Dreaming as a function of the chaos in the self-organizing brain
David Kahn, Allan Combs, and Stanley Krippner

"This paper agues that REM state dream experiences owe both their structure and meaning to chaotic self-organizing properties of the brain during REM sleep. Several lines of evidence support the notion that the REM dreaming brain can be understood as a process system that exists near the edge of chaos, one highly sensitive to internal influences. This sensitivity is due, first, to the fact that the dreaming brain gates out external input, thus operating without the stabilizing influences of waking feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex in REM sleep is only minimally activated, thus the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, there is a reduction of neuromodulatory inhibition during REM sleep, allowing the brain to respond to minute internal stimulation. Finally, the REM sleeping brain is subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic PGO stimulation that may initiate creative patterns of dream activity. Taken in overview, this conception of dreaming offers a common meeting ground for brain-based studies of dreaming and psychological dream theory


Self-organizing dynamics are fundamental to processes at many levels of the organic as well as the physical world, an idea shaped by both empirical and theoretical research over the last thirty years (e.g., Kauffman, 1993; Laszlo, 1987; Maturana, Varela, & Uribe, 1974; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Recent work shows the same self-organization in the brain (e.g., Freeman, 1991; Kahn, & Hobson, 1993; Pribram, 1995; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), as well as in the process structure of human experience itself (e.g., Combs, 1996; Combs & Krippner, 1998). This paper discuses self-organizing dynamics in the brain with the intention
of understanding the REM dream experience alone and in relation to waking consciousness..."===http://www.academia.edu/4427865/Dreaming...zing_Brain

"The mysterious dark energy that's driving the universe's accelerated expansion may have its roots in the background "vacuum energy" that pervades all of the cosmos, a new study suggests.

"What we think is happening is a dynamic effect of the quantum vacuum, a parameter that we can calculate," co-author Joan Sola, of the University of Barcelona in Spain, said in a statement. "Nothing is more 'full' than the quantum vacuum since it is full of fluctuations that contribute fundamentally to the values that we observe and measure."

Though dark energy constitutes about 75 percent of the universe, scientists don't know exactly what it is. They've developed several different ideas, including the theory of "quintessence," which proposes a sort of anti-gravitating agent that repels rather than attracts. [The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic)]

Another concept posits the existence of a "phantom field" whose density continues to increase with time. This theory predicts an accelerating expansion so powerful that it will eventually break apart the bonds that hold atoms together, tearing the universe apart in a "Big Rip" about 20 billion years from now.

The quintessence and phantom field hypotheses are based partly on data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite— spacecraft that have studied the cosmic microwave background, the ancient light that began saturating the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

In the new study, Sola and lead author Spyros Basilakos of the Academy of Athens in Greece analyze the same spacecraft observations and find less support for either quintessence or the phantom field idea.

"Our theoretical study demonstrates that the equation of the state of dark energy can simulate a quintessence field, or even a phantom field, without being one in reality," Sola said. "Thus, when we see these effects in the observations from WMAP, Planck and other instruments, what we are seeing is a mirage."

Basilakos and Sola instead suggest that dark energy is a type of dynamic quantum vacuum energy — something different than Einstein's cosmological constant, which describes a static vacuum energy density and is another possible explanation of dark energy's nature.

Basilakos and Sola acknowledge there are some issues with the quantum vacuum energy theory but say it's a promising idea.

"However, quintessence and phantom fields are still more problematic; therefore the explanation based on the dynamic quantum vacuum could be the more simple and natural one," Sola said."===http://news.discovery.com/space/astronom...140331.htm

What can it mean for events to happen to a chair or a rock or a tree? Well, science certainly conceives of a universe of purely physical things that events happen to. The chair falls over, the rock heats up, and the tree dies. There is even a long history of events that happened to these nonconscious things that exists somehow. But in what sense?

The phenomenal being of a purely objective being like a chair or a rock or a tree is utter blankness. There is no passivity there to react or respond to its environment in any way. Think about being a chair. All blankness inside, with no possibility of being the subject of some happening. But the events must therefore be objective in themselves, existing somehow in time without the need for passive experients. This is the concept of objective time.

So to save itself from panexperientialism, in which all things are subjects as well as objects, the events of time are conceived by science to occur and persist on their own as objective facts in themselves. The whole history of what has happened in the universe must somehow still exist, perhaps stored in the interstices of space itself. Not just a recording of the past even, but the past as it actually and eternally IS.

But I still have trouble imagining a past of events still existing FOR a chair or a rock or a tree. Do we not even refer to these things as subjects by calling them "it" or "they"? "The rocks fell in the avalanche and THEY piled up at the bottom of the hill." Yes, we assume subjectivity in even nonconscious things. This is how events can happen to them and remain attached to them as histories. There can be no pure object to which events happen and to which the past persists or even to which a future of possibilities can be said to exist. There MUST be some rudimentary subjectivity there by which that object can be said to have undergone some process or passage of time. A purely objective entity would be totally isolated from the universe, incapable of interacting with anything around it. To be is to be a subject, capable of having events happen to you in time and space.

Anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote:

"We touched on the vital dualism of experience- the fact that all objects have both an inside and an outside- and we promised to talk about it at more length. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe, that has intrigued man since remotest times. It is the basis of the belief in souls and spirits. Man discovered it and elaborated it because of his own self-reflexivity, the real and apparent contradiction between the inside of his body - his thoughts and feelings, and the outside. But theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner, known as one of the fathers of psychophysics or experimental psychology, wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter - something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? If you take a slow motion film you can see this happening. We don't know what is going on inside it, but it must register some internal reaction to experience. At the bottom of the scale, the objects with least interiority would be rocks; probably they would have no more inner life than the idling of their atomic structures, but in these, as physicists have taught us, there is anything but repose.

These are hardly new or startling thoughts, but they help us to introduce the problem of man's distinctive interiority. When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature, of creation as having both an inside and an outside, is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors- physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private secret self. We are in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body..."=="The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/197

EXCERPT: Physicists are racing to complete a new model of quantum complex networks that tackles the physical nature of time and paradoxical features of emergence of classical reality from the quantum world. [...] About 15 years ago, physicist Albert-László Barabási, now at Northeastern University while studying the complexity of the World Wide Web, created a network model to illustrate how a relatively small number of websites receives the majority of browsing hits, while the majority of sites on the internet share the remaining amount of traffic. This and related realizations led to the development of a whole new branch within the field of network science and is based on the idea that social and biological networks follow non-random patterns. (See "Embracing Complexity.") But can aspects of quantum physics be expressed in terms of a quantum theory of complex networks? Theoretical physicist Jacob Biamonte is now grappling with that question. If successful, this new line of thinking could help explain how familiar everyday physics—and even time’s arrow—emerge from the fuzzy quantum realm...

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-21/reviews...k-fiction/

EXCERPT: Historical pastiche is one of our most important art forms, cutting across all media. We come to know it best through what we might call “decade-ism,” the artistic practice of parceling out history in ten-year spans. There is a menu of decades to choose from, and an audience with sophisticated tastes in recent period detail waiting to sample the latest clever, self-aware tweaking of classic ingredients. That TV serial set in the Sixties? It’s as rich as it looks, but the bitter aftertaste tells you the chef is sending up the clichés. Perhaps you’d prefer instead something from the Fifties (meaty, starchy) or, if you need something lighter, the Eighties (faintly metallic, a bit too sweet)? It doesn’t matter that these are simulacra. That knowingness only results in a finer appreciation for the precision and flair with which the results are prepared.

Not everything on the menu has been craved, though. The Seventies, that ragged decade, tends to be fodder for easy comedy. The details that attach to it — the polyester-and-feathered-hair-and-Moog-synthesizer aura — haven’t seemed ripe for mythic reinvention or idealizing treatment, more because of their banality than their unattractiveness. Images from the Seventies seem like meaningless citations without any larger significance, funny only because of their weird hollow particularity. Wasn’t the decade a dead end? Aren’t its details purely hermetic and self-regarding, artifacts from a time capsule no one would have intentionally preserved? Who would want to revisit that? Even Fredric Jameson, anatomist of our nostalgias, once commented that the specificity of the Seventies was its lack of specificity (ah, dialectical criticism! — one might almost think it an artifact of the very time it diagnoses). You can have a sincere or ironic taste for that trashy style, but you can’t pretend that anything world-historical gave that taste its alibi.

Everyone knows now how decades come back into fashion with motiveless regularity. That’s what pastiche does: it supplies styles for a market that craves novelty, even the refurbished kind. But the recent burst of fictional resurrections of the Seventies — the most acclaimed novels of recent years among them — doesn’t just represent the establishment of a new consumer market. The novelists who have lately returned to the Seventies seem to be making a stronger claim: that there is something uniquely vital to the decade, and in fact uniquely to be missed. In a bid to transcend our knowing cynicism, as well as the shabby reputation the Seventies have had, these stories hold up that moment for complicated admiration and longing. No small melancholy attends that task of historical recovery. Few people, Flaubert remarked to a friend after writing Salammbô, could guess how sad one had to be to want to resuscitate Carthage. How sad does one have to be to want to resuscitate the era of stagflation?...

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/t...g-to-terry

EXCERPT: [...] As Eagleton contends in Culture and the Death of God, the Almighty has proven more resilient than His celebrated detractors and would-be assassins. God “has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of”; indeed, atheism itself has proven to be “not as easy as it looks.” Ever since the Enlightenment, “surrogate forms of transcendence” have scrambled for the crown of the King of Kings—reason, science, literature, art, nationalism, but especially “culture”—yet none have been up to the job.

Eagleton demonstrates that all the replacements for God have proved abortive, and that secular intellectuals must concede the futility of all attempts to find proxies for divinity. It’s a simple and courageous contention, conveyed with Eagleton’s signature wit and learning and without a trace of sanctimony or schadenfreude. With brisk but never facile aplomb, he recounts an intellectual history of modernity as the search for a substitute for God and adumbrates, in his own running and spritely commentary, a political theology for the left.

Once upon a time—before modernity, to be precise—God was alive and robust, and religion united “theory and practice, elite and populace, spirit and senses.” With its capacious embrace of the soul and the body, religion—clearly epitomized, for Eagleton, by Roman Catholicism—has repeatedly exhibited the capacity to “link the most exalted truths to the daily existence of countless men and women.” More attuned to our most fundamental needs and longings than the modern cultural apparatus, it has been “the most tenacious and universal form of popular culture.”

[...] Shaken by the Reformation, the Catholic synthesis of religion and culture was finally demolished by the Enlightenment. Retailed to generations of undergraduates as a monolithically and militantly secular movement, the Enlightenment emerges from Eagleton’s account as a much more reformist affair, seeking not to écrasez l’infâme but to make religion more urbane and rational, something gentlemen could espouse without an unbecoming zeal. Purged of superstition and fanaticism, religion would defer to Reason, defined in terms of logical consistency and effectiveness in practical affairs. Most philosophes rejected the churches, not the Intelligent Designer of the universe; the Enlightenment aimed “at priestcraft rather than the Almighty.”

If they mocked the clergy, the philosophes respected the magistrates, for they feared the common people as credulous rubes who needed an enlightened ruling class. [...] If God and religion must pass—and likely fail—the tests of Enlightenment rationality, is reason compelling enough to assume the vacant throne of the Almighty? Relentlessly critical and iconoclastic, Enlightenment reason tends to pulverize symbols and deprive them of hegemonic power. It became evident toward the end of the eighteenth century that reason defined in the philosophes’ terms was too irreverent, cerebral, and rarefied to generate symbols capable of commanding popular deference. How would a secular society—defined in terms of religion’s relegation to private life, not its abolition—achieve the unity once afforded by a common faith?

The answer was—or appeared to be—“culture,” first advanced by German Idealists and Romantics as the heir to the mantle of God. [...] Under the talisman of Culture, philosophers and poets aspired to establish a new, post-Christian clerisy whose art and literature would leaven the people with new myths, icons, and epiphanies. As Walt Whitman would put it in Democratic Vistas, “the priest departs, the divine literatus comes.”

The divine literatus came, and saw, but did not conquer the realm once enchanted by God and his priestly minions. Culture fumbled the Almighty’s rod, failing both to close the chasm between elite and populace and to elaborate an authoritative metaphysics and morality. [...] Matthew Arnold’s model of culture, for example—a “gentrified form of Christianity,” as Eagleton scathingly describes it—proved all too transparently phony.

[...] Eagleton prefers Nietzsche’s sacrilege to Arnold’s bland and disingenuous unbelief. Nietzsche was the first infidel to realize the full implications of atheism: once God has been assassinated, there must be no successor, lest anyone or anything once again assume His inherently illegitimate authority. [...] Yet because Nietzsche himself abhorred nihilism, he ultimately failed as an atheist. Fashioning his own values out of nothing but his own ingenuity and will to power, the Übermensch, Eagleton observes, “has more than a smack of divinity about him”; his aristocratic hauteur and his indomitable volition recall the Almighty in all His lordly potency. Like culture, Nietzsche’s atheism turns out to be yet another ruse of “counterfeit theology.”

If even Nietzsche wasn’t the genuine article, has there ever been an authentic atheism? Eagleton identifies two candidates: postmodernism (both as a historical moment and as a mélange of critical theory) and Marxism. In the era of postmodernism, both the restless heart and the infinite abyss are dismissed as relics of humanism. The venerable questions of meaning and destiny are sloughed off as unreal and coercive “metanarrative”; revolutionary hope yields to the conquest of cool, the imperium of a hip and benevolent plutocracy. Meanwhile, thanks to mass communications, postmodernism joins the elite and the people, the aesthetic and the commonplace: culture is increasingly popular and even populist, while everyday life is thoroughly aestheticized by advertising and product design. “The only aura to linger on is that of the commodity or celebrity.”

This points to two glaring and puzzling absences from Eagleton’s roster of surrogates: the market and the commodity. Eagleton insists that capitalism is “fundamentally irreligious in a critical area (i.e., the economy), and totally alien to the category of the sacred.” Yet despite the apparent secularity of its pecuniary ethos, capitalism is hardly post-metaphysical: its metaphysics is money, the criterion of reality, meaning, and identity in a competitive commodity culture. The young Marx referred to “the divine power of money” and its status as “the god among commodities.” As the realm of the commodity widens, money not only purchases everything; it brings things into being from nothing, performing all manner of astonishing feats of moral and metaphysical alchemy. Contra Lennon and McCartney, money can buy you love: I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. However “secular” their origins in property relations, commodity fetishism and the idolatry of the market are capitalist forms of enchantment.

Eagleton rejects the idea of Marxism itself as a proxy for religion and implies that Marx, not Nietzsche, was really the first real atheist. For Marx, the humanity that finally replaces God is not utterly independent or self-fashioning; men and women will remain limited, material beings even in the realm of freedom. Thus, Eagleton asserts, Marx refrains from turning humanity into yet another surreptitious stand-in for God. Yet he also acknowledges some “clear affinities between religious thought and Marx’s vision of history,” especially the eschatological imagination: the arduous struggle for justice, the final conflict of oppressor and oppressed, the ultimate victory of the subaltern and the establishment of peace, freedom, and abundance. Marxists, Eagleton admonishes his comrades, should be grateful for this prophetic legacy.

[...] By the terms of Eagleton’s theology [...] avarice is more than a grubby moral failing, and capitalism is much worse than a system of exploitation and injustice. They stem from a lack of trust in the basic goodness of creation; as Eagleton writes, they deny God as “friend, lover, and fellow accused,” who created the world out of lavish affection and will suffer anything to reconcile us. Christianity, Eagleton reminds us, is a radical humanism, rooted in the faith that a superabundant love is the leaven and marrow of the universe.

[...] That faith will seem folly to secularists, however touching or even appealing they may find it; but if Eagleton’s story of unavailing surrogates is right, they might want, at the very least, to reconsider their indifference or animosity to theology. Secular liberals and radicals continue to speak in a moral and political idiom, originating in the Enlightenment, a lexicon of justice and compassion derived mainly from the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet those traditions insist that justice and compassion are anchored in the very metaphysics that a secular left dismisses as superstitious at best and ideological at worst.

If Eagleton’s theology is right, then today’s apostates must insist that love widens the range and magnitude of moral and political possibility; but they can do so only if they affirm a very different account of the nature of the cosmos. In the coming age of political and ecological crisis, we may have no other choice but to embrace the vulnerability that comes with the eschewal of possession and domination. We may discover, contrary to the fraudulent realists, that the meek will inherit the earth....

"Consumer Reports is calling the Tesla Model S the best car it has ever tested. The Model S, an all-electric plug-in car, earned a score of 99 out of a possible 100 in the magazine's tests.

The score would have been higher but for the fact that the all-electric car does need to stop and recharge during extremely long-distance drives.

"If it could recharge in any gas station in three minutes, this car would score about 110," said Jake Fisher, head of auto testing for Consumer Reports. Fisher called the car's performance in the magazine's performance tests "off the charts."

Depending on price, the Model S has driving range of between 208 and 265 miles. A full charge takes about six hours from an ordinary 240 volt outlet, according to Tesla.

The Model S has already won awards from car magazines like Motor Trend and Automobile, but Consumer Reports is widely regarded as being the most influential magazine among car shoppers. Consumer Reports, published by the non-profit group Consumer's Union, purchases all the cars it tests and does not accept paid ads.

The score of 99 means the Tesla (TSLA) Model S, a sedan that can seat as many as seven people, performed as well or better than any automobile the magazine has ever tested. The score is not unprecedented -- most recently, it was earned by the Lexus LS460 in 2009 -- but no car at any price has ever scored higher.

Prices for the Model S start at about $70,000, not including federal and state tax incentives for electric cars.

The Model S tied for the quietest vehicle the magazine has ever tested, was among the most energy-efficient and had excellent scores for acceleration, braking and ride quality."===http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/09/autos/te...er-reports

Ear muscles. Second eyelids. A cellulose-digesting organ. Spare grinding teeth. Humans carry alot of leftovers from their long trek from tree-dwelling herbivore to land-roving hunter. Next time you look in the mirror, contemplate this amazing record of evolutionary obsolescence.

http://io9.com/5829687/10-vestigial-trai...ow-you-had