Stray Thoughts

“It was possible for Paine, in the 18th century, to believe that culture was served merely by the absence of a church, a state, a social order such as those under which Europe labored. That was the error of his school, for the absence of these harmful or obsolete institutions left a vacancy in society, and that vacancy was filled by work, or more accurately speaking, by busy work, which fatigued the body and diverted the mind from the things which should have enriched it. Republican politics aided this externalism. People sought to live by politics alone; the National State became their religion. The flag…supplanted the cross, and the Fathers of the Constitution the Fathers of the Church.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, 14-15

In this election year, a reminder.

“Democracy is not so much a new form of political life as a dissolution and disorganization of the old forms. It is simply a resolution of government into the hands of the people, a taking down of that which has before it existed, and a recommitment of it to its original source, but it is by no means the substitution of anything else in its place.”
Henry James, 1852, quoted in Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, p. 10

“And of course the inner processes are very patient. The puzzle of humanness is apparently not meant to be a simple affair to be easily mastered. Whatever deals with human lives is naturally patient.”
Wilson van Dusen, The Natural Depth in Man

“But the subtler contents never appear on the surface; they always come to light outside the consulting hour. I therefore asked her cautiously, `Tell me, how do I seem to you when you are not with me? Am I just the same?’ She said, `When I am with you, you are quite pleasant, but when I am by myself, or have not seen you for some time, the picture I have of you changes in a remarkable way. Sometimes you seem quite idealized, and then again different.’ Here she hesitated, and I prompted her: `In what way different?’ Then she said, `Sometimes you seem rather dangerous, sinister, like an evil magician or a demon. I don’t know how I ever get such ideas — you are not a bit like that.'”
C.G. Jung, “The Archetypes Of The Collective Unconscious” in Two Essays In Analytical Psychology

“The times through which we are passing — and even more terrifying, those through which our children and grandchildren will pass — are difficult ones. Difficulty, however, has always been life’s stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before us…. At the instant when a man contracts like a spring in order to undertake the leap, inside us the entire life of the planet likewise contracts and develops its propulsion. This is when we clearly sense that simplest of truths which we often forget in comfortable, barren moments of ease: that man is not immortal, but rather serves Something or Someone that is immortal.”

Nicholas Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, p. 412

This is from http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080813192458.ud84hj9h&show_article=1, kindly sent me by HRPC author Robert Bruce. At some point science is going to have to conclude that the brain is not the mind is not the spirit, and I do suspect that experiments such as this one may be leading them in that direction.

A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain

Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern

 

Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.

Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

“The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain,” said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot’s principle architects.

Continue reading A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain