There and Back Again:

Aeon — Is the Universe a Conscious Mind?

“We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends, we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.”

Love this metaphor. The only way we can trust what come down our individual pipelines are where we find agreement with others regarding ‘externals’.

Add the reflection that we, alone, can create, imagine and communicate entirely fictional and imaginal ideas and worlds and it all just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Add drugs to that and it’s pretty much DizzyWorld…it’s a nice holiday, and can instruct us about our imaginal worlds and set some of us on courses of conscious navigation and inner journeys…and, at times, give us chrystaline moments of personal clarity, but, as Howard says, it rarely results in any “doing”.

The flip side of all of this is that we also can interact with our World, we make and shape tools, machines, and now AI that effect not only the outside world around us, but, now, our inner worlds of perception and senses of reality. So there is a feedback loop and boomerang effect, both at the same time.

We shape our tools and our tools shape us. One of the big questions going forward is “to what extent are we being shaped by A.I. and AR/MR/VR ? To what extent are we evolving, and are we now co-evolving with our machines? Co-intelligence is now co-evolving on two different planes (at least) — human and A.I. Does Post-Human represent a proper integration of all this planetary evolution; is it the natural progression of Gaia? Or can we live in harmony as separate entities: Human, A.I.and robots, and post humans? Only Science Fiction writers are speculating about all this.

So, glory to all hard scientists who want to dive in this water. And kudos to all creatives and liberal artists who do so as well.
Plenty of room for Peter Max and friends to illustrate the forthcoming digital media. Pass the drugs, light up the bong. Please.

I still don’t want to work on Maggie’s Farm No More!!

May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

A major force passed on today. John Perry Barlow (1947–2018), most known for his Cyberspace Manifesto, has sailed on to Numenor. His passing was peaceful.

“It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership,” Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s executive director, said in a statementWednesday. “He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance.”

I was going to write about something else today but it would not be respectful. This man, this soul, this vital ball of energy has so shaped this medium that we should all pause and reflect upon exactly who we are,where we are, how we got here and where we wish to go. We are so far away from his vision.

Song for John

https://tcnewcomb.com/2018/02/07/sail-on-sailor-john-perry-barlow/

I HAVE FRIENDS WHO HAVE BEEN, AND ARE, IN REHAB and the first thing I’ve noticed is that once they have broken away from whatever addictive behaviors were stunting their growth they pretty much are on the same path as me. Really, we are all in rehab. Life is broken, we are broken, put a bandaid on the planet!

It has become chic these days to be in rehab; it’s almost become a badge of honor to admit it openly. That is partly because of the extremely high rate of opiate addiction in this country — both prescribed and illegal. It’s a growth industry. And it’s self-perpetuating. 85% of all people in rehab will NEVER be cured. They will be back for rehab 2,3,4… if they have the insurance or state and federal aid for it. It’s just camp and a little R&R until they get back on the street and do it all over again. The death rates are astounding.

And it is important to distinguish between recovery and relapse. There is a huge difference between “crash and burn” and “trip, stumble and fall”. Rehab is the emergency room, relapse is the out-patient clinic and urgent care, and recovery is the way it really is; for all of us! In a spiritual sense of the words, we are all recovering human beings, saved by grace, constantly relapsing. So, while the paths may be different, we are all on the same journey. (As Hank William’s sang, “I’ll never get out of this world alive”; I’m just trying to get out of this place intact.)

Forget about the 1% we hear so much about. Life is all about that miraculous 15% of us — the rehabbers, relapsers, relics and ressurrected -where life once again becomes a journey of endless possibilities and personal development. That’s where we team up, the rest of us 15 per centers, because that’s about the percentage of people actually living an integrated life. We can’t make this journey all alone. It takes two to tango and experience the dance we call life.

Well, I’ve been dancing with digital for more than 45 years and it’s time for me to detox. I have written before about the importance of taking digital sabbaths.

It’s summer and the time when folks take a vacation. This summer I am taking a month long digital vacation. I’m not going cold turkey, but I am disconnecting from nearly all of the digital distractions in my life and taking time to disengage from this fractal reality that is now, unavoidably, my life. I don’t want my MTV for a while. I need to find my head again, regain some bandwidth here on the ground, hit the bike trails, hang out at the coffee shops, visit friends and family. Basically I need to reconnect with myself.

This digital angst is unsettling. I’m out of balance and seem to have lost my way in the real world, having spent too much time in the virtual worlds that are so captivating and demanding of my time and attention. So, I’m pulling my head out of the screens and reconnecting with the universe.

I realize I have to do a better job of being me, of finding a wholesome integration of all these new technologies. I’ve been like a kid in the candy shop, sampling all the new flavors of tech for far too many years. I feel like Edmund and his Turkish Delight in The Chronicles of Narnia. There’s no digital anything I won’t sample. And, basically, it’s all good. But, like anything, too much of it will make you ill. And I am increasingly aware of my ‘ill-ness’ and ‘dis-ease’, as opposed to my normal Pooh and Tigger selves.

So I’m taking a break from cyberspace and hopefully reintegrating my headspace and soulspace, so that I can more successfully navigate this mediated reality that’s become my life.

I’ll be back!! Enjoy your holidays as well.

Just discovered Lucas Rizzotto, yikes what a mind…follow this kid…
The Next 5 years

1) Hands will be standard VR/MR Contollers
2) Eye Tracking Will Be Central to th Medium
3) Physical Objects Will Be a Key Part of VR/MR Experiences and Brands
4) A.I. Will Bring Conversational UI into VR/MR
5) Untethered MR Devices Will Slim Down & Finally Reach the Consumer Market

Virtual Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Mixed Reality … If you are here, there’s a chance you’ve heard those terms and many more to describe differences in immersive media. This is mostly a symptom of a new medium trying to figure itself out and the underlying struggle to understand the characteristics that truly set it apart.
But upon close inspection of today’s landscape and what’s coming next, one could say that the technology and design approaches in VR/MR are bound to become increasingly similar until the point they become a singular medium — and you can see symptoms of this shift today.

New VR devices like Intel’s Project Alloy employ some MR features that allow you to see your immediate surroundings with smart use of sensors and cameras. Microsoft’s new VR/MR hybrids allow you to seamlessly switch between both modes with the press of a button, all in the same device. And while the HoloLens has a limited Field of View right now, the HoloTour VR-like demo is living proof that MR can fully block out the world around you if it so desires. VR devices that can do MR and MR devices that can do VR — the collision course has never been more imminent.
VR+MR already share the same development tools, and soon the design and interaction language of both will be pretty much identical (specially as hand tracking becomes the norm). Future immersive experiences won’t live in separate mediums or under distinct labels, but rather on a spectrum — experiences with few virtual elements imposed on your real world fall to the left, and experiences that replace most (or all) of your environment fall to the right.

Also discovered a musing by C.S. Lewis Meditations in the Toolshed:
In other words, you can step outside one
experience only by stepping inside another.
Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading,
we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist
may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician’s
thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the
grey matter. But then what about the cerebral
physiologist’s own thought at that very moment?
A second physiologist, looking at it, could
pronounce it also to be only tiny physical
movements in the first physiologist’s skull. Where
is the rot to end?
The answer is that we must never allow the rot
to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from
the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its
own nature, intrinsically truer or better than
looking along. One must look both along and at
everything. In particular cases we shall find reason
for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior.
Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be
truer than the outside vision which sees only
movements of the grey matter; for if the outside
vision were the correct one all thought (including
this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is
self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that
no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside
vision of the savage’s dance to Nyonga may be
found deceptive because we find reason to believe
that crops and babies are not really affected by it.
In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But
we must start with no prejudice for or against
either kind of looking.

Which leads me to Husserl’s Epoche

The term was popularized in philosophy by Edmund Husserl. Husserl elaborates the notion of ‘phenomenological epoché’ or ‘bracketing’ in Ideas I. Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, one is thought to be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.[2]

The Phenomenological Reduction

Which of course, naturally leads me to an interview with Bob Dylan (atrocious btw)

What can I say, this is how I roll :)