Or more officially the GCP (Global Consciousness Project). Princeton, serious science (?) with some wonderfully whacky content – Princess Di’s funeral and the O J Simpson trial linked to random events detected in electronic networks apparently arising from the fact that “… a small effect of consciousness on the electronic REG (random event generator) isn’t diminished by distance or shielding, so it apparently isn’t brought about by something physical like temperature changes, or sound waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Instead it seems that the information itself is the important thing …”
I happen to believe that final sentence, about non-local information being the most fundamental level in physics, but can this whacky noetic / noosphere stuff really be empirically proven ? I kinda hope so. What does Josephson make of it I wonder ?
Today, American scientists announced, “send us the money”. Hmm.
Teilhard de Chardin gets top billing, but this Poetic History page includes many luminaries and other phaedra including personal hero Ned Lawrence with a quote I remember oh so well
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. ”
I’d actually forgotten how much of an impression that had made on me. (to whit my still unwritten review of Seven Pillars of Wisdom – “It Is Written“.
Thanks to Platt at MoQ for providing the link.
teilhard de Chardin, now that’s a name few non-catholics know. Did you know that there was a character in the movie “shoes of the fisherman” who was purported to have been Chardin? And did you know that the church would not let him publish his books and he obeyed?
I read him, again, after reading “the blank slate” I wanted to see if a catholic mystic would have something to say which would dissuade me from rejecting god’s existence. I also read a woman whose name escapes me. She was a french jew turned catholic and was
also considered a mystic.
this lady
http://www.answers.com/topic/simone-weil
Simone Weil I have heard of, but that’s about it. I know a little more about Teilhard de Chardin, but I didn’t know about the “Shoes of The Fisherman”.
For someone who claims to be an uneducated amateur, you are amazingly well-read.
I can’t keep up, and I have years of catching-up to do.
(Cabinet-making business a bit slow these days is it ? :-))
cabinetmaking at this location to end soon, as soon as the house is sold. I’m working on the countertops, sort of a FLW design. I wonder if there is too much information. I tend to like the less is more approach. When it’s finished I could send you a digital.
Uneducated? self educated and curious and sometimes intimidated by people who seem to be on a first name basis with the great philosophers. One day my niece’s boyfriend, who was attending a top university said “what you don’t realize, alice, is that Marx was saying…..”. the kid kind of pissed me off so I went and got a copy of Das Kapital and actually read a good bit of it. Tough reading at that.
Maybe that’s what you mean by memes. David Hume said this, John Locke said that, but have any of these people actually read the texts?
I have attended some college, but do not hold a degree other that AA. I do like to learn and do not like to be fooled.
When Weil and de Chardin write, their ideas trail behind in little wisps, try to grap hold and they break off.
“Less is more” is one of my adages too. Too much information. Not what you know but who you know (on first name terms), etc – these are all humanly true too
Generally I find that if I (you) find something to be intuitively true, someone more famous almost certainly thought of it before I (you) did, but that doesn’t make me (or you) any less right.
The problem isn’t not being right.
The problem is “winning arguments” – “justifying decisions and budgets”, selling your “cost/benefit analysis” etc …