Thursday, October 28, 2010

About This Blog (under construction)

This blog is about experiencing ourselves as fully alive--and more importantly--fully human

Toward this end, we're about developing a new context to better envision the living of our lives together; a context that doesn't rely on our contraptions, but instead, relies on the very genius which  makes us human in the first place: our Mind and Heart. 

Contraption:  "Originally a western English dialectical word, probably made from the words, contrive and trap."  (Wiktionary.) 

Clocks rely on traps to change mechanical motion into readable time.  And since Newton, we've been contriving our life together in terms of  machines like clocks.  Which isn't all bad, especially when it replaces a world contrived by superstition and unseen spookiness. Yet despite our success in growing beyond a spooky world, how come our time is marked by malaise, frustration, anger, fear, and "ideology-ism"?  Could it be that the very source of our complaint flows from not feeling ourselves truly alive and truly human? And if this is the case, where is our source stopped? How does a life lived in contraption differ from a life lived from mind and heart?






In other words, we can live our lives via contraption, but 

5 comments:

  1. Hi Mike, Weren't the days and years of our lives always numbered? Before we counted and kept time, or lost it, there was, at minimum, the dead line of nightfall, if not of 3pm on Friday.

    I suppose mind can either transcend or dwell on whether we have kept or lost something. I can't think of something fast and momentarily bloggish to say about heart.

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  2. Peter! How great to hear from you! I always enjoy your insights and contributions.....

    I'm just doing a bit of remodeling here, and trying to make this into a real blog- so I'm learning how to make a separate "about this blog" page.

    Yeah- you're right about time, and it's cool how you made counting so natural in your example. When I develop the idea of contraption here, you'll see that the idea entails something other than clocks and counting, or at least I'm not equating clocks and counting with contraption.

    While you're here, I wonder what you think of how I talked about the color teal in my post before this. When I read the way Whitehead put the physics of reality in terms of "primary" and "secondary", it let me see more distinctly, something that I had less of a "technical" understanding of. Prior to reading this I would have just thought in terms of subjectivity.

    Your thinking in Quantum Field Theory seems pertinent here...no?

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  3. I think I wrote a comment on teal, but uncharacteristically decided I was writing nonsense before I posted it instead of after. Can't remember what I wrote.

    I think QFT isn't necessary for thinking about "Teal" in hard physics terms. In classical physics/biology terms, human eyes have, more-or-less, four different kinds of receptors, rods and three kinds of cones, which have different frequency responses. In classical physics terms, Teal corresponds to many different kinds of light, because the electromagnetic spectrum is infinite dimensional, whereas the human eye projects to essentially 3 dimensions (hence RGB TVs, instead of infinite-color TVs). Light that we see as the same color can have rather different spectra if we put the light through a prism.

    But to me the really pertinent thing about color is whatever emotional history a particular color has. If I notice that a woman has green eyes of a certain shade I find it hard not to stare at them shamelessly, because they're my mother's eyes (or so I say). The spectrum has little to say about that. Texture can be as emotionally resonant as color, as well, but color rarely comes close to the emotional resonance of smell.

    I suppose none of this is very "intellectual". I'm not sure it can even be called an "interpretative" response; it's a response, but it's perhaps most powerful when we at first have no idea why we respond powerfully to a worldly particular.

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  4. Peter, your descriptions brought me back to my days of art studies when I was developing my use of black and white photography: Film was capable of infinite shades of grey while paper was capable of ten. Ansel Adams pioneered the technique that I then learned to get the ten paper shades on a negative. Good memories...

    What I want to be careful of when I introduce a phrase like "interpretive interaction" is making it absolutely denotative. I only mean it to act as a connotation in order to draw out shades of insight. In those few sentences written by Whitehead, I saw reality in terms of a signal sent and a signal received. But the signal received was not identical in form to the signal sent. And though teal is not the literal form of its underlying signal, it seems to be what is meant by it. And yet tweak the "interpretive framework" and the signal might "mean" something else.

    And more astonishing, as you point out, is the experience of "responding powerfully to a worldly particular". An apt turn of phrase!

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  5. This sounds to me very much like "The Voice of Atlantis", where you find your true humanity, in all its glorious iterations. Truth, spirit, belief, creativity, engagement, respect, love, understanding, synergy, and a mutually shared passion for growing our human understanding of everything.
    This is truly the new way, be it particle or wave, practical or emotional, for Atlantis represents the penultimate achievement of the human Mind in search of the future in every dimension.

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