Culture Is Our Business
Check out some of these topics and links to more clues. Immortality, Neurologic, Space Migration emerged in the early 1970's and morphed into Life Extension ( life_X) , intelligence increase, and local Space Stations. We still need back-up mini biospheres of the biosphere! Gaia! Gaea! Later these morphed into
SMI2LE. Early Bible stories of communicating with God, traveling UP to Heaven, living for 500 years! So this is the latest update!
| 9:00 AM | Session 3A: accumulation of damaged molecules
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Freeman Dyson says
When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.
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Original Post by David Pescovitz, June 23, 2008 11:03 AM
George Lakoff is well known as a cognitive linguist who looks at how language affects culture, specifically how much the metaphors we use impact the way we think. During the last presidential election, he grabbed a lot of attention with his book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, about how Republicans are masters at "framing" debates to their benefit. His new book, The Political Mind, explores the same territory but in the context of cognitive science. The New York Times reviewed The Political Mind yesterday and it sounds fascinating. From the NYT:
Lakoff blames "neoliberals" and their "Old Enlightenment" mentality for the Democratic Party's weakness. They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters' interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.
This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a "New Enlightenment," progressives will exploit these discoveries. They'll present frames instead of raw facts. They'll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It's not the platform that needs to be changed. It's the voters.
The basis of Lakoff's theory is simple: the mind is the brain. Any connection that forms between your thoughts also forms between your neurons. As you internalize a metaphor, a circuit in your brain "physically constitutes the metaphor." This parallel development continues as mental complexity increases. "Narratives are brain structures," he proposes.
Link to NYT review, Link to buy The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain
Previously on BoingBoing:
"¢ George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives Link
"¢ George Lakoff on why the conservatives seem to be winning Link
from
Along with a host of other literary, artistic and scientific luminaries of the period, novelist Anais Nin was one of the new wonder- drug's early guinea-pigs. At the dawn of the psychedelic sixties, she saw herself as part of a larger social organism that was liquefying; opening like a sea-anenemone to countless imaginary worlds of the imagination made flesh. Like the generation of psychonauts that followed in the wake of the bomb, she experienced an epiphany that, for a few brief and glorious hours, exploded her right out of history. The term 'psychedelic' was coined to describe this experience of the ineffable. It means "mind- manifesting" and represents the transposition of inner and outer psychological and experiential realities; the detonation of the 'self'.
very cool online database
http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/index.html
from Skeptics Society
In this controversial lecture based on his new book, the world-renowned complexity theorist Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues that people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality,
from BioComplexity site
An essay outlining Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred thesis is contained in a new series of 13 essays by distinguished thinkers on the topic "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" currently published on the John Templeton Foundation website at: http://templeton.org/belief/. The preface and first chapter of the book are currently published as an essay titled "Breaking the Galilean Spell" on Edge.org at:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html
An essay by Kauffman titled "Reinventing the Sacred" is also scheduled to be published in the May 10 issue of New Scientist magazine.
Listen to an interview from IT Conversations – Stuart Kauffman 060608
From BoingBoing.net
"My new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, is just out (May 10). The idea for Arts, Inc. hit me when I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, during Bill Clinton's administration. I became convinced that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright extension, and Clear-Channel-style media consolidation were undermining our basic rights to an arts system that really serves the public."
Bill Ivey was the seventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton and served from 1998 to 2001.
Amazing! Walter Ong surfaces! One of McLuhan's major Mentors!
Communication, Technology and the Sacred
Santa Clara, California
June 19-22, 2008
Convention Coordinators:
If, as Walter Ong suggests, technologies of communication and information affect noetic economies (structures of thought); and if noetic economies have to do with what it means to be human; it seems important to consider how the spoken and the mediated word and image contribute to the human soul – or to the sacred. How have technologies and the larger media world altered our experiences of the sacred?