Impact
What if you got this wish: to re-live the good years of your life all over again. Would that make you a better person?
Maybe not, because where are the lessons then?
[At least TRY to remain upright!]
04-JUL
5 Replies
04-JUL
Independence
It seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving & weaving away at the Fates; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.
Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
03-JUL
02-JUL
Interplay
Thoughts grow and change over time in the same way that a planted seed forms roots, appears above ground, grows, and changes.
Consciousness is born of uncertainty.
In a completely predictable world, we wouldn’t need it, and the light of consciousness would probably blink out.
Yet although it is uncertainty that awakened us, we find living with it difficult, so we reach for theories that promise an explanation.
By one recent count, there are no fewer than 22 of them in the field of cognitive science.
A World Appears (2026) by Michael Pollan
01-JUL
Cactus
In order for a physical system to generate experiential qualities, it must exhibit a certain kind of interconnectivity and recursiveness, whether among neurons or among other similarly networked things (such as electrophysiological signaling in plants).
Consciousness is not restricted to brains. Any physical system properly configured to integrate information is, to some degree or another, theoretically conscious.
A World Appears (2026) by Michael Pollan
30-JUN
Antioxidant
Of course I can get through the day without coffee. But let’s all be thankful that today is not the day we find out what that would be like.
Nanea Hoffman
29-JUN
Anthropomorphic
When I went to sleep, I closed my eyes with this last thought in my mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars.
–Rabindranath Tagore
28-JUN
Revolution
One hundred twenty loops around the glowing orb are what we get – give or take a decade or 10 depending on how well you attract lightning.
And that’s a generous estimate, mostly reserved for women living on some isolated island in Japan or Italy with simple diets and a daily glass of vino.”
~Mike Ricker, leafmagazines.com