Author Archives: Steve Mays

Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmore

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tenSusan Blackmore describes her fascinating book as “my own attempt to combine science and personal practice in the investigation of consciousness.”

“Learning to meditate means nothing more than learning to sit still and pay attention, staying relaxed and alert, without getting tangled up in trains of thoughts, emotions or inner conversations.”

“Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for and that once you arrive you will realise there was nowhere to go in the first płace; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.”

“Being in the present moment […] meant that I was not to think about the next moment, not to dwell on what I had just done, not to think about what I might have said instead, not to imagine a conversaton that I might have later, not to look forward to lunch, not to look forward to weekends, or holidays or… anything.”

“The present moment is always all right. All my troubles lay in the thoughts I was letting go of. […] The body seemed to keep on doing relevant and sensible things, apparently without all the agonising I had assumed was essential.”

“Idealism: The idea that there is no separate physical world, and everything in the universe is made up of thoughts, or ideas or consciousness.”

“Materialism: The idea that there is no separate mental world, and everything in the universe is mad of matter.”

“Actions exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. — Buddhist saying

“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”

“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”

“The words aren’t really necessary anymore. Rather, there just seems to be a questioning attitude, an openness of mind. Am I conscious now? Yes, I am, keep on that way, and now, and now, and gently now. […] Awareness does become more continuous with practice — it can just take a very long time.”

“I can grab a now. I can grasp out with my attention. This and this. They happened at once, didn’t they. It was a now, I am sure, even though it was gone by the time I can have that certanty. […] I cannot work out what it would mean for there to be no now. And yet there does not seem to be a now. […] When I sit quietly, doing nothing, there is no obvious choice of what is now. Stuff just happens.”

“I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. I am, it seems, the world I see.”

“There is not a separate me as well as the experience. It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street.”

“I see and hear and feel but name nothing. […] It is something like paying attention equally to everything.”

“How can I tell the clouds have moved? Because from one moment to the next I can remember what came before.”

“There are multiple brain processes going on, some of which take up more of the brain’s capacity than others, but there is no me who experiences them, and no time at which they become conscious.”

“The world we think we see or hear — is always a memory. and what is a memory?”

“Do past and future look different? […] They’re all just the same stuff — memory stuff; imagination stuff. Past and future can be held in mind as equivalent.”

“Mindfullness is being fully here in the present moment. But now I know that there is no such moment. So what is mindfullness?” [What I understand as ‘now’ is really just a memory of just-past moment]

“What was I conscious of a moment ago? I found whole streams of experience that seemed to have already been going on, for someone, before I noticed them.”

“There is no thinker other than the thoughts. […] I’ve always treated thoughts as a problem, or something to be dealt with. Now, instead of either fighting them or watching them, I am simply to be them.”

“The universe seems to be causlly closed. That is, everything that happens is caused by something else. Nothing happens by magical forces intervening from outside the web of causes and effects, for everything is interconnected with everything else. […] Yet I feel as though I can act freely. Indeed this magical view is probably how most people in most cultures have always thought about themselves, imagining a non-physical mental entity that has wishes and desires, can think and plan, and carry out those plans by acting on the world.”

“Decision are made because of countless interacting events, and afterwards a little voice inside says, ‘I did that’, ‘I decided to do that.’ […] I am not separate from the perceptions, thoughts and actions that make up my world. And if I am what seems to be the world, the we are in this together. Me and the world, world/me are doing all these actions that now just seem to act of their own accord.”

“The world had summed up the options, chose one, carried it out, and moved on. This action was a result of everything I had learned and done before. […] Could I just trust the world and this body to woirk all by itself without me doing anything?”

“I am not a continuous conscious being at all. What seems to be me just arises along with whatever is being experienced. […] Every time some experience comes along, the me is allowed to go, along with the ending of the experience, as though experience and experiencer arise and then snuff out together. […] There never was a continuous I. […] The ‘same me’ was never recreated. […] Will I be snuffed out like a candle? Yes, just as I have been a thousand, million times before.” #

“Consciousness is an illusion; an enticing and convincing illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies.”

“(My selves) arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. With every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it.”

There is nothing it is like to be me.
I am not a persisting conscious entity.
I do not consciously cause sthe actions of my body.
Consciousness is not a stream of experiences.
Seeing entails no vivid mental pictures or movie in the brain.
There is no unity of consciousness either in a given moment or through time.
Brain activity is neither conscious no unconscious.
There are no contents of consciousness.
There is no now.

“At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribudon made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was.”

Providence (short film about Bradley Manning leaks)

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The military (and many outside the military) consider Bradley Manning a traitor for leaking classified documents. Let’s imagine we’re in the latter days of World War II and a German soldier leaks thousands of documents related to concentration camps and the atrocities committed there. Is he a traitor? Probably. Did he do the right thing? Depends on who you ask? If the only difference between my hypothetical and the Manning case is whose ox was gored, that’s morally thin ice.

But the Manning leaks could have endangered American lives, goes one argument. No doubt, although I’ve not seen anything to suggest any lives have actaully been lost. Would it matter if some of the leaked documents revealed American actions were costing innocent lives?

I thought the Viet Nam war was a bad idea, primarilly because it could have gotten me killed. Turns out there were plenty of other reasons. Like the the mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians near the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, by United States Army soldiers. Most of the victims were women, children, infants, and elderly people. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies were later found to be mutilated and many women were allegedly raped prior to the killings.

Would it be treason to tell the world about My Lai?

“My country, right or wrong!” was a popular slogan for those supporting that war. That did work for me then and it doesn’t work for me now.

Southern Discomfort

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From article by George Packer in The New Yorker:

The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer.

Following the upheavals of the civil-rights years, the New South was born: the South of air-conditioned subdivisions, suburban office parks, and Walmart. Modernization was paved with federal dollars, in the form of highways, military bases, space centers, and tax breaks for oil drilling.

the Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and nascar, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C.

As its political power declines, the South might occupy a place like Scotland’s in the United Kingdom, as a cultural draw for the rest of the country, with a hint of the theme park.

What does mobile explosion mean for news?

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Some nuggets from new Pew Research Center report based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012 (including 4,638 mobile device owners)

  • Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet
  • Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier
  • 64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly
  • As many as 43% say the news they get on their tablets is adding to their overall news consumption. And almost a third, 31%, said they get news from new sources on their tablet
  • Fully 60% of tablet news users mainly use the browser to get news on their tablet, just 23% get news mostly through apps and 16% use both equally

700 Club

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“We had unwritten policies in place at The 700 Club, for example, that denied access to overweight people. We required people who wrote to us to report a “miracle” to include a photograph, so that we could filter people out based on how they looked. We wanted youngish, intelligent, attractive and articulate people to counter the view that Christians are all stupid Bible-thumpers. We very rarely, if ever, invited guests on the show that were overweight or fit the stereotypes discovered in the Gallup study. When crowd shots were taken in the studio, the camera operators were advised to zoom in on the most attractive people in the audience. None of this was written down, of course; it was just understood.”

Terry Heaton was a producer for the 700 Club in 1981

William Gibson Interview

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Excerpts from interview with William Gibson in the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER: Do you take notes?
GIBSON: I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldn’t have been very good.

“Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”

“My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.”

“We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the same, though broadcast television, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television.

“In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let’s go rob a Chinese corporation—cool!”

“If you’re visiting the future, you really want to have a few of the “shit, could they do that?” moments.”

“In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when multinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can never happen again. There’s deliberately no textual evidence that the United States exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industrial complex that may not have any government controlling it.”

“The Bridge is a fable about counterculture, the kind of counterculture that may no longer be possible. There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.”

“Social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates techno­logies into emergence—it actually seems to be quite a random thing.”

“It looks to me as though that prosthetic-memory project is going to be what we are about, as a species, because our prosthetic memory now actually stands a pretty good chance of surviving humanity. We could conceivably go extinct and our creations would live on. One day, in the sort of science-fiction novel I’m unlikely ever to write, intelligent aliens might encounter something descended from our creations. That something would introduce itself by saying, Hey, we wish our human ancestors could have been around to meet you guys because they were totally fascinated by this moment, but at least we’ve got this PowerPoint we’d like to show you about them. They don’t look anything like us, but that is where we came from, and they were actually made out of meat, as weird as that seems.”

Kevin Kelly: Found Quotes

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My thanks to Kevin Kelly for finding and sharing the following quotes:

“The core function of memory is to imagine the future. Memory is not designed to perfectly replay past events; it is to flexibly construct future scenarios. “– Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias, Time, June 6, 2011

“It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about).” — Stephen Bayley, The Gentle Art of Selling Yourself, March 4, 2007

“In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children. Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.” — Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950, p. 444.

“Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!” – Nathanial Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables. Chapter 17.

What did we do before computers?

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It’s a question I silently ask myself from time to time, so I thought I’d try to reconstruct how I (and others) did my job when I first came to Learfield in 1984. (This photo was taken in 1985 and I’m including it with this post as a memory aid. Annotated version.)

It might be easier to to start with what we didn’t have. I’m going to say no computers even though there was a Lisa II (?) running VisiCalc. No fax machine. No mobile phones.

The bulk of my job was dealing with affiliate radio stations and there was only three ways to do that:

1. Call them on the phone
2. Send them a letter in the mail
3. Get in the car and go see them in person

Each week we would send stations a “log” showing which commercials would be airing in each of the news or farm programs we sent them via satellite. One of the secretaries had drawn a table (6 columns for M-Sa and 13 rows for the number of shows) using a ruler. This was copied (we had a copier) each week and the blank table was rolled into an IMB Selectric typewriter and the names of the sponsors typed in.

This had to be completed by Wednesday of each week in order to get them mailed and to the stations in time for their “traffic” person to insert those commercials into THEIR log for the coming week. And delay and the system fell apart.

The photo above reminds me I used a manual typewriter often enough to keep it close. The computer in the photos is a Zenith and I was the only person in the company with his own personal computer.

We also had a big IBM Displaywriter that allowed us to do mail-merge documents. Amazing tech for the time.

Next to my phone is a Rolodex with all of my contacts, each typed on the big Royal but continuously updated with scratch-throughs and margin notes. If you got fired, you wanted to have a copy of your Rolodex.

If –god forbid– we needed to get information to every network affiliate “fast,” someone had to call each station, one at at time.

One of the tools I relied upon most was my big map. You can’t see them but there is a pin showing the location of each radio station on the network. It was a thrill to add a new pin and agony to remove one.

Long before Google Docs, there was the bulletin board for all the important lists. (this was not portable)

Years later we got our first fax machines, even though most of our stations didn’t have them. We knew they would. Someone stood at the machine and keyed in the name and phone number of every radio station (or advertiser). When you wanted to blast a fax out to a “list,” you fed the document in and it called each number, transmitted the facsimile; printed a “receipt” and then called the next number on the list. It was wonderful. We didn’t have to wait 3 or 4 days for the USPS.

And it got better. As we got more computers and modems, programs like WinFax could do the job of a fax machine but with far less effort and with much greater speed. We could keep a station’s fax machine humming all day and all night, burning up expensive rolls of thermal paper. The term “spam” was years in the future.

Now we post information to our websites and stations download at their leisure. We communicate with them on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. Email is instantaneous.

Will it get faster/better/easier still? Hard to imagine how but I assume it will