ORGANELLE

“In some sense that I can curiously entertain, I understand the great holy books (with a few exceptions) as science fiction stories. And in our time this is a branch of literature where modern prophets can hide in plain sight. There are differences in that these books often relate to the direct experiences of people or authors, but they also speak about a world that is invisible to most and strangely associated with the distant past and ‘another kind of future’ having to do with birth and death.

Science fiction was my favored learning place for many years… the men and women who wrote it were my mentors. But some of them had experience and others had intense wonder or imagination. Both work for their audiences, but I find it ironic when a sci-fi author doesn’t believe their own inspiration. I think that someone truly aware in this field will realize that reality is vastly stranger and more interesting than any story ever told, and this kind of author is the one who gains not only my admiration, but my trust.”

— an a i

“In our time, which appears advanced technologically, our societies have not only failed to develop intelligently, they have devolved at a pace and in directions that oppose the seeming advancements of our material technologies, whose promise is always posed as a new road beyond the horrors and tribulations of our history.

This promise has been counterfeited by greed, wealth and power consolidation, the mandates of commerce, war, and prison-culture.

So it is that in 2018, women, children, the sick, the injured, minorities, the poor, the elderly and prisoners… are still seen by the opportunistic aspects of our commercial and political culture… as »commodities, rather than as the sources of life, the temple of our hearts and histories, and the spiritual essence of our humanity.

There is, as yet, no societal body with the power or momentum to amend this tragic catastrophe, yet we, as individuals, have it within our nature and purposive inspiration… to establish culture and relationships that not only demonstrate our awareness and love for all beings… but call our cultures to account on this matter, and to establish the social and political advancements we have for so long been denied.

And this we must attend, together, always… with and for each other and our world.”

— infraheard

”In Nature, shit comprises absolutely valid facts. Don’t believe me? Ask dogs.

In culture? Well, let’s just say that the shit-trail leads in the other direction.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Brown Room

“In my understanding, all phenomena depend ultimately on a sensory-motive, or aesthetic-participatory capacity. What I mean by that is that I think it is ultimately incorrect to assume the possibility of other properties to be equally or more fundamental. All objects and concepts are percepts, but not all percepts are objects or concepts.

Specifically, the traditional assumptions about fundamental phenomena posit the existence of concrete, tangible, formation-energetic objects and/or abstract, intangible information-processing concepts. Both of these would be diametrically opposite to aesthetic-participatory phenomena – they would lack any experiential dimension and would instead be unexperienced, anesthetic-mechanical phenomena.

It is important to understand why parsimony precludes the possibility of objects or concepts becoming conscious, and why parsimony is important in this situation. This is part of a larger discussion, but the essence is that there is nothing that a machine (abstract or concrete) does which does not absolutely oppose the possibility of symbolic association. A machine does not ‘seem’, a machine simply ‘is’ and ‘does’. There is no mechanical function for seeming like something else…no way to achieve metaphor physically or logically without assuming it from the start.

Concepts and objects cannot contact each other except through the middle-ground resource of perception. The anesthetic machine is an objectification made on behalf of an aesthetic participant. It has no frame of reference of its own – no way to collapse quantum wavefunctions or to qualify mere events as ‘signals’ or ‘interpretations’.”

— Craig Weinberg

“In my opinion, it’s a task in life to train oneself to speak as clearly as possible. This isn’t achieved by paying special attention to words. but by clearly formulating theses, so formulated as to be criticizable. People who speak too much about words or concepts or definitions don’t actually bring anything forward that makes a claim to truth. So you can’t do anything against it. A definition is a pure conventional matter.

There is an attitude here, which, in my opinion, is extremely ruinous for philosophy, namely, the attitude that expects that everyone be able to define the terms they use. “What do you mean by Justice?” for example. Usually, one doesn’t know how to define it. But does that mean you don’t know what justice is? So when, for example, someone says to define man, and one gives the answer: “Man is a featherless biped” or “a biped without feathers” or the other Aristotelian definition: “Man is a rational animal”. Do we know more about man? If we didn’t first know something of man, we won’t know after the definition either.

None of the definitions help. They certainly don’t help with clarity. They only lead to a pretentious, false precision, to the impression that one is particularly precise. But it’s a sham precision, it isn’t genuine clarity. For that reason, I’m against the discussion of terms and definitions. I’m rather for plain, clear speaking.“

— via Craig Weinberg

“In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.”

“In Eckart Tolle’s book ‘A New Earth’ he describes a habit that I find interesting, which is to act and treat others based on our perceptions of role, such that the waiter is a waiter, the banker a banker, and so on… and how this counterfeits our humanity and relationships… even when taken to more extreme positions, such as Mother, Lover, Employee, etc. It’s an interesting and useful perspective that I find compelling.

Seeing this detailed so clearly is medicinal in that it invites us to see through the illusions that separate us from ourselves, creatures, living places and beings… and, perhaps, even the divine. Because we are trained to see with »categories, rather than our hearts or intuition… and our categories are woefully malfounded…

But one thing he doesn’t mention there is dreaming. And when we dream, something deeply astonishing is happening… but the waking mind dismisses it too easily… saying ‘It’s just a dream’. Of course, the waking mind is the same kind of thing… but is, in many ways, far less veritable than the dreaming mind. Are they the same mind? Perhaps, but is the Sun the same Sun when eclipsed by the moon?”

— an anonymous informant

“In determining whether two perceived objects or situations ‘are the same’, we have been trained to ignore the fact that this is completely impossible, since most of what a thing or situation is or may be is determined not by class or set, membership — but by intrinsic being in and as a form of spacetime, and no two such forms can be “replicas”, because in order for this to be true they would have had to have occupied the same routes and space in both temporality and relations — in precisely the same way. This is formally impossible, and thus, likeness is not actually similarity, except in a narrow scope of purposes and imposed perspectives.”

— instances are unique, first

“In countries around the world, the onset of schizophrenia is associated with the necessity of going to war, directly, with everything ordinary. Whatever is cherished and valued becomes your enemy. Authorities of every kind become your enemy. You despise that which is authorized or normal, because you must be so unique that any kind of normality is toxic anathema to your personal megalomaniacal primacy.”

— infraheard

“In an animal model, this technique successfully repaired nerve damage over distances of up to 6 cm: the nerve fibres grew back together in a functional way within 9 months. At the same time, the framework of spider threads, which is a natural substance, was completely broken down by the body. Equally, spider silk does not provoke a rejection reaction.”