israeli flag in peace with arabic mosaics
(art from plataforma girassol, picture by @lowfill)
in BRAZIL we have SPACE, ok? i would like to live the most of my life in a HOT country you know
via youtube.com
via @jumundim
Biosemiotics: Uexküll and Peirce [must see]
via newscientist.com
Estonian-born Jakob von Uexküll was an animal physiologist whose 1934 book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A picture book of invisible worlds – and later works – inspired Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who then went on to win a Nobel prize in 1973 for their studies in animal behaviour, or ethology.
Von Uexküll wrote: “If we stand before a meadow covered with flowers, full of buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, darting dragonflies, grasshoppers jumping over blades of grass, mice scurrying, and snails crawling about, we would be inclined to ask ourselves the unintended question: Does the meadow present the same view to the eyes of so many various animals as it does to ours?”
He thought that a naive person would intuitively answer that it is the same meadow to every eye. Physical scientists, he thought, would see all the animals in the meadow as “mere mechanisms, steered here and there by physical and chemical agents, the meadow consists of a confusion of light waves and air vibrations… which operate the various objects in it”.
For von Uexküll, both views were wrong. Each creature in the meadow lived in “its own world filled with the perceptions which it alone knows”, and it was in accordance with that experiential world – and not the entirety of the whole, unseen but physically existing world – that the creature had to coordinate its actions to eat, flee, mate and sustain itself.
For some animals, that subjective perceptual universe, or Umwelt, as von Uexküll called it, writing in German, is narrow. He describes the umwelt of a tick which sits “motionless on the tip of a branch until a mammal passes below it. The smell of the butyric acid awakens it and it lets itself fall. It lands on the coat of its prey, through which it burrows to reach and pierce the warm skin… The pursuit of this simple meaning rule constitutes almost the whole of the tick’s life.” By reacting only to the single odorant of sweat, the tick reduces the countless characteristics of the world of host animals to a simple common denominator in its own world.
So von Uexküll’s meadow is alive with myriad perceptual worlds, with each one, for each species, evolving within, and functioning as, a different web of meaning. To understand why animals are organised the way they are, and why they act on the world as they do, he explained: “Meaning is the guiding star that biology must follow.”
Von Uexküll’s pioneering sensation-action “feedback-cycle” model for explaining the mechanics of biological meaning was revolutionary for its time. Indeed, it anticipated by many decades the science of cybernetics, which studies systems of control. But his model is now considered too mechanical and simplistic by most biosemioticians. To build what they hope might be a more scientifically fertile model, many of them base their understanding on the semiotic logic of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
What matters is exactly what. Old is the new new. Wholesomely.
via bravenewwhat.org
http://bravenewwhat.org/manifesto/#
[The Author is dead you].
Jesse Darling reserves the right to maintain a fluid position.
Please contribute to the discussion —>
Scroll down to read the evolving manifesticon.
Love,
JD xxx
oh man — It’s late. Don’t be asking me for a manifesto
No, irony is not over, no matter how much you roll your eyes at it.
Damien Hirst was here and then he left. The part which is more important is the part which is less likely to change the world. What matters is exactly what. Old is the new new. Wholesomely.
by @jessedarling
via le @fadereu
conditiones sine quibus non identitas indiscernibilium
conditiones sine quibus non identitas indiscernibilium
(on the technological engineering of the vanity and suffering of life)
There are many distinct levels of suffering within our human experience. There are objective and subjective realms of suffering. There is physical, measurable pain; but there is also psychological, subjective pain. Much on the same way that our bodies are endowed with neural networks that respond to sensorial impulses according to a biological configuration which was predetermined by our genetic traces; decoding such impulses into “pleasure” or “pain”; we can also say that our emotional and intellectual bodies are endowed with certain specificities that were somehow predetermined by the sum of our life experiences. As a consequence of exposure to different life experiences, many of us develop psychological mechanisms to find pleasure in pain; or to find pain in pleasure.
Suffering is, in itself, a perceptual experience. It exists only in relation to our perception, so the way we choose to perceive and decode an experience is what will determine its category. It is a fact that the human experience of happiness or suffering could be many times detached from the factual conditions of an event. Brazilians are a prime example of this: even when amidst social conditions of brutal poverty, injustice and violence, many individuals are somehow capable of finding joy in their daily struggles. Some cultures seem to be prone to a joyful uptake on suffering as an integral part of the magnificence of life… If life is unavoidable suffering, let’s embrace it as it is and celebrate anyway!
Another very interesting case of manipulation of our perception of suffering is the use of antidepressants. Instead of a tropical, cultural deactivation of the experience of suffering by refusing to be depressed by its pain (Brazilians); Americans seem to have found a biotechnological way to avoid the suffering of life: Prozac. According to the American pharmaceutical way of life, all suffering is unnecessary. How bad does it hurt? A little? Take one pill. Really bad? Take three pills. No matter what your life circumstances are, eventually you will get numbed and/or excited, and a smile will come back to your face.
But even this artificial pharmaceutical happiness could be seen, in Schopenhauer, as part of our conditiones sine quibus non. Even this sort of perceptual manipulation of the experience of suffering will soon come to an end, for when the intensity of pain is great enough, no mechanism of avoidance is able to numb it, be it through biochemical means or cultural means. And there are intense pains to be found everywhere in our human experience, especially in death – be it in the death of our beloveds or in our own… So the unavoidability of suffering is indeed a fact of life, but is there a way out of it?
I seem to find an exit sign that is placed on my own identitas indiscernibilium.
Renata Lemos
Saas Fee, 2010
The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun.
The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones.
Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation. Many are world capitals that have evolved and adapted through centuries of dominance: London, New York, Paris. New York City’s economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa’s economies combined. Hong Kong receives more tourists annually than all of India. These cities are the engines of globalization, and their enduring vibrancy lies in money, knowledge, and stability. They are today’s true Global Cities.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/beyond_city_limits?page=full