Build Your Own Damn Wagon

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This is what I meant—this is a good closure—this is what I meant by “do not watch, do not consume.” In other words, do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds, build your own values, and your own house of mirrors. And then you are on equal footing. But if you are consuming the manufactured... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

Yeah. I’m a critic of science. I think it’s an interesting artifact, but it’s become a tyrant. It’s become the arbiter of all truth, and that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Most of what’s interesting doesn’t fall under the purvey of science.

Well, shamanism (and the modern echo of it in the artist) is this awareness. It’s a humbler... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

Damn, dude

It’s a curious thing, the Western commitment to abstraction. It’s a unique cultural set. You know, if you are at all familiar with the Maya civilization—they achieved great things in mathematics and in technical understanding of city planning and coordination of large-scale tasks, and this sort of thing. But they never left the woods in a certain... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

Damn. I’ve always wondered about this. “ontogeny recaps phylogeny” - how does that fit in with Ken Wilber’s “levels of thinking” stuff?

every technology carries utterly unpredictable consequences. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would create a sexual revolution because it’s a rolling bedroom. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would destroy the extended family, that people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles from [each other]. The automobile created the suburb. McLuhan, on... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

McKenna being a “McLuhanite”
(I’m still not over the fact that he calls it “McLuhanite” when “McLuhanist” is obviously more correct. A rare lapse in aesthetic judgement by Terence :P )

Memes are the smallest units of a concept. And they’re like genes. The word is deliberately constructed to rhyme with gene. And so when I say, “Every woman should consider having only one child,” that’s a meme. And that meme goes out into society, where it competes with the family values meme, the gay lifestyle meme, the celibacy meme—they all... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

Information theory, memes, genes

Dissipative structures are these special situations which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium. That’s the technical way of saying it. In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go, and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium. And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

This is blowing my mind. This stuff in combination with Levin’s work is very, very interesting.

You know, the theory of evolution is essentially a theory which is an effort to account for the large numbers of diverse plants and animals on the planet. Darwin, in his diaries, referred to what he was doing as searching for a solution to the species problem. It was not thought to have anything to do with sociology or geology, but now I think we... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

BBawa

Terence is referencing Ilya Prigogine

So the universe is a thing where habit constrains but novelty overcomes that constraint. And once overcome, new levels of novelty become incorporated into the old set of constraints. I mean, like, for instance, take Manhattan. Manhattan is an incredibly novel addition to the geography of southern New York. And yet, once in place, it has its rules.... See more