This weekend I listened to a talk given by Terrence McKenna where he expounds upon his path to “Intellectual Freakery”.

“I began to pursue this vast area of interlocking disciplines that really has no name, but we can name the disciplines…

• Botany
• Ethnography
• Chemistry
• DNA Function
• Cultural Dynamics
• Shamanism
• Linguistics
• Theories of Natural Magick
• Relationship of Man to the Environment

The Nexus of Concerns that clusters around the questions: What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

As I have begun to write this blog again, I have been searching for some kind of rubric for topics I would cover. So for now, The Nexus of Concerns will serve as my guiding editorial principle.

I recently attended an Evolver event entitled: The Singularity Is Where? Dialogue with Jason Silva & Daniel Pinchbeck

I thought the evening was interesting, though the conversation meandered all over the god damned place (as you might well imagine). One thing I have noticed about these two is that they speak almost entirely in references. This is not condemnation, it is one of the things I love about them.

During the evening I jotted down every reference I could snag and then spent some time looking them all up.

Below is a kind of bibliography I suppose of their conversation. I have to say that my brain literally hurt after going back and learning about all of these wonderful people and references. I am extremely grateful to these two wonderful men for tuning me into so many important frequencies.

I apologize in advance for anything I lifted off the internet without referencing properly.  Please know I basically did not write any of this.  I will include as many links to the people’s official webpages as possible. When in doubt assume I took the text from wikipedia (unless it ends with a quote about them, in which case I probably took it from their TED page, or if it is a book, most likely from Amazon). Enjoy!

Daniel Pinchbeck and Jason Silva

• Daniel Pinchbeck – Psychedelic Writer and Futurist, author of  Breaking Open the Head and 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl

• Jason Silva – television personality, filmmaker, and performance philosopher.

• Wonder Junkie – “She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz…she was Pocohontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon.”

• Carl Sagan, Contact

• Rudolf Steiner – an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. Steiner gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s world view, in which “Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”

• Hedonic Adaptation (and the Hedonic treadmill) – The phrase “hedonic adaptation” was made popular by Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein in chapter 16 of Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (the article begins on page 302). Although hedonic adaptation confers enormous benefits by reducing the subjective effects of adverse conditions, it has associated costs as well. The most obvious cost of hedonic adaption is that it occurs for goods as well as bads, creating what Brickman and Campbell (1971) have called the “hedonic treadmill” — the tendency for transitory satisfactions to eventually give way to indifference or even dissatisfaction. Scitovsky (1976) comments that “the attainment of a goal seems, when the moment of triumph is over, almost like a let-down” (62). Adaption to pleasurable experiences may also be responsible for destructive addictions, which are due in part to the decreasing pleasure from a given level of a good or activity and in part to the displeasure (craving) when consumption of the good or activity ceases (see, for example, Koob et al. 1989; Loewenstein 1996).

• Bill McKibben – an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. Books – The End of Nature (a “righteous jeremiad” introduced the concept of climate change to the world in 1989), The Age of Missing Information (an experiment where he watched one day’s wrht of tv from 100 channels (2,400 hours worth) and then compared it to a day he spent on a mountaintop), Deep Economy (shortcomings of the growth economy), Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (another book on climate change)

• Kevin Kelley – the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Most notable book: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

• Marshall McLuhan (deceased) – a Canadian philosopher of communication theory. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. Coined the term The Medium is the Message and Global Village. The internet has revived his works – Books: Understanding Media, The Medium is the Massage, The Global Village

• Amber Case – Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, examining the way humans and technology interact and evolve together. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location-sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She predicts that intensification of the human-technology interface will quickly reduce the distance between individual and community, & believes that the convergence of technologies will bring about unprecedented rapid learning and communication. Dubbed a digital philosopher, Case applies her findings to such fields as information architecture, usability and online productivity. She’s currently working on a book about using anthropological techniques to understand industry ecosystems. “She’s a digital native. She’s from the future. She’s come back to help us figure out how to think.”

• Barbara Marx Hubbard – is a prolific futurist, author and public speaker. She is credited with the concepts of ‘The Synergy Engine’ and the ‘birthing’ of humanity. She has written five books, delivered more than 80 keynote speeches and given more than 75 interviews. She is currently President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, which she co-founded in 1990.

• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (book) – by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler that was published in 2012. The writers refer to the book’s title as being a future where nine billion people have access to clean water, food, energy, health care, education, and everything else that is necessary for a first world standard of living, thanks to technological innovation.

• Conflict iPhones (Daniel’s idea, but I think I named it? not sure, either way this person named it that aslo) – The minerals used in iPhones are being mined from war torn nations. Are our smartphones any more conscientious than African blood diamonds?

• “Behind the euphoria of new technology is often a nightmare of consequence.” – Daniel Pinchbeck

• Stewart Brand – an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

• Mark Lynas – a British author, journalist and environmental activist who focuses on climate change. He is a contributor to New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK; he also worked on the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He lives in Oxford, England. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011). He has stated “I think there is a 50-50 chance we can avoid a devastating rise in global temperature.”

• The Monsanto Act – Opponents of genetically modified food are outraged over a provision they have dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act,” which was signed by President Barack Obama after being added to an essential spending bill without congressional hearings. The rider strips the power from federal courts to halt the sales and planting of genetically modified foods even if health concerns arise, according to Food Democracy Now, a food-safety advocacy organization. Food Democracy Now collected more than 250,000 signatures on a petition that called for the president to veto the measure, which was tucked into the $982 billion six-month spending bill needed to keep the government open for the rest of the fiscal year, CBS News reported.

• Steven Johnson – A contributing editor to Wired and author of eight books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in In his book Where Good ideas Come From he explores Stuart Kauffman’s idea of the Adjacent Possible.

• The Adjacent Possible – “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.”

• Charles Eisenstein – author and public speaker and self-described “degrowth activist”.[1] He is the author of the 2011 book Sacred Economics.

• Sacred Economics (2012) – short film by Ian MacKenzie, a teaser on the ideas of Charles Eisenstein and the return of the gift.

• “Community can’t just be an add on to a monetized life.”

• What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (book) – Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab.

• http://www.edge.org/ – “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” Closer resemblances are the early seventeenth-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society’s common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation.

• The Overview Effect – Documentary about what seeing the earth from space for the first time did to humanity

• Edgar Dean Mitchell – an American pilot, retired Captain in the United States Navy and NASA astronaut. As the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

• Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is “90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets”

• Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (deceased) – an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth”, ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres. He pioneered the idea of natural inspiration in design and innovation.

• Permaculture – a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, and environmental design which develops sustainable architecture and self-maintained horticultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems

• Paul Stamets (TED Talk)- Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets’ research is the Northwest’s native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas. There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet. “Once you’ve heard ‘renaissance mycologist’ Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you’ll never look at the world — not to mention your backyard — in the same way again.” – Linda Baker, Salon.com

• John Todd – a biologist working in thel field of ecological design. His ideas often involve applications that become the basis of alternative technologies. His principal professional interests have included solving problems of food production and waste-water processing. As an author, he has presented the outcome of the work that he and colleagues have undertaken in a series of books, as well as in the requisite scientific papers.

• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood – the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts.[1] In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.

• The Stanford Study on Awe – Psychological scientists Melanie Rudd and Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management devised a way to study this feeling of awe in the laboratory. Across three different experiments, they found that jaw-dropping moments made participants feel like they had more time available and made them more patient, less materialistic, and more willing to volunteer time to help others.

• The researchers found that the effects that awe has on decision-making and well-being can be explained by awe’s ability to actually change our subjective experience of time by slowing it down. Experiences of awe help to brings us into the present moment which, in turn, adjusts our perception of time, influences our decisions, and makes life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.

• Hubble Imax 3D – Speaking of awe

• Douglas Richard Hofstadter – an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of “I”, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

• Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It by Thomas de Zengotita – In this utterly original look at our modern “culture of performance,” de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana’s funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time.

• Murray Bookchin – an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement,[6] Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.[7] Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

• Ernest Becker – a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
• “We are gods with anuses.”

• Alan Harrington – Obscure author of The Immortalist. In it he argues that the anticipation of death was the most important determining factor of human behavior.
• Film based on book by Jason Silva

• The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.”- Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

• John M. Smart – a futurist and scholar of accelerating change. He is founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, an organization that does “outreach, education, research, and advocacy with respect to issues of accelerating change.”.[1] Smart has an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, and a BS in business administration from U.C. Berkeley. Smart is the principal advocate of the concept of “STEM compression,” (formerly “MEST compression”) the idea that the most (ostensibly) complex of the universe’s extant systems at any time (galaxies, stars, habitable planets, living systems, and now technological systems) use progressively less space, time, energy and matter (“STEM”) to create the next level of complexity in their evolutionary development.[2] A similar perspective is found in Buckminster Fuller’s writings on ephemeralization.

• Femtotechnology – a hypothetical term used in reference to structuring of matter on a femtometer, which is 10−15 m. This is a smaller scale in comparison to nanotechnology and picotechnology which are 10−9 m and 10−12 m respectively. Work in the femtometer range involves manipulation of excited energy states within atomic nuclei (see nuclear isomer) to produce metastable (or otherwise stabilized) states with unusual properties. In the extreme case, excited states of the individual nucleons that make up the atomic nucleus (protons and neutrons) are considered, ostensibly to tailor the behavioral properties of these particles (though this is in practice unlikely to work as intended).

• Machine Elves – term coined by the late ethnobotanist, writer and philosopher Terence McKenna to describe the apparent entities (described as “elves”) that have been reported by users of dimethyltryptamine.[1] References to such encounters can be found in many cultures ranging from shamanic traditions of native Americans to indigenous Australians and African tribes, as well as among western users of these substances.

• The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde – “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

• Hancock, Sheldrake and TED – Last month I posted videos of two recent thought-provoking TEDx talks by Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake. However, if you visit either of those stories today, you’ll find that the videos are no longer accessible. The reason? Complaints were made to the TED organisation – for example, by atheist blogger Jerry Coyne, and of course, P.Z. Myers – about the lectures being unscientific and full of ‘woo’. Under pressure from these bloggers and their readers (and others), TED set up a conversation page to get input from TED viewers about these talks.

• Diana Slattery – Expert in xenolinguistics, the study of alien languages -

• Alva Noë – Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive scienceand the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.

• Matt Ridley (TED Talk) – a British scientist, journalist, and popular author[1] and a member of the House of Lords.[2] Ridley has written several science books including The Red Queen (1994), Genome (1999) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). In 2011, he won the Hayek Prize, which “honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty.”[3] Ridley also gave the Angus Millar Lecture on “scientific heresy” at the RSA in 2011.[4] He was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[5] and won the Julian Simon award in March 2012.[6] His TED.com talk on “When Ideas Have Sex” has been viewed 1.9 million times.[7]

• Geoffry West – Cities as Organisms – Trained as a theoretical physicist, Geoffrey West has turned his analytical mind toward the inner workings of more concrete things, like … animals. In a paper for Science in 1997, he and his team uncovered what he sees as a surprisingly universal law of biology — the way in which heart rate, size and energy consumption are related, consistently, across most living animals. (Though not all animals: “There are always going to be people who say, ‘What about the crayfish?’ ” he says. “Well, what about it? Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don’t make sense.”) A past president of the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute (after decades working in high-energy physics at Los Alamos and Stanford), West now studies the behavior and development of cities. In his newest work, he proposes that one simple number, population, can predict a stunning array of details about any city, from crime rate to economic activity. It’s all about the plumbing, he says, the infrastructure that powers growth or dysfunction. His next target for study: corporations. He says: “Focusing on the differences [between cities] misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.” “His gifts are precisely what’s needed to encourage scientific disciplines to mingle so freely. ” Murray Gell-Mann,

• Janine Benyus – Biomimcry – In the world envisioned by science author Janine Benyus, a locust’s ability to avoid collision within a roiling cloud of its brethren informs the design of a crash-resistant car; a self-cleaning leaf inspires a new kind of paint, one that dries in a pattern that enables simple rainwater to wash away dirt; and organisms capable of living without water open the way for vaccines that maintain potency even without refrigeration — a hurdle that can prevent life-saving drugs from reaching disease-torn communities. Most important, these cool tools from nature pull off their tricks while still managing to preserve the environment that sustains them, a life-or-death lesson that humankind is in need of learning. As a champion of biomimicry, Benyus has become one of the most important voices in a new wave of designers and engineers inspired by nature. Her most recent project, AskNature, explores what happens if we think of nature by function and looks at what organisms can teach us about design. “The sophisticated, almost pro-growth angle of Benyus shows the great potential profitability of copying some of nature’s time-tested, nonpolluting, room-temperature manufacturing and computing technologies.” New York Times

• Robert Thurman – Buddhist – Tenzin Robert Thurman became a Tibetan monk at age 24. He’s a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, and co-founder of Tibet House US, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization.

• Thurman’s focus is on the balance between inner insight and cultural harmony. In interpreting the teachings of Buddha, he argues that happiness can be reliable and satisfying in an enduring way without depriving others. He has translated many Buddhist Sutras, or teachings, and written many books, recently taking on the topic of Anger for the recent Oxford series on the seven deadly sins. He maintains a podcast on Buddhist topics. And yes, he is Uma’s dad. “Thurman considers Buddhism to be primarily a system of education, a science that guides individuals to live life to its fullest.” Kansas City Star
• Gross national happiness in Bhutan: the big idea from a tiny state that could change the world

• Bhutan measures prosperity by gauging its citizens’ happiness levels, not the GDP. Now its ideas are attracting interest at the UN climate change conference in Doha

I don’t really follow the simple reason on this American Atheists billboard that is going to be positioned outside of the Presidential Debate tonight. I get that god is a space alien. But are they saying he does baptisms for the dead and that makes him a bigot? Maybe it should have been a checklist?

Anyway, clearly the focal point of the ad is the magic glowing underwear. I’m not a graphic designer, but I think the rest of the stuff on the billboard detracts from the image. I would have just gone with “Do you really want the genitals of your president covered with these!?!?” I think that would have gotten the point across.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said a thousand times: If you are an Atheist but not a Nihilist you are just being a pussy.

THESE RED VELVET PANCAKES FROM BROOKLYN

COMMUNE REQUIRE A SIDE OF INSULIN

The sentiment reminds me of the last line from Okkervil River’s most horrific and beautiful song “Westfall” about a man being arrested for murdering a girl. The final lines of the song: “Evil don’t look like anything” land with a nihilistic smack on the rump of the supposed order of the universe.

Some dark thoughts for a fairly beautiful Tuesday morning. Hope all of you are not being evil today.

I thought John Dehlin could express it better than anyone (I even like his macabre aside towards the end).

I love you all and have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Sending rays of love from the heart of Brooklyn.
(I apologize profusely for the budweiser ad, what can you do?)

The Mountain Goats cover “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”

I am going to see The Weakerthans tonight. I was going through their new album which I don’t know so well and was entranced by this simple yet devastating little tune called Bigfoot. Enjoy this live version and the lyrics and I promise I will enjoy them as well this evening.

Bigfoot

I changed the oils and oiled the squeaks,
Patched the holes and fluid leaks,
Left dusk beneath a diabetic moon

And way to take the TV crews across the creaking ice
The news is howling to the timber wolves and soon

I’ll go through it all again
Watch their doubtful smiles begin
But the visions that I see believe in me

So praise the things I can’t forget with burgers and a silhouette
On t-shirts at the council general store

I’ll listen to the south winds sigh with rumors and regrets
And I don’t want to talk about it anymore

I’ll go through it all again
watch their doubtful smiles begin
When the visions that I see believe in me

Or the visions that I see that will believe me.