"The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typified living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero."
Ilya Prigogine (via inthenoosphere)
"In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero."
"In the early 1950s, scientists began to suspect that there might be hidden patterns in technology’s rate of change and that by unearthing those patterns, they might be able to predict the future. One of the first official attempts to do just that was a 1953 US Air Force study that tracked the accelerating progress of flight from the Wright brothers forward. By creating that graph and extrapolating into the future, the Air Force came to what was then a shocking conclusion: a trip to the Moon should soon be possible. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly explains further: It is important to…"
"All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence)."
Ilya Prigogine (via inthenoosphere)
Some good quotes
“Science proceeds as if the past was the home of explanation; whereas the future and the future alone holds the key to the mysteries of the present. When that first cell divided, the meaning of that division was to be discovered in the future, not in the past; when some pre-human ancestor first uttered a human sound, the significance of that sound was to be interpreted by human language, not by apish grunts; when the first plant showed solicitude for its seed, the interest of that solicitude lay in the promise of maternal affection. Things must be judged in the light of the coming morning, not in the setting stars. - HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK,
“For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. - WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON
“The human enterprise can be summed up as this: the perpetual redefining of boundaries into frontiers yet to be experienced.” Ahmed…
This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
Full Story: Business Insider
"It is a silly product. The industrial world is awash in milk. We’re overproducing milk. We actually have governments around the world who pay farmers not to produce milk. So the first product Monsanto comes up with is a product that produces more of what we don’t need.” - Jeremy Rifkin"
"The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness."
Alex Grey (via caffeinebased)
Using this opportunity to say Hello and Welcome to all new minds following this blog
(Having been asked for it, this is a re-post for those that missed it)
A Cyber Soaring Humanity
1. A Cyber Soaring Humanity (or The rise of the Cyber Unified Civilization)
"Conflict is not a synonym for Violence. Violence is only one possible response to conflict — a collective expression, or political tool to achieve ends.” - Lynch & McGoldrick[2005]"
"
I don’t think there is an “illuminati”
I don’t think there is a secret society.
I just know that there are people with power.
People with money.
and people with neither.
If you’re not in the first two, then you’re in the third one and you’re getting fucked.
"
(via technocraticus)
History and Empathy - JeremyRifkin
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel once remarked that happiness is “the blank pages of history” because they are “periods of harmony.” Happy people generally live out their existence in the “microworld” of close familial relations and extended social affiliations.History, on the other hand, is more often than not made by the disgruntled and discontented, the angry and rebellious—those interested in exercising authority and exploiting others and their victims, interested in righting wrongs and restoring justice. By this reckoning, much of the history that is written is about the pathology of power.Perhaps that is why, when we come to think about human nature, we have such a bleak analysis. Our collective memory is measured in terms of crises and calamities, harrowing injustices, and terrifying episodes of brutality inflicted on each other and our fellow creatures. But if these were the defining elements of human experience, we would have perished as a species long ago.All of which raises the question “Why have we come to think of life in such dire terms?” The answer is that tales of misdeeds and woe surprise us. They are unexpected and, therefore, trigger alarm and heighten our interest. That is because such events are novel and not the norm, but they are newsworthy and for that reason they are the stuff of history. Today, our twenty-four hour cable TV news shows become the chroniclers of the accounts of pathological behavior, bombarding us with tales of horror and woe.The everyday world is quite different. Although life as it’s lived on the ground, close to home, is peppered with suffering, stresses, injustices, and foul play, it is, for the most part, lived out in hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity. Comfort and compassion between people creates goodwill, establishes the bonds of sociality, and gives joy to people’s lives. Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is our core nature. Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization. In short, it is the extraordinary evolution of empathic consciousness that is the quintessential underlying story of human history, even if it has not been given the serious attention it deserves by our historians.
"In his book “Time Wars,” Jeremy Rifkin suggests that many of the conflicts between groups may have been over competing notions of time. Rifkin sees the conflict of our era as being between ‘industrial’ time, which is individualistic, atomistic, quantitative, utilitarian, artificial (clock-based), centralized, and mechanistic; and what might be called ‘postindustrial’ time, which is communitarian, participatory, qualitative, empathetic, rhythmic, cyclical, decentralized, and organic. From the ‘industrial’ viewpoint, time is a resource for the progressive creation of wealth, which is not to be squandered. Perhaps from the ‘postindustrial’ viewpoint, time is a resource for human lives and experiences… recognizing entropy, the person living in ‘postindustrial’ time knows that material ‘progress’ is not indefinite or without external cost."
"I think that both the ”“I”” and the”“me”” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.
By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.
There’s nothing at the center. We’re the product of the emergent property, I would argue, of the multitude of these processes that generate us.” - Bruce Hood, Canadian Experimental Psychologist."
Amiquote - Lapidarium
