- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Mind and Matter
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Matter With Curiosity
here it is standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
...
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
...
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Saturday, March 01, 2025
Waves of Consciousness
leave some writing, and just as quickly
new waves roll in and erase it.
I try to quickly read what's
written there, but it's hard,"
- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore
"When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world."
- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
The Universe in Your Hand
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Altered State of Consciousness
- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
Inner Paths to Outer Space
Friday, January 10, 2025
Mystagogic Objects
- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)
Fragments
Saturday, November 30, 2024
Collective Field
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Myo
- D.T. Suzuki (1870 - 1966)
Zen and Japanese Culture
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Myconeurological Networks
Sunday, November 03, 2024
Constructs of Imagination
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...
...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."
Monday, July 29, 2024
The Function of Consciousness
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Tuesday, December 05, 2023
Fungal States of Minds
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Consciousness
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
We cannot get behind consciousness.
Everything that we talk about,
everything that we regard as existing,
postulates consciousness."
Monday, August 08, 2022
Atoms with Consciousness
There are the rushing waves…
mountains of molecules, each stupidly
minding its own business… trillions apart…
yet forming white surf in unison.
before any eyes could see…
year after year…
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?…
on a dead planet,
with no life to entertain.
tortured by energy…
wasted prodigiously by the sun…
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
repeat the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves…
and a new dance starts.
masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing
a pattern ever more intricate.
here it is standing…
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity.
wonders at wondering…
...I…
a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Untitled Ode to the Wonder of Life,
Quoted by Maria Popova (1984 - ), The Marginalian
Sunday, November 14, 2021
Hatching of Self
Friday, September 10, 2021
The Matrix of All Matter
- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)
Monday, April 26, 2021
Focal Points
- Bernardo Kastrup
Dreamed Up Reality
Postscript. As I alluded to a few blog posts ago, owing to this will-it-ever-end-pandemic, my photo-safari opportunities are - as for most of you - few-and-far-between. Thus, quality "photography time" nowadays amounts to either immersing myself in an unfathomably deep gorge of unprocessed raw files or looking to make this gorge even more unfathomably deep by saving an endless stream of impromptu "experiments" with light and form in my home studio (i.e., my day-job work desk after I clear it of my day-job notes and scribbles). The diptych above (as well as the one from yesterday) combines these two practices; i.e., they are "experiments in abstraction" captured a few years ago with my iPhone. Yesterday's images are of two ceilings, one in a local grocery store, the other at a local department of motor vehicles (where I sat, bored, one day in 2017, while waiting for one of my sons to test for his driver's permit). Today's images come courtesy of a local mall. There is appreciable comfort (from my otherwise omnipresent angst over few-and-far-between photo opportunities) in knowing that there are always wonders to be discovered, even if such "discoveries" are of discoveries made long ago!
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Mind at Large
- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Tuesday, December 01, 2020
Wonder about Wonder
- V. S. Ramachandran (1951 - )
The Tell-Tale Brain