Merleau-Ponty's careful analyses of perception revealed, contrary to our common ways of speaking, that the perceiving self is not a disembodied mind but rather a bodily subject entirely immersed in the world it perceives.
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Oral, indigenous peoples from around the world -- whether hunters or rudimentary horticulturalists -- commonly assert that the land itself is alive and aware, that the local animals, the plants, and the earthly elements around them have their own sensitivity and sentience.

Related: The War On Weeds. It's just like the war on drugs: a dumb idea that has done a lot of harm, and inevitably the weeds are going to win.

New subject, astronomy. 100,000 stars is a cool zoomable map of our local part of the galaxy, although if you're on Firefox you'll have to zoom with the side slider and not the mouse wheel.

Swarming Proxima Centauri: Coherent Picospacecraft Swarms Over Interstellar Distances. I continue to believe that there is no future for humans in space under the present paradigm, but we can still do some really cool stuff with space robots.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#e83eb430eebd83a91891e613937e8654d7c8957a 2024-05-15T15:10:05Z May 15. I continue to think the future will be more techno-utopian, more techno-dystopian, and more postapocalyptic, all at the same time. Here's an example, and also, following Monday's post, an example of the urge for aliveness coming through in unattractive ways. This happened Saturday night, less than a mile from my apartment, a street takeover in Seattle, in which cars did donuts in the middle of an intersection, while people got as close as they could without getting killed, while recording it on their phones.

I hate the song "Dancing in the Streets". It's so smarmy, as if dancing in the streets is some bland happy thing that no one would ever be against. This was actual dancing in the streets, and everyone in the comment thread is indignant that the streets are being used for something anti-utilitarian. "Anything that blocks the flow of traffic, protests included, should result in jail time."

The video was filmed from a pedestrian overpass, and the location was surely chosen with easy filming in mind -- this action was not just adventure, but spectacle. Expect more of this kind of thing, as we get deeper into these strange times.

I was reading a sociologist called Max Weber the other day. Back in the 1920s, he was predicting that we would all be taken over in a bureaucratic age. It could be left wing or right wing, but we would enter into what he called an iron cage of rationality. It would be a wonderful world where everything was managed, everything was rationally done. But what you would lose was enchantment. It would become a disenchanted age.

I think, following Morris Berman, that the original disenchanted age was in the 1700s. Romanticism brought some enchantment back, but then it was buried under industrialization. Curtis says, "I sometimes wonder whether conspiracy theories are an attempt to re-enchant the world in a distorted way." That's an important insight, that if something is being suppressed, it may only appear in distorted form, which conveniently makes it look repulsive to the dominant culture.

I'm still reading Moravagine, and if some future enlightened society is trying to understand the mindset behind the atrocities of the 20th century, that novel nails it. From the context of a suffocating mechanistic perfection, the narrator seeks to feel alive in a world of wild flux, and can't even imagine how to do that without horrific murder and destruction.

I have already said that the activity of consciousness is a congenital hallucination. Our origins being aqueous, our life is the perpetual rhythm of tepid waters. We have water in our stomachs and in our ears. We perceive the rhythm of the universe through the peritoneum, which is our cosmic tympanum, a collective sense of touch. Of our individual senses the first in rank is our hearing, which perceives the rhythm of our own particular and individual life. This is why all diseases begin with auditory troubles which are, like the manifestations of marine life, keys to the past and precursors of an inexhaustible process of becoming. It was, therefore, none of my business as a doctor to attempt to hinder such manifestations. I envisaged, rather, the possibility of multiplying these tonic accidents and achieving, through a prodigious subversion, the perfect accord of a new harmony. The future.

It's like all possible paths converging into this present thoughtless moment. It's an infinite informational orgasm that loops back on itself forever. There's no where to go because it's everywhere. There's no other time because it's all of time. There's nobody else there because it's everybody. It's not a personal experience but it's somehow also all you. It's before the universe, it's after the universe. In fact the existence of a universe becomes completely nonsensical. It will always be THAT thing, there's no room for physical existence whatsoever. There never was a universe. And you can never come down from this realization. It's Nirvana and it always has been Nirvana. But then in the same paradoxical way that you forgot this unforgettable thing when you were born. You forget it and are rebirthed. It's like the realization shape shifts into non realization. It's still THAT thing but it's completely unlike itself so you don't recognize it anymore. It's just normal reality as we know it. Something like that! xD