neelkantha

“In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” - Fred Dretske

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, [digital] man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors.”

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

“The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.”

• David Mitchell

On a philosophical level, [the phenomenon of chaos] struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? I always felt that the spontaneous emergence of self-organization ought to be part of physics.

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.

How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give.

If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair.

If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering.

Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.

“Don’t just do something. Sit there!” - Zen proverb

I received the gift of a lovely New Yorker essay from a relative, which blessed me with this opportunity to reflect on and clarify my feelings towards travelling.[1] I was at first reminded of my time spent online dating. “I love to travel” became a clear signal to me to just move on! But why? That essay put words to some of my feelings that contributed to developing that heuristic.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a husband and a happy home and children,
and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,
and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor,
and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America,
and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila
                                     and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions,
and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion,
and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.