The word symbol derives from the Greek σύμβολον symbolon, meaning "token, watchword" from σύν syn "together" and βάλλω bállō " "I throw, put." The sense evolution in Greek is from "throwing things together" to "contrasting" to "comparing" to "token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine." Hence, "outward sign" of something. The meaning "something which stands for something else" was first recorded in 1590, in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. – Symbol - Wikipedia

The sciences of the time held, more or less, to the following schema: if we wish to know the mechanism of a clock, the fact of whether or not there are bacteria on its cogs and counterweights has not the least significance, either for the structure or for the kinematics of its works. Bacteria certainly cannot influence the movement of a clock! In precisely the same way it was con­sidered that intelligent beings could not interfere in the move­ment of the cosmic mechanism, and hence that that mechanism should be studied with complete disregard for the conceivable presence of beings in it.

This unpleasant, even vexing impression derives, I think, from our regarding any synthesis of physics and the will to be inadmissible—I would even say, indecent—to the rational mind. For myths are a pro­ jection of the will. The ancient cosmogonic myths, in solemn tones, and with a simple-hearted innocence that is the lost para­dise of humanity, tell how Being sprang from the conflict of demiurgic elements, elements clothed by legend in various forms and incarnations, how the world was born of the love- hate embrace of god-beasts, god-spirits, or supermen; and the suspicion that precisely this clash, being the purest projection of anthropomorphism onto the blank space of the cosmic enigma, that this reducing of Physics to Desires was the prototype the author made use of—such a suspicion can never be altogether overcome....the attempt to expound it in the language of empiricism smacks of incest, of a vulgar inability to keep separate concepts and categories that have no business being joined in an indiscriminate union

He converted me; I can even point to the place in A New Cosmogony that accomplished this. I refer to Section Seventeen of the sixth chapter of the book, the one which speaks of the marvelment of the Newtons, Einsteins, Jeanses, and Eddingtons at the fact that the laws of nature were amenable to mathematical expression, that mathematics— the fruit of the pure exercise of the logical mind—could prove a match for the Universe. Some of those greats, like Eddington and Jeans, believed that the Creator Himself was a mathema­tician and that we descried, in the work of creation, the signs of this His characteristic.,,Mathematics, an approximation of the structure of the Universum, somehow never quite manages to hit the nail squarely on the head hut is always just a little of! the mark...Mathematics and the world will converge,... when the work of creation has reached its goal, and it is still in progress. The laws of nature are not yet what they are “supposed” to be; they will become such not as a result of the perfecting of mathematics, but as a result of actual transformations in the Macrocosm!

For it is purely by reflex that we think of the entire material world as yielding to the following sharp logical dichot­ omy: either it was created by Someone (and then, standing on the ground of faith, we name that Someone the Absolute, God, the First Cause) or, on the other hand, it was created by no one, which means, as when we deal with the world as scien­ tists, that no one created it. But Acheropoulos says: Tertium datur. The world was created by No One, but all the same it was created; the Universe possesses Makers.

such disciplines as game theory or the algebra of conflict struc­tures

At last a state of cautious neu­trality was reached between Science and Faith, the one endeavoring not to get in the way of the other. It was as a result of this coexistence, touchy enough, tense enough, that the blindness of Science came about, evident in Science’s avoidance of the ground on which rests the idea of the New Cosmogony. This idea is closely connected with the notion of intentionality —in other words, with what is part and parcel of a faith in a personal God. For intentionality constitutes the foundation of such a faith. According to religion, after all, God created the world by an act of will and design—that is to say, by an intentional act. And so Science declared the notion to be sus­ pect and even forbade it outright. It became, in Science, taboo; one was not permitted even to make the least mention of it, lest one fall into the mortal sin of irrationalistic deviation. That fear not only sealed the lips of the scientists; it sealed their brains as well.

The Cosmogonic Game proceeds differently from that of chess, for in it the rules change—that is, the manner of the moves, and the pieces themselves, and the board.

My procedure was heretical in the extreme, because science’s first premise is the thesis that the world comes “ready-made” and “finished” in its laws, whereas I was assuming that our present Physics represented a transitional stage on the way to particular transformations.

Gödel’s proof could not have been drawn, because then the laws governing the constructibility of mathematical systems were different from what they are today.

Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind. Representative theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.

What are the two processes, now, into which the room-experience simultaneously enters in this way One of them is the reader's personal biography, the other is the history of the house of which the room is part. The presentation, the experience, the that in short (for until we have decided what it is it must be a mere that) is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar inner operations extending into the future, on the reader's part. On the other hand, the very same that is the terminus ad quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of future ones, in which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical room.

The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was proposed by Konrad Zuse in his 1969 book Rechnender Raum

You don't capture the truth with a proposition. What you do is you develop propositions that are vectored to a truth that is infinitely distant.

Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

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?

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 bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.

the argument is that human beings and social systems composed of human beings are inherently, in Birhane's terms, absolutely unpredictable. And so any attempt by a technology to accurately predict human behavior, to accurately assess or represent human personality is essentially a doomed prospect that just won't work. And it will never.

Predictive models, due to their use of historical data, are inherently conservative. They reproduce and reinforce norms, practices, and traditions of the past

Given massive power disparity, those engaged in the practices of designing, developing, and deploying ML systems—effectively shoehorning individual people and their behaviours into predefined stereotypical categories

Ubiquitous deployment of ML models to high-stake situations creates a political and economic world that benefits the most privileged and harms the vulnerable.

They do not invent the future. Doing that, OʼNeil (2016, p. 204) emphasizes, “requires moral imagination, and thatʼs something only humans can provide.”

We have so far looked at how individual people and social systems, as complex adaptive systems, are active, dynamic, and necessarily a historical phenomenon whose precise pathway is unpredictable. Contrary to this, we find much of current applied ML classifying, sorting, and predicting these fluctuating and contingent agents and systems, in effect, creating a certain trajectory that resembles the past

Technology that envisages a radical shift in power (from the most to the least powerful) stands in stark opposition to current technology that maximizes profit and efficiency. It is an illusion to expect technology giants to develop AI that centres on the interests of the marginalized. Strict regulations, social pressure through organized movements, strong reward systems for technology that empowers the least privileged, and a completely new application of technologies (which require vision, imagination, and creativity) all pave the way to a technologically just future.

And with listening too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs that act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears

I cannot escape paradox when I look deep into things, in the crafts as well as in poetry in metaphysics or in physics. In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable; supersensible and unpredictable. Law exists; and yet freedom is possible. In metaphysics, life and death in the commonplace sense collaborate in rhythms which sustain life. The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change; and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed.

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church.

An act of the self, that's what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwisewe are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us. There is no need merely to reflect.

They have never heard of e. e. cummings, who lived in their city, nor of the New York painters. ... But they know well the life of the subway, the office, the factory, the union hall, the hassle for employment;

I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materializes and de-materializes grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter- of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them.

I, like everyone I know, am instinctively motivated toward symbols of wholeness. What is a simpler, more natural one than the pot fired? Wholeness may be thought of as a kind of inner equilibrium, in which all our capacities have been brought into functioning as an organism.

In pottery, by developing sensitivity in manipulating natural materials by hand, I found a wisdom which had died out of the concepts I learned in the university: abstractions, mineralized and dead; while the minerals themselves were alive with energy and meaning.

Some secret center became vitalized in those hours of silent practice in the arts of transformation.

The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things.

One is supposed to be ... Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the seat of true power.

Well, and what is freedom? First of all, freedom seems to mean the absence of external restraint, the freedom to play. When we are free from external tyrannies, we seek freedom from our inner limitations. We find that in order to play we must be nimble and flexible and imaginative, we must be able to have fun, we must feel enjoyment, and sometimes long imprisonment has made us numb and sluggish. And then we find out that there are, paradoxically, disciplines which create in us capacities which allow us to seek our freedom. We learn how to rid ourselves of our boredom, our stiffness, our repressed anger, our anxiety. We become brighter, more energy flows through us, our limbs rise, our spirit comes alive in our tissues. And our gratitude is immeasurable for all the hours of labor that carry us forward.

he surrealists in France called it le point supreme and found it also at the center: le foyer central. When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power in the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole

We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do. Certain kinds of egotism and ambition as well as certain kinds of ignorance and timidity have to be overcome or they will stand in the way of that creator.

Fox returns more than once to a remark by Brian Eno, who wrote that at one point he “decided to turn ‘pretentious’ into a compliment”: “The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”

What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires.

This is the crux of the “horror of philosophy,” which we see in Descartes’ demon, Kant’s depression, and Nietzsche’s wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. Put simply, it is the thought that undermines itself, in thought. Thought that stumbles over itself, at the edge of an abyss.

Far from dismissing philosophy, I would argue that this makes philosophy interesting. Particularly if one “mis-reads” philosophy in this way. If we were to adopt a method, it might be this: read works of philosophy as if they were works of horror...The proposition that governs this book...is that something interesting happens when one takes philosophy not as a heroic feat of explaining everything, but as the confrontation with this thought that undermines thought, this philosophy of futility.

mysticism of the unhuman

Importantly, Angela [of Foligno] qualifies this by noting that the divine is “dark” not only because it surpasses human comprehension, but because in so doing it renders the human insignificant.

The Cloud is an example of what scholars have referred to as “affective Dionysianism,” a mixture of poetic and theological ruminations on the divine as inaccessible, incomprehensible, radically non-human. At its most intense, The Cloud advocates for a spiritual exercise that entails a successive stripping away of the self, so that it may be ready to encounter the impersonal, formless “cloud” of the divine.

Therefore, it is my wish to leave everything that I can think of and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think.

Ch 4 Prayers for Negation

Before the beginning, after the great war between Heaven and Hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man. And to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness. And great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason.

Los Angeles grew into a kind of theme park of the soul, a carnival of transcendence offering esoteric sources of entertainment, transport, and commodified wonder...There is a gnawing absurdity at the heart of this mystic carnival, this tacky tinseltown of snakeoil simulacra

“[Jack] Spicer delighted in provocative and incongruous combinations. His statements are mercurial, and his lines refuse to be pinned down to a single register. His poems repeatedly disrupt even their own procedures by jamming the frequencies of meaning they set up. They make use of his life-long fascination with games and systems: bridge, baseball, chess, pinball, computers, magic, religion, politics, and linguistics.” (Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, from the introduction to My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer)

This machine kills the fascist within.

— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) March 3, 2016

The argument is that neoliberal market fundamentalism—the view that markets alone can resolve the problem of how to construct social life in the face of unforeseeable contingencies—is a perverse and disavowed colonization of archaic divination rites, the rituals through which human cultures, on the basis of chance, have perennially sought for more-than-human knowledge.

As the philosophical father of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek was explicit that markets not only contained but were in fact constituted by uncertainty. And yet, appropriately constructed, markets were supposed to be forms of cosmic order so powerful they would overcome the inability of human beings to foresee the future. Aware of the looming contradiction that markets must somehow transcribe knowledge of the unknowable future, Hayek argued that only disciplined market actors could appropriately channel this order. By implication, those who knew the unknowable would prove it through success.

"Yes", said Raphael. "Here you can only see a representation of a river or a muntain, but in our world – the other world – you can see the actual river and the actual mountain." This annoyed me." I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World", I said with some sharpness. The word "only" suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all; Iwould argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal, and not subjec to decay." "Sorry" said Raphael. "I didn't mean to disparage your world" (p 222)

All art is quite useless.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. — D H Lawrence, quoted in The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote | by Simon Leys | The New York Review of Books