I knew of Marshall McLuhan as the cultural icon of the 60s. Was familiar with a few of the more popular quotes. But like the subtitle says, I knew nothing of his work. And I probably wouldn’t have read this biography had it been written by anyone else. I’ve read several of Douglas Coupland’s novels and enjoy his style. Some insight into what we are experiencing now can be found in this slightly depressing story of a brilliant man, waaay ahead of his time. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Quotable
Life in the Meta City
I found the following in a brief Q&A with William Gibson (Scientific American):
“The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don’t live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it’s still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.”
I paid $6 for the PDF of Gibson’s article (September issue). A few nuggets:
“Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers.”
“Cities, to survive, must be capable of extended fugues of retrofitting.”
“Relative ruin, relative desertion, is a common stage of complex and necessary urban growth. Successful (which is to say, ongoing) cities are built up in a lacquering of countless layers: of lives, of choices encountered and made.”
If I wore a younger man’s clothes, I think a city would be the place for me.
“Google+ is a bank”
Dave Winer believes Google+ wants to “move money around the same way Amazon does. They need your real name because it’s a business.”
“Google-Plus is their integrated communication system. Over time, it’s going to be at the core of everything they do, from auctions, to paying for things with Android phones, to their groupon and yelp clones. They’re going everywhere, and this is the system that will tie it all together. So, at the outset, of course they need real identities. That Google-Plus account you’re playing with today is going to be your bank account next year.”
The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self by Julien Baggini
Reply
Excerpts from The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self by Julien Baggini
We all tend to think there’s a connection between the four-year-old child on our first day of school and us now. What makes us the same is we believe we’re the same. Sense of self over time is therefore the story that we tell ourselves that keeps us together. pg 39
The Ego Trick – The remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singlular thing underlying it. pg 123
There is an Ego Trick, but it is not that the self doesn’t exist, only that it is not what we generally assume it to be. pg 151
Consciousness of self emerges from a network of thousands or millions of conscious moments. pg 40
We are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner biographies coherent. pg 40
The self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction. pg 41
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world. pg 49
“I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so rather than rob you of your self, it robs you of all the exterior things that you pile on through life, all the baggage that you carry and the layers. What you’re left with at the end of the day with dementia is the core person, the soul, or whatever term you want to put on it. We’ve described it as an onion. If you peel an onion, from the brown skin outwards, you’ve got lots and lots of layers. When you get right to the centre of the onion you get to a little pearl in the middle and you can’t peel any more off it. It seems to me that is the real essense of the person.” – pg 54
We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts. pg 69
The self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. pg 83
18th century philosopher David Hume: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound, etc. I never catch myself, distinct from some such perception.”
(Baggini) Our minds are just one perception or thought after another, one piled on another. You, the person, is not separate from these thoughts, the thing having them. Rather you just are the collection of these thoughts.
(Hume again) “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” pg 119
“non-reductive physicalism” — The self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does. In other words, we are made up of nothing more than physical stuff, but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary. You cannot full describe what it is to be a person in the language of biology; but that does not mean a person has non-biological parts. pg 120-121
“The Buddha’s idea of self therefore is something we create. Your identity, your sense of being a person is formed through your actions, and that is only possible becasue there is not a fixed self. There is no unchanging essence or substance to which those attributes are then attached at all.” — Stephen Batchelor pg 148
“The existence of the self as an independent, eternal and atemporal unifying principle is an illusion.” — Thupten Jinpa pg 148
The self is not an illusion. What is illusory is an idea of self which sees it as an unchanging, immortal essence. pg 148
The self is an illusion, but not just an illusion. But still, I would prefer to do away with talk of illusion altogether. Talk of illusion suggests there is a way of perceiving onself free from that illusion. But there isn’t. pg 150
The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. pg 152
“We are responsible for our actions not because they are our products but because they are us, because we are what we do.” — Christine Korsgaard pg 168
“The machine we’ve made”
“I think we should prepare ourselves for all kinds of new religions based around the idea of a planetary soul. As in a single web of electronic neurons around the globe, connecting all sentient beings. The Noosphere will go from a hypothetical speculation by a Catholic priest to an outright competitor to the Catholic faith. We will see the rise of Noosnics, Globalists, Overminders, Bit Monks, Quantumarians, and a hundred other sects and cults that take seriously the idea of a glorified planetary spirit as a reflection of the divine.”
“The internet will become a religion in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions. But mostly because it will be the first platform for true Otherness that will appear on the planet. Not Other as in other variety of human, or other variety of animal, but Other as in an agent not like us, yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part. This conundrum will trigger so many spiritual and religious buttons that it will also shake the established religions.”
Kevin Kelly: Found Quotes
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.
Teflon mind
“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
Stories we told ourselves
“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
Moving from ownership to access
“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.
Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
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.