me would be a more beautiful affirmation of their eternal lifegiving being.

It occurs to me that not only do we gain from the experience of growing up and maturing as human beings, but we also benefit from the advances in culture and knowledge of the time we are living in. All those historical changes---the movements and inventions and wars and moral progress and artistic advances---- get absorbed as much as the cumulative lessons of our individual lives. We are not just wiser for having lived. We are wiser and more conscious for having lived thru this historical time span we were born into.

I have always been drawn to liminal metaphors in art and writing and film--those places or moments that are in-between two realms, where there is a transition from one state to another. A rite of passage. A threshold. A doorway. A window. A portal. A bridge. A stairway. A place of magic and transformation into something new and different.

I believe that the resolution to the mind-body problem lies in just such a liminal property---the property we all call energy. I feel like that while mind and body do not directly interact, being two fundamentally distinct ontic substances, they DO effect each other thru a third in-between state of pure energy. It is thru energy that matter influences the mind, thru the electrochemical firings of the brain. And it is thru energy that mind influences matter, thru intention and volition and motor nerve signals. Paranormal activity in the form of both poltergeist phenomena and psychokinesis likewise show this need to use energy to have perceivable effects in the physical realm. It is because energy shares in both states of the physical and the mental that it can be the medium or go-between for their interaction. It is the force of pure potentiality. The reagent that allows their reciprocal agency upon each other. Whatever energy is in itself, it seems to be the incandescent weld that fuses our fractured reality together. The alchemical flame or Sanctus Ignis binding together body and mind as one soul.

“All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.”― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It's writing like this that made "Mr. Robot" such a great series...

"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of... food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac."---Mr. Robot

I awoke last night staring into the glare of the apt light shining thru my window. Suddenly to my utter surprise I was seeing a scrolling grid of little symbols! The grid kept scrolling revealing different symbols. As I tried to focus in on the symbols to see what they were, this vision faded away into the glare of the light. I was astonished. What had I just witnessed? Some sort of informational substrate within reality itself? The living code inside of light? There was another time I was staring into a candle flame and had a vision of the rocky surface of another planet. It was like a drone's view flying over its surface. That's what I felt I was seeing at least.

We are so used to seeing light as the reflection of things around us. As a mirror world already saturated with colors and shapes and patterns and shadows. But what if when we look into light itself, right when it is emitted from its source as pure empty radiance, we glimpse the source of the simulation itself? What if staring INTO the light exposes our minds to visions of the implicate order of reality itself. Seers of old have always used the technique of staring into flames to access knowledge of distant things. Candles as oracles of esoteric gnosis. Light itself then as the pristine effulgence of the Infinite Mind--the ceaseless downloading of Being itself into our illusory simulacrum of a world..

“How then can men describe the universe, except by their inscribing of themselves upon the fields of space? To describe the universe as it is they must become the universe, and then they will describe themselves; and to describe themselves they will be able to discover no better way than that in which the universe gives utterance to itself. It speaks perpetually the Language of the Gods, the Universal Tongue, for it is God for ever giving utterance unto Himself.”
― G.R.S. Mead, Gnosis of the Mind