All posts tagged Ideas

I attended a lecture at Wham City in Baltimore recently, and I wanted to jot down some quick notes on the subject. “Noetic Transhumanism” was the main idea tonight, espoused by a neighbor of mine, C.K. Our humble lecturer is in the early stages of an experiment with the idea of Noetic Transhumanism. He gives lectures like the one given tonight, to develop his ideas.

Noetic Transhumanism is a kind of transhuminist idea. Transhumanists believe that humans can overcome their own natural limitations, to become more than, or other than the humans we are now. Science fiction cyborgs come to mind with this idea, as well as the science realities of genetic modification, steroid use, psychoactive drugs, etc.

Noetic Transhumanism is a similar idea, although it has less to do with the physicality of the human condition. Noetic Transhumanism is the idea that humans can overcome our inner limitations: limitations of the mind, emotions, and spirit, in order to become more than, or other than we are now. This transition may be a transition away from physicality altogether — but in what sense, and is that possible?

In some sense, as C.K. described, people have been escaping physicality into the realm of ideas, for centuries: Greek heroes, prophets, legendary people of all stripes, etc., but this isn’t exactly the kind of transcending that C.K. seems to have in mind.

C.K. seems most interested in what some people have called the Noosphere, and he describes it as though it were a realm, or a dimension related to ours.

This lecture was pretty much the outset of C.K.’s ideas on the subject. There wasn’t much need, in an introduction, to delve into the details, comparisons and so on. The second part of the lecture was C.K.’s discussion of his attempts to pursue this idea, to address any questions that arise along the way, and to attempt an end result — that being a noetic transition of some sort.

Every week, Stefanie Hollmichel posts a new response to a different Emerson essay. This week it was Emerson’s essay entitled “Heroism”, about which she comments, interestingly:

His ideas are such a bizarre mix he sounds like Pat Robertson, an ACLU attorney, and a Spartan combined into one person. If he stopped there I would be completely disgusted, but he redeems himself.

Last week, in a cleverly titled post “Wouldn’t be Prudent” she said:

Emerson’s essay on Prudence is filled with all kinds of interesting snippets which I find more thought-provoking than the whole. Snippets like “We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as experience.” And “Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters.” And “The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.”

These posts make for fun reading, and she always links to the subject of next weeks post in advance, to invite participation. I think that’s a great way to run a lit-blog!

(In fact, I might like to adopt a similar practice myself.)

source: So Many Books

Dissing Disambiguation is an interesting diatribe by a mathematician who describes himself as “a 40 year-old gay man living in a wonky world.”

He explains a field of mathematics called topology that “deals with properties of space of objects that can be stretched without tearing or gluing.” He describes a couple of objects that are particularly interesting in terms of this mathematical viewpoint… What makes this worthy of a post on No Categories? Read on…

For me, the really cool thing is the way we look at the world around us. How we are fortunate that there are people in this world who cherish the oddity all around this world–physical and otherwise. Too many people are afraid of ambiguity. They don’t like it when things can be interpreted in more than one way. This is true from things as varied as human sexuality, biblical scholarship or geometric shapes.

I say ambiguity is something to be celebrated. We are often left with alleged truisms such as ‘the truth is black and white’ or ‘the truth is simple’. To accept such statements as reality disallows for the possibility of a new point of view–a new exploration of a unique and foreign space or concept. We are complicated beings. The ambiguity that exists naturally around us could be said to lead to further complication. Instead, I choose to believe that any thing or any one can be taken for something beyond face value. Attempting to find that ambiguity or explore that topology makes me a more thoughtful (and hopefully) more caring individual.

Sometimes, in the dark,
On my way home through the woods,
I think I’m naked.

According to sources like The Boston Globe, Josh Corey, and Chicago Magazine, there is a new editorial agenda at Poetry Magazine. My recent interest in the Imagism ideas published during the formative period of that publication has put the magazine at the top of my wish list, mostly out of curiosity. It seems that a century has done a lot to change the magazine, for better or for worse.

According to the Globe,

Three years ago, a pharmaceutical heiress made Poetry magazine, the venerable monthly that discovered T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, the richest literary journal in the history of the world. The sum of $175 million, given by Ruth Lilly, made the subject of poetry into news fit to print in just about every newspaper in America.

The question on everyone’s mind, then, is: what ever will they do with all that money. Luckily, when a large sum of money is at play, the use of if it is generally documented, or justified somehow.

The Poetry Foundation, the entity created by and entrusted with that money, and its president John Barr have a stated agenda to put poetry “back into the mainstream of American culture”

It also happens that the president of the foundation is a former Wall Street Executive, in addition to having written whatever poetry bears his name. Perhaps this is why the Globe reports: “some critics of the foundation’s initiatives wonder whether poetry can, or should, restore its cultural authority by way of a marketing campaign. . . The Poetry Foundation’s posture as a kind of heavily endowed insurgency trying to shake up the poetry world has drawn two kinds of critics: those who think the foundation is addressing an illusory crisis and those who think the foundation’s approach is misconceived.”

Indeed, Barr doesn’t hesitate to use the language of corporate marketing to talk about his outreach efforts, speaking of “demographic groups” and “poetry users.” With annual budgets that should range from $5 million to $10 million a year, Barr says, the Poetry Foundation’s ultimate goal is to create a general readership for poetry large enough to make it possible for more poets to succeed in a commercial marketplace rather than rely on academia to make a living.

Now, that would be nice, wouldn’t it – if poets could succeed with the commodification of their art. Then again, art is inherently not commodity.

Oh, and get a load of this! These are the words of Christian Wiman, an editor of Poetry Magazine

More poems should rhyme. More poems should have meter. More poems should tell stories in accomplished ways. More poems should do the things that people like poems to do.

Poems should do whatever they were created to do! I’ll venture a guess about those people who expect poems to do such things as rhyme, etc.. They are the same people who haven’t read very much from the centuries and centuries of poetry that does those things, and that lack of reading is what caused their expectation in the first place. Those expectable poems are published, already.

(I wonder, if a poem fully ought to do whatever it was created to do, does that justify the poems that were created to please the alrgest possible audience, to be sold, or published in order to sell magazines. . .)

Nevertheless, if this organization is hiring, I’ll apply for a job. It sounds like they might benefit by having someone like me behind one of their desks. I know I would probably learn a thing or two, even as their janitor.

I have started reading Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.
Unfortunately, I can’t link this book to my post(s) about it because Project Gutenberg’s entry on Hermann Hesse does not contain the text of Steppenwolf. It does include Siddhartha, which was a book that I enjoyed reading, very much.