The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Philosophy”
Wyrd, Post-Selection, and the Quantum Trickster
English is blessed with a large and fascinating family of w-r words connoting twisting, turning, and turning-into (in the sense of becoming)—think writhing wriggling worms and the wrath of wraiths. (See my ancient post about “werewords” if you are curious.) My favorite of this family is Wyrd, which comes from the Old English weorthan, “to […]
Phil Dick Boulevard: Precognition, Karma, and the Unconscious
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung The future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to […]
The Rashomon Brain: Hunting Duck/Rabbits, Seeing Multiple Realities
“A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a coconut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart […]
The Passion of Einstein: Light, Spacetime, and the Holy Grail
In David Lindsay’s bizarre Gnostic allegory A Voyage to Arcturus, space travel is accomplished by means of “back light”—light rays that strive to return to their origin. A bottle of back light gathered through a telescope aimed at Arcturus is used to pull a small ship and its passengers from an observatory in Scotland up […]
Belittling Ufology
How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin […]
Manifesto of Extraterrestentialism
The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence […]
“There is no center” (The Parallax View Pt. 2)
Parallax is really not new. In its social implications at least, it’s just a restating of the postmodernist truism: “There is no center.” That was always the motto, right? But we – or at least, I – always took that to mean a lack of a privileged social viewpoint, a lack of some Archimedian position […]
The Parallax View
Reading Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus” The Parallax View. Mixed feelings, disappointment at its difficult philosophical tone, different from his more accessible early books. The main thing, though, is his “strategic decision” to use the term “parallax” to denote the discontinuity at the heart of being, the nonidentification of an object with itself (or a subject […]
