ORGANELLE

“Is the universe just a simulation?

No, but modern media »is an ideological bullshit factory.”

“A definition is at best a mnemonic of completed thought and has no interest except as a summary of past philosophic activity or as the starting point of a formal system. The issue is speculation…”

— Eva Brann, What Then, Is Time?

“The common people play definitions like records. Nothing means anything; anything suddenly means everything. It’s like kids playing with a kind of clay that reshapes their minds to the images they produce, except what they produce is largely an image of confusion rendered as completeness. Effectively this destroys the possibility of intelligence.”

— an anonymous informant

“Individuals who purchase cars are victims. All of us who suffer from the pollution are victims.”

— Dirty Money: Netflix

“Individuals experience great difficulty in a variety of domains related to cognition, reference, and reality-testing (against models). In some senses, small groups are better at determining, for example, if a theory is even possible, let alone verifiable or ‘true’. Groups beyond a given size are prone to influence-errors (i.e: problems in option weighting/evaluation based on membership influences) and groups that are too small are not diverse enough to formulate dependable evaluations.

There are exceptions, of course, but, in general, most of us struggle with evaluating ideas, explanations, theories or descriptions… partly because we are not actually individuals — our form of animal is intimately linked with both the environment — and the nature of our experience of and participation in groups.

This is another reason why I tend to question the idea of ‘an individual’ human being as a reference model that implies its completeness or reality, and also why I am extremely skeptical about ‘opinions’ held either by individuals or vast collectives. It seems to me that whatever the nature of our intelligence, it is easily deformed by the nature and purposes of our common relational contexts, agendas and activities.

I suspect that this is related to why many ‘prodigies’ were at once isolates and yet deeply participated in ‘expert subcultures’ such as those emerging within the domains of art, science, spirituality and physical development. Since they were unable to locate intelligent collectives, the internalized them, and acted as both individual and collective.”

— an anonymous informant

“Indeed, one past error has been to mistake a path for the path or, more commonly, to mistake a back road for a motorway. For example, based on their work on the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which is transmitted to humans via cats, researchers E. Fuller Torrey and Robert Yolken have argued that “the most important etiological agent [cause of schizophrenia] may turn out to be a contagious cat.” It will not.

Toxoplasma gondii — likely a cause of ‘schizophrenia’, unlikely the most important | (Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock/Courtesy The Conversation)

Evidence does suggest that exposure to Toxoplasma gondii when young can increase the odds of someone being diagnosed with schizophrenia. However, the size of this effect involves less than a twofold increase in the odds of someone being diagnosed with schizophrenia. This is, at best, comparable to other risk factors, and probably much lower.

For example, suffering childhood adversity, using cannabis, and having childhood viral infections of the central nervous system, all increase the odds of someone being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder (such as schizophrenia) by around two to threefold. More nuanced analyses reveal much higher numbers.

««Compared with non-cannabis users, the daily use of high-potency, skunk-like cannabis is associated with a fivefold increase in the odds of someone developing psychosis. Compared with someone who has not suffered trauma, those who have suffered five different types of trauma (including sexual and physical abuse) see their odds of developing psychosis increase more than fiftyfold.”

“Indeed, I have seen the dead return to life as if a miracle. I have also seen the living join the dead while yet drawing breath. Both are entirely natural, neither has meaning of itself. But passion and care have merit in all cases. So, too, kindness. Simplicity overcomes profundity because it is its origin.”

— an anonymous informant

“Inappropriate? What’s inappropriate is when play has been excluded from our work, lives, social contexts and relationships. That’s inappropriate. In extremis.”

— infraheard

“In/formation” (there’s a pun there)… implication… suspicions… and ‘maybe’… long ago became weaponized – particularly within the contexts of electronic media. Nearly none of us are trained to recognize or respond to these threats, so, for the most part, we tend to both succumb to and transmit them. We haven’t yet developed the forms of social and critical intelligence that would empower us to resist or transform the context we’re now participating in.

Thus we are essentially ‘drafted by choice’ into systems of weapons aimed at our people and future, and, thinking ourselves aware… fall prey to the “dead radio gambit”… attending and retransmitting linguistic and conceptual toxins that pretend to be antidotes… to poisons that never existed… empurposed to confuse and divide us into factions too ignorant to recognize actual threats or opportunities.

Until we learn, together, how to vet, recognize and respond intelligently… to contagions masquerading as information.

“In vetting transaction offers of any kind, we should pay attention to the purposive character of the offer, and what ‘lies behind’ it in terms of agendas — and the possible and actual consequences of our participation. In short? Who benefits and what those benefits cost… in terms of lives, intelligence… and possible futures for our world and minds.”

“In the garden today, the mind of insight arose briefly within me. And I saw, then, as it were, two wheels of flow. Two polarities of time and being. All of the past; all lives, dreaming and minds… and all of the future. And they were tilted, and flowing in polarized directions while, between them, my mind and spirit were forming and flowing away. And I realized then, that time is always eternal, and that it is this tension between these polarities that we feel as urgency, agency… and temporality. Yet, in thought, these feelings acquire deceptive clothing. For they are not experienced in their true natures except in relation — never in thought — even in this one.”

— an intelligence agent

“In the garden today, the mind of insight arose briefly within me. And I saw, then, as it were, that our bodies are vessels for something unimaginable. And that all of our technologies of containment, and, especially, of vehicles… »represent this intangible fact. Especially our ‘cars’. Once, they were alien to our experience, these machines. In our youth. We realized how strange and inhuman they were — but eventually, we became fascinated by them… and then used to their feel — the extension of our being into their form and ways of movement. A movement that is not travel, but dislocation… a disembodiment, masquerading as… as always… convenience. Long ago, travel was relation with the places traveled among… but our machines did away with this. They ‘protected’ us from intimacy with terrain and adventure. And delivered us to speed, transmission from one locale to another… with the intervening intervals largely if not completely blurred… erased… dislocated from our bodies and experience.”

— an intelligence agent