Showing posts with label Abstracts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abstracts. Show all posts

Monday, January 15, 2024

Time and Space

"Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us."

 

Monday, January 08, 2024

Symbolic Communication


"Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial [non-human intelligences] NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will perforce have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally. 
 
There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains  that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, and metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, prompting us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space."

- Bernardo Kastrup (1974 - )
UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence

Sunday, January 07, 2024

Cosmogenesis

"We live in a universe where the mathematical equations of the beginning are alive in us. If you altered them in any way, we wouldn’t even be here. We would never have come forth. Those conditions at the beginning of time are exactly what they had to be for us to allow the mathematics of the universe’s beginning to think inside us."
...
"Our universe had been creating itself for billions of years and suddenly, through the work of a handful of human beings, the universe found a way to reflect on itself, on how it had developed over billions of years."
...
"The greatest discovery of the last four hundred years is the time-developmental nature of our universe. Scientists have come to realize we live not in a cosmos but in a cosmogenesis, a universe developing from a primordial simple state into ever more complex states."

- Brian Thomas Swimme (1950 - )
Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

Thursday, January 04, 2024

Cosmic Serpent


"All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision."

- Jeremy Narby (1959 - )
The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Walls of the Worlds


"At least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things. Outside the boundaries of the universe lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas. Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in."

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

It’s a Visual World

Leonora Carrington (asked if there had been other artists in the family): My mother used to paint biscuit tins for jumble sales. That’s the only art that went on in my household.

Interviewer: I wonder where it came from?

Leonora Carrington: I have no idea.

Interviewer: No other artists in our family? None at all?

Leonora Carrington: Why are you fixed on the idea of heredity? It’s not hereditary … comes from somewhere else, not from genes. You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make a kind of intellectual mini-logic. You never understand by that road.

Interviewer: What do you think you do understand by then?

Leonora Carrington: By your own feelings about things …if you see a painting that you like… canvas is an empty space.

Interviewer: If I got one of your pictures down from upstairs and said to you what were you thinking when you painted this…?

Leonora Carrington: No. It’s a visual world, you want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not… the visual world, it’s totally different. Remember what I’ve just said now, don’t try and turn it into a …kind of intellectual game. It’s not… It’s a visual world, which is different. The visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk –that’s one concept– to this bed and around it without running into it. I’m moving in space. Or I can have a concept of it and then I can see it as an object in space…”

 - Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Don't try to intellectualize art

Note. The text above is transcribed by Hugh Blackmer, whose blog is a "must visit" for anyone even remotely interested in photography, art, philosophy, whimsical musings on life and reality, and other thoughts on subjects that language alone is inadequate to describe (Hugh covers a lot of creative ground 😊. The post from which I pilfered Hugh's interview fragment contains links to far more material on Leonora Carrington than just this one interview. Thank you, Hugh! 

Thursday, November 09, 2023

Observer-Centric Virtualities


"Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.
...
Self-causation of reality becomes apparent when a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a novel pattern and perceives it. All mass-energy, space-time itself emerge from consciousness. Those are epiphenomena of consciousness.
...
Mind instantiates oneself into matter. In a mathematical sense, matter is an “in-formed” pattern of mind. Time is emergent, and so is space. If space-time is emergent, so is mass-energy. All interactions in our physical world is computed by the larger consciousness system. In short, mind is more fundamental than matter. All realities are observer-centric virtualities."

- Alex M. VikoulovTheology of Digital Physics

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

The Direction of Time


"There is no logical necessity for the existence of a unique direction of total time; whether there is only one time direction, or whether time directions alternate, depends on the shape of the entropy curve plotted by the universe."

- Hans Reichenbach (1891 - 1953)
The Direction of Time

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Capturing Surrealities - #2

"Far away there in the sunshine
are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, 
but I can 
look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and try
to follow where they lead."

Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888 )

This is a second batch of "surrealities," captured using my iPhone during a recent trip to Niagara, CA. Each is an example of the myriad photographic possibilities that almost always present themselves merely by looking up (or down) 😊... The "truth" revealed: the left and right images are lights on the ceiling of two restaurants we ate at, while the center image is the ceiling just outside the second floor entrance to the Table Rock Market, which overlooks the Canadian side of the falls.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Capturing Surrealities - #1


"Unlike other media, a photograph is always based on a real, material origin. Rather than looking at this as a disadvantage, we should understand that this same fact makes photography the ultimate surreal medium – simply because photography, although based on reality, is very far from the truth."

While still on the subject of my wife's and my recent weekend trip to Niagara, CA (see posts 1, 2, and 3) - I am working on a few more images I will be sharing in the coming days - the triptych contains three "less than obvious" (surreal?) views of our trip as captured by my iPhone. The "truth" revealed, left to right: a plasma cylinder used to lure visitors into the House of Frankenstein ... a time exposure of a dynamic art display inside a wonderful Indian restaurant called The Dhaba On The Falls (I was given permission to take a shot while we waited for our food to arrive 😊... and an upside down view of some lights hanging on a wall by the luggage conveyor belt at the Buffalo the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. While these humble images may be a far cry from, say, epic Icelandic landscapes - and are probably not to everyone's tastes - I confess that these little surrealities provide me me no end of pleasure when I "discover" them in the wild. It is also worth remembering (by all photographers, from beginner to seasoned pro) that there are always compositional opportunities waiting to be seen and captured.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Expanding Our Vision


"Science seeks to understand complex processes by reducing them to their essential actions and studying the interplay of those actions; and this reductionist approach extends to art as well. Indeed, my focus on one school of art, consisting of only three major representatives [Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele], is an example of this. Some people are concerned that a reductionist analysis will diminish our fascination with art, that it will trivialize art and deprive it of its special force, thereby reducing the beholder's share to an ordinary brain function. I argue to the contrary, that be encouraging a focus on one mental process at a time, reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art. These new insights will enable us to perceive unexpected aspects of art that derive from the relationships between the biological and psychological phenomena."

- Eric Kandel (1929 - )
The Age of Insight

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

We Are Stories


"We are stories, contained within
the twenty complicated centimeters
behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling together of
things in the world, and oriented
toward predicting events in the future,
toward the direction of increasing entropy,
in a rather particular corner of this
immense, chaotic universe."

Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time

Sunday, September 03, 2023

Frost-Pale Stillness


 "The primal sun with beams for its white hands
strikes cliffs and woods, an empty country's harp,
and conjures colored music from the bonds
of frost-pale stillness, plays a merry dance
on the glowing yellow, green, and red that light the
flowers and heather, on the mist-blue mountain cap,
on the scattered flocks of sheep in summer white,
fissures sprayed with black, the lava's grey expanse.

I drink your music's glory with thirsty eyes,
my cherished, longer-for land, and turn to you,
my nerves aflame with the same welcoming joy
as when you first rose to me from the seas.

I snuggle up in that motherly embrace
where I laughed as a child,
where I find joy and grace."

Snorri Hjartarson (1906 - 1986)

The image above is the center-piece of my just-completed "Icelandic Abstracts" portfolio that consists of images captured during an exhilarating two-hour plane tour of the area surrounding the Skaftafell National Park area, which is home to some of Iceland‘s largest glaciers, most prolific volcanoes and richest river deltas. 

While I booked a "photographer's plane tour" covering the southern part of Iceland months in advance, I was also well aware of Iceland's notoriously finicky weather. Because of the popularity of such tours, I was told that - in the event of "bad weather" - my ticket would be refunded but a backup flight was unlikely to be offered. As luck would have it (at least at first), the weather during the morning hours of the day of the scheduled flight was awful. Visibility did not extend much farther than the hood of our car, and was certainly not good enough to allow a plane to take off; or, if the pilot was crazy enough to go ahead with the tour, to allow its passengers to see anything near the ground! However, a morning full of remorseful angst miraculously gave way to early afternoon bliss, as the clouds cleared (slightly but sufficiently) to provide two hours of photographic nirvana. Vacations and the vagaries of chance, indeed.

The images in this portfolio were created in a way diametrically opposite to how 95% of my portfolios emerge (meaning, the conditions were way out of my comfort zone): (1) rapid-fire "spraying" of shots (to get as many compositions in as possible in a very short time frame) vs. my usual "slow tempo" meditative approach; (2) slow-action oriented anticipation of "just the right framing with appropriate telephoto zoom" punctuated by quickly opening up to a wide angle view to help anticipate the next "frame" vs. my typically much more deliberate compositions centered on a narrow range of focal lengths; and (3) using (what for me are) very high ISOs (3200+) to achieve fast enough shutter times to minimize blurring vs. my normal "stick to base ISO" mantra. 

Add to all this the fact that while the captain of my small Cessna was kind enough to give me the run of the cabin - he allowed me to unbuckle my seatbelt and move at will from the right window to left to right again, over and over again - this otherwise laudable "artistic freedom," when coupled with the 60 deg swings of the aircraft from horizontal the captain deliberately - and routinely - engaged in so that I could get the "best views," took its inevitable toll: each image represents a delicate compromise between maximizing aesthetics and minimizing nausea

But, my-oh-my, what breathtaking images of its abstract frost-pale stillness Iceland had to offer this lucky photographer...thank you, Iceland!

Friday, June 23, 2023

Omnitensional Integrity


"The word tensegrity is an invention: it is a contraction of tensional integrity. Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors.
...
The integrity of the whole structure is invested in the finitely closed, tensional-embracement network, and the compressions are local islands. Elongated compression tends to deflect and fail. Compressions are disintegrable because they are not atomically solid and can permit energy penetration between their invisibly amassed separate energy entities.
...
Tension structures arranged by man depend upon his purest initial volition of interpretation of pure principle. Tension is omnidirectionally coherent. Tensegrity is an inherently nonredundant confluence of optimum structural-effort effectiveness factors.
...
All structures, properly understood,
from the solar system to the atom,
are tensegrity structures.
Universe is omnitensional integrity."

- Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Sunday, June 11, 2023

A Personal Universe


"Poetry remakes and prolongs language;
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
 of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."

- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Sunday, June 04, 2023

Cosmic Observer



"In quantum mechanics...
an observation here and now changes in
 general the ‘state’ of the observed system...
I consider the unpredictable change
 of the state by a single observation...
to be an abandonment of the idea of
 the isolation of the observer from the
 course of physical events outside himself."

Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

"The cosmos is within us.
We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the
universe to know itself."

Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

Thursday, June 01, 2023

Looking at Things


"If we are always arriving and departing, it
is also true that we are eternally anchored.
One's destination is never a place but
rather a new way of looking at things.
...
You will then be ready to undergo initiation: an ordeal imposed by the Brotherhood of Fools and Simpletons. Three questions will be put to you. Just three. The first: 'How would you order the world if you were given the powers of the creator?' the second: 'What is it you desire that you do not already possess?' The third: 'Say something that will truly astonish us!' If you answer these satisfactorily you are then to return to your birthplace, sit quietly with hands folded, and meditate on the needs of all God's creatures... When you know what it is they need... you are to report back to the Brotherhood and dissolve the order.
...
Whoever uses the spirit that
is in him creatively is an artist.
To make living itself an art,
that is the goal."

- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Singing Elephants


"Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched... the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away, and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail... [there was no] fear. When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untravelled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy."

Saturday, May 27, 2023

Finite Worlds


"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Note. The image is a "quick grab" with my iPhone of some lights on the ceiling of the hotel my wife and I recently stayed at in Monterey, CA. A basic photography lesson I learned and embraced long ago (though occasionally still forget to apply; happily, not this time) is this: if you are in a "dull, dull, insufferably dull" place for image taking (or, at least, think you are - like standing around in a hotel lobby with nothing to do or to "look at"), just look up or down ... something is sure to catch your eye 🙂

Friday, May 26, 2023

Mysterious Worlds


"Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov