• Capture the most captivating of materials, content, articles and more.
• Find the most fascinating facts, images, and information available.
• Integrate with self and website the most profound wisdom and stories I can.

Captivating materials and articles should read like poetry, delectable, fluent, smooth, accessible. Fascinating information should be transformative or enlightening. Images should be beautiful or awe-inspiring. Meta-integration-worthy wisdom must be capable or proven to have stood the passage of time and reach across cultures. All new content should be exemplary (from nature, humanity, science, art, literature) or illustrative (of important trends, patterns, cycles, etc.).

FYI, here are some of the places I generally like to look…

Quotes collections and websites – BrainyQuotes, Thinkexist, and Wisdom Quotes.

Social news aggregators and engines – Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Slashdot.

In books I read, the majority being sci-fi novels (and I’d argue that I generally pick very good ones). Sci-fi favorites from recent years: Foundation Trilogy/Series, Ender’s Game(Series), The Algebraist, Pushing Ice, House of Suns, Accelerando, and The Wind-Up Girl. Non-fiction favorites from recent years: What Technology Wants, The Next 100 Years, The Narcissism Epidemic, and The Evolving Self.

And of course I must mention TED.

I plan to pursue growth and thrival-fuel through these means. Please share your thoughts with me on other great sources of news and other fascinating or captivating information…

This is how I plan to…

differentiate & integrate,

explore & reflect,

discover & synthesize,

and widgetize & optimize ; )

A WARNING TO SELF AND READER ALIKE

Do not forget that all this hunting for paths through which to expand the mind, improve the intellect, evolve the self, (the same goes for entertaining yourself), that too much time spent on transistasis (change/evolution) equates to problems with homeostasis (the renewal, detox, and settling of physical and psychological selves).

As a rule, you must stand up and move your body around every hour if you are on the computer for more than two hours per day, and who isn’t these days, right? This is very important; you must train your body as you hone your mind — they go hand in hand. If you sit for too long reading or surfing the internet, your immune system and your cardiovascular system go into hibernation and blood vessels and muscles (as well as general well-being) atrophy. Watch out for the whole, holistic self. Meditation, whether sitting-emptying-the-mind style or walking-around-reflecting-on-things, is also to be considered essential, as is being with friends and family, which is very hard to do indeed when plugged in…

OPENING STATEMENTS

Technology needs a soul injection.
Who’s gonna pay the price?

Technology needs a soul installation.
Who’s gonna pay with their life?

If we’re gonna talk about planting chips into our brains,
then first we’d really better talk about who’s using who…
’cause to me it seems an awful lot like tech is using you.

QUERIES AND QUESTIONS

→ → → → → → → → ⇒ ⇒ ⇒ ⇒ ⇒ ⇒ ⇒ ⇒
Fast Forward and we can see our souls being diluted…
⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ⇐ ← ← ← ← ← ← ← ←
Which way are we really moving? Everything has been distorted.
↔ ↔ ↔ ↔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ⇔ ↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

SUMMATION

I’ve heard technology referred to as the 7th Kingdom of Life, read a book called “What Technology Wants”, and it got me thinking that we’d better ask ourselves what we want.

Because even though inventions beg and beg and beg to be invented, we’re the ones that decide in the end how it will be. And just like, say, with an Empire or a Nation, with any Kingdom we must always ask whether it’s got any soul, or even one bit or strand of moral fiber at all. So, does it? — Is this kingdom not lacking in soul?

And this we must continue to ask, because the (empty) Kingdom will, lacking any noble purpose, crumble from trying too quickly to build itself up to greater heights. And if it is truly a Kingdom of Life, then we probably don’t want it to fall at all…

I am told the German translates like this:

Die Auslese war hart.
Doch jetzt ist sie da.
Die stärkste Technik aller Zeiten.
Gnadenlos günstig.
Saturn.
Wir hassen teuer.

Selection was tough.
But now it’s here.
The most powerful tech of all time.
Mercilessly low-priced.
Saturn
We hate pricey. (We don’t do expensive.)

An epic story about meeting god on a train.
Written by Harry Stottle @ fullmoon.nu

Talking to God

I met god the other day.

I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?

Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise.

Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!

It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington. Got myself a nice window seat, no screaming brats or drunken hooligans within earshot. Not even a mobile phone in sight. Sat down, reading the paper and in he walks.

What did he look like?

Well not what you might have expected that’s for sure. He was about 30, wearing a pair of jeans and a “hobgoblin” tee shirt. Definitely casual. Looked like he could have been a social worker or perhaps a programmer like myself.

‘Anyone sitting here?’ he said.

‘Help yourself’ I replied.

Sits down, relaxes, I ignore and back to the correspondence on genetic foods entering the food chain…

Train pulls out and a few minutes later he speaks.

‘Can I ask you a question?’

Fighting to restrain my left eyebrow I replied ‘Yes’ in a tone which was intended to convey that I might not mind one question, and possibly a supplementary, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. ..

‘Why don’t you believe in god?’

The Bastard!

I love this kind of conversation and can rabbit on for hours about the nonsense of theist beliefs. But I have to be in the mood! It’s like when a jehova’s witness knocks on your door 20 minutes before you’re due to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Much as you’d really love to stay… You can’t even begin the fun. And I knew, if I gave my standard reply we’d still be arguing when we got to Cardiff. I just wasn’t in the mood. I needed to fend him off.

But then I thought ‘Odd! How is this perfect stranger so obviously confident – and correct – about my atheism?’ If I’d been driving my car, it wouldn’t have been such a mystery. I’ve got the Darwin fish on the back of mine – the antidote to that twee christian fish you see all over. So anyone spotting that and understanding it would have been in a position to guess my beliefs. But I was on a train and not even wearing my Darwin “Evolve” tshirt that day. And ‘The Independent’ isn’t a registered flag for card carrying atheists, so what, I wondered, had given the game away.

‘What makes you so certain that I don’t?’

‘Because’, he said, ‘ I am god – and you are not afraid of me’

You’ll have to take my word for it of course, but there are ways you can deliver a line like that – most of which would render the speaker a candidate for an institution, or at least prozac. Some of which could be construed as mildly amusing.

Conveying it as “indifferent fact” is a difficult task but that’s exactly how it came across. Nothing in his tone or attitude struck me as even mildly out of place with that statement. He said it because he believed it and his rationality did not appear to be drug induced or the result of a mental breakdown.

‘And why should I believe that?’

‘Well’ he said, ‘why don’t you ask me a few questions. Anything you like, and see if the answers satisfy your sceptical mind?’

This is going to be a short conversation after all, I thought.

‘Who am I?’

‘Stottle. Harry Stottle, born August 10 1947, Bristol, England. Father Paul, Mother Mary. Educated Duke of Yorks Royal Military School 1960 67, Sandhurst and Oxford, PhD in Exobiology, failed rock singer, full time trade union activist for 10 years, latterly self employed computer programmer, web author and aspiring philosopher. Married to Michelle, American citizen, two children by a previous marriage. You’re returning home after what seems to have been a successful meeting with an investor interested in your proposed product tracking anti-forgery software and protocol and you ate a full english breakfast at the hotel this morning except that, as usual, you asked them to hold the revolting english sausages and give you some extra bacon. ‘

He paused

‘You’re not convinced. Hmmm… what would it take to convince you?’

‘oh right! Your most secret password and its association’

A serious hacker might be able to obtain the password, but no one else and I mean

NO ONE

knows its association.

He did.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?”

Don’t Fear the Singularity

By Ran Prieur, 2005

“The Singularity” is the biggest idea in techno-utopianism. The word is derived from black hole science — it’s the point at the core where matter has contracted to zero volume and infinite density, beyond the laws of time and space, with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. They apply the word to the future to suggest that “progress” will take us to a place we can neither predict, nor understand, nor return from.

At least they have their metaphors right: that our recent direction of change is about contraction, not expansion, and leads inescapably to collapse and a new world. Their fatal pride is in thinking they’ll like it. Basically, they think computers are going to keep getting better faster, until they surpass biological life, and we’ll be able to “upload” our consciousness into immortal robots or virtual reality heaven. The engine of this fantasy is the “acceleration,” which supposedly includes and transcends biological evolution, and is built into reality itself, destined to go forward forever.

The weakest part of their mythology is the part they take for granted. If civilization is part of evolution, it’s not like birds getting wings — it’s like the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global catastrophe that prunes the biosphere down to the roots so it can try something different. Civilization has been a great evolutionary event for bacteria and rats, who are leaping forward through human attempts to kill them. But it hasn’t been good for humans. We can only guess how people lived in the stone age, but most primitive people observed in historical times enjoy greater health, happiness, political power, and ease of existence than all but the luckiest civilized people. Even medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern people, at a slower pace, and passed less of their money up the hierarchy. Even our medical system, everyone’s favorite example of beneficial “progress,” has been steadily increasing in cost, while base human health — the ability to live and thrive in the absence of a medical system — has been steadily declining.

Conversely, the strongest part of their mythology is where they focus all their attention, with careful and sophisticated arguments that there are no technical limits to miniaturization or the speed of information transfer. This is a bit like Easter Islanders saying there is no physical limit to how big they can make their statues — and since the statues keep getting bigger, they must be an extension of evolution, and will keep getting bigger forever. Meanwhile the last trees are being cut down…

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and of course Alan Watts, for this epic short film.

It is a film that touches on: Evolution, the nature of intelligence and the self, and the hoax of our modern success-centered lives.

It is a video meant to put us in our places, and also ask us to evaluate what we have built for ourselves.

Is this what I wanted to be doing?
Am I missing out?
What is my focus?

And hopefully we can, with honest answers, begin to shift our trajectory or maybe just dance a little more in life; have some fun, eat drink and be merry, that’s where I see the value in this film.

“The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.” — Freeman Dyson