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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Weird Studies
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    from Weird Studies/Courses/Weirding
    • JFM: ethos of trust in reality. A stable world needed for David Icke to be wrong. We can't account for stability and trust, so its a leap of faith (?). ref Errol Morris Weird Studies/Errol Morris, Lobsters anti-Kuhn.

    Weird Studies/Errol Morris, Lobsters

    04 Nov 2022 - 17 Jun 2023
    Open in Logseq
      • Revolves around Opinion | The Pianist and the Lobster - The New York Times a very long (and interactive
        The interactive features include music (directly related) and some neat collapsible text widgets which I want to steal, maybe replace these sidenotes which don't work all that well.
         article on many things, but revolving around the question of where art and artistic ability come from.
        • Beans. Could it all come down to beans? We all wonder what that extra ingredient might be. If I had this extra ingredient in my makeup would I be a great composer, a great musician or a great mathematician? ... What is it that allows me to play? Could it be taken away? Could it suddenly vanish? Is it some property of my mind or brain? Could it be something external to me altogether?
        • Some interesting stuff on the mechanical nature of Beethoven's late music. Reminded me of this Omniorthogonal: Mental Music Machinery although that's about the machinery of a musical idiot (me) and this is about the machinery at the highest levels of classical musicianship.
        • Stuff on Nerval was interesting (know nothing of him except the lobster story)
        • Part of the genius of human intelligence is that we’re able to discern boundaries between ourselves and the world. But we could be wrong. About everything. Perhaps the boundaries we have imagined are not really there or have been incorrectly placed. Our cartography of the universe could be false, incorrectly imagined. In one of his last poems, Nerval wrote: “Often the most obscure of beings houses a hidden God; and like a nascent eye veiled by its lids, a pure spirit buds beneath the husk of stones!"
        • The WS guys highlighted this, and I agree, it's very striking. I vibe more with the "imagine all our boundaries are wrong" than the hidden God stuff.
        • Ref to Tor Nørretranders who I should read (I have his book The User Illusion)
      • The Dogen quote with the thousand eyes of the rock, of the tounge, of the mind...that was quite something. Totally wrong of course. Or, OK, not wrong, but incommensurable with the computationalist view of mind. The Eyes of Dogen | Hardcore Zen
        • Is it though? The tongue, at least, has thousands of sensors, not quite eyes but they fulfill part of the function of an eye, connecting physics and sensation.
        • I guess I have problems with panpsychism, or some versions of it.
      • Some stuff on agency when it comes to art (musical performance, etc). Mention of Libet experiment, and some nods to distirbuted-agency theory of mind. This episode might have been the closest the guys have come to my kind of cognitive science, which was interesting, because usually I have them kind of opposed to it (in my head, they don't really spend too much time on it.).