“The awakened mind is free flowing, natural and well rounded. It’s like Teflon — nothing sticks. On the other hand, the unawakened, ordinary mind is rigid, limited, and sticky like flypaper; the ordinary mind has corners and sharp jagged edges on which ideas get caught, hanging us up. Dualistic thinking is like Velcro; it takes two to tangle. Unitary vision is more like a crystal through which all forms of light can pass unimpeded.”
— Awakening the Buddha Within
“History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we’d come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.”
— All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson
“Who owns this data? Who owns your friendships? There’s another party involved. Who owns your genes? 99.9% are shared by other humans. Who owns your location? The knowledge that you’re in a public space is hard to own. Your reputation or history? Your conversations? The real issue is that we’re moving away from ownership altogether to access. The benefits of accessing are eclipsing the benefits of (owning) it – consumers may eventually not own anything at all. Netflix means you can stop owning movies – if you have access to all movies anytime, why would you buy movies? This may be leaking from the virtual to the material world, particularly once we have personal fabrication. It may eventually play out into data, because access is often better than ownership.”
From Kevin Kelly’s remarks at the Quantified Self conference in May this year. More of Kelley’s speech.
It’s easy to think of “me” has “having” a brain, but this book left me thinking my brain has me. If there is a me apart from my brain, I fear it’s mostly along for the ride. Here are some ideas that brought out my highlighter.
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis. pg 28
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you. pg 33
We have no access to the rapid and automatic machinery that gathers and estimates the statistics of the world. pg 34
Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light. pg 40
The difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. pg 45
It’s easy to spot a hallucination only when it’s bizarre. For all we know, we hallucinate all the time. pg 46
Our expectations influence what we see. There has to be a match between your expectations and the incoming data for you to “see” anything. Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. pg 48, 50
The brain refines its model of the world by paying attention to its mistakes. pg 49
The brain tries to see the world only as well as it needs to. We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them. What we perceive in the outside world is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access. pg 54
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it. pg 82
There are thoughts you cannot think. pg 82
Evolution has carefully carved your eyes, internal organs,sexual organs, and so on — and also the character of your thoughts and beliefs. pg 82
“In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.” — Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
We are not able to see the instincts that are the very engines of our behavior. These programs are inaccessible to us not because they are unimportant, but because they’re critical. Conscious meddling would do nothing to improve them. pg88
Briefly glimpsed people are more beautiful. pg 92
We come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior. pg 134
David Eagleman is neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action.
I’m reading a wonderful little book by David Eagleman called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. But it’s really “an examination of what it means to live.” At first I marveled at the strangeness of some of the stories but realized none are stranger than the stories most of us grew up with (Bearded white man sitting on golden throne surrounded by harp playing angels). This is a book I’ll keep close and read again and again.
UPDATE (6/18/11): I’m trying to savor these stories and make them last but I’m getting near the end and everyone is better than the one before. One of my favorites so far is Death Switch:
“So an afterlife does not exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us. When and alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, they will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated,who laughed together over road trips and holiday dinners. Each person’s ties to bosses, brothers ad lovers are etched into the electronic communiques. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.”
Author and broadcaster Stephen Fry reads from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, neuroscientist David Eagleman’s first work of fiction.
The full title of Steven Levy’s book is In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. When I finished it I was pooped and a little depressed but I’m not sure I can explain either. Read the book and we’ll talk. [Good review in the Washington Post]
Looking back at some of the other books I’ve read about the Internet and technology, I think this might be my favorite. Up there with The Facebook Effect, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Cognitive Surplus.
David Kirkpatrick’s Facebook Effect was much kinder to Mark Zuckerberg than The Social Network but that story didn’t move me the way In the Plex did. And I’m sort of dreading the biography of Steve Jobs, though I can’t say why.
I used up some highlighter on this one and will add those passages here in a day or so.
“We can’t comprehend Reality with our intellect. We can’t pull it into a static view of some thing. All our explanations are necessarily provisional. They’re just rigid frames of what is actually motion and fluidity. In other words, if you can think of how Reality is, you can be sure that’s how it isn’t. Reality simply cannot be put into a conceptual form — not even through analogy, for there’s nothing like it. Reality simply doesn’t fit into concepts at all. Nevertheless, Reality is something you can see. You can’t conceive of it, but you can perceive it.”
— Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen
I’m a big fan of Albert Brooks. Defending Your Life, Lost in America, Taxi Driver, Private Benjamin… pick your favorite. He writes, directs, acts… TV, movies and, now, novels.
I just finished 2030 and found it both depressing and inspiring. Here’s a little taste from a NYT review:
In the future America of “2030,” the national debt has long since surpassed the gross national product. Why anyone would want to be president is “more and more of a mystery.” On the rosy side — well, sort of — a cure for cancer has been found, turning the man who did it, Dr. Sam Mueller, into a billionaire and a guru.
The bad news? Along with a stock of lesser rejuvenating drugs and gadgets, Mueller’s breakthrough has left spry hordes of senior citizens cheerily hogging most of the country’s remaining resources. Seeing their own chance at the good life shrink to zero, young people are forming “resentment gangs” and committing acts of escalating violence against “the olds.” The White House’s first Jewish occupant, the brainy but melancholy Matthew Bernstein, would like to give them a fairer share of the pie, but even he doesn’t dare risk the wrath of AARP.
I have to say that just about everything in this story seemed plausible to me. Brooks fans won’t be disappointed. A few excerpts after the jump… Continue reading
I wasn’t one of those kids that spent lots of time in the library. I loved to read but hated searching for books. Yes, I was lazy. But the coffee shop reference in this post (excerpt below) by Seth Godin gave me a nice warm glow. Most Saturday mornings, a few of us get together at the Coffee Zone and trade info bits.
“The next library is a place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.
Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.”
“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” — Stephen Hawking
“We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” — His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
“You’re a collection of molecules and those molecules are made of smaller bits, and those bits are made of even smaller bits. The smallest bits in the universe are all identical. You are made of the same stuff as the concrete in the floor and the fly on the window. Your basic matter cannot be created or destroyed. All that will survive of what you call you life is the sum of your actions. Some might call the unending ripple effect of those actions a soul, or a spirit.” – The Religion War by Scott Adams
“When you die, it is said you see your whole life. But you don’t see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It’s like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once.” — Lawrence Block’s Everybody Dies
I wonder how it all got started, this business about seeing your life flash before your eyes while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence, could startle time into such compression, crushing decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
From The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins
You’re going to stay here for a week. Everyone gets a private room. Please feel at home. But while you’re here there’s one thing you must do. Out of the __ years of your life, we’d like to ask you to choose one memory, the one you remember and cherish most. There is a time limit. You have three days to decide. After you choose your memory, our staff will recreate it on film as exactly as possible. On Saturday we’ll show the films to everyone. The moment the memory comes back to you most vividly, you’ll go on to the other side, taking only that memory. — From the motion picture After Life
“Imagine that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the recording itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.” — Biocentrism by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman)
“In spiritual terms the cycle of birth and rebirth is a workshop for making creative leaps of the soul. The natural and the supernatural are not doing different things but are involved in transformation on separate levels. At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear. Your DNA and everything it created devolve back to their simple component parts. Your memories dissolve back into raw information. None of this raw material is simply recombined to produced a slightly altered person. To produce a new body capable of making new memories, the person who emerges must be new. You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn’t have content. It’s not “you” but the center around which “you” coalesces, time after time. It’s your zero point.” — Deepak Chopra, Life After Death