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To be, or not to be — that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep, No more. And by a sleep, to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is…
Although the dictionary definition of "pagan" simplply describes someone who is neither Jewish, Christian, nor Mos lem, a more practical working definition might encompass a religious philosophy of immanence—that the divine is present in all creation, but in manifold forms. Thus the Roman hearth belonged to Vesta, the…
Here are some examples of the principles that teachers can use to expand concepts presented in formal course material. These principles don't have to be taught in the context of any particular class. It's an empirical question. This is a comment that ought to terminate many more conversations than it does. For many of…
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However…
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they'd implanted it, but that didn't make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not…
Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely…
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable…
The humanist has a feeling of perfect athomeness in the universe. He is conscious of himself as an earth child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of his long ancestry still ring in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, he has a secure…
In any system of meditation, one can categorize the techniques endlessly. One could divide them into active, passive, and waking, or make distinctions between mental, emotional, and physical meditations. Active meditation techniques require you to focus on some object to the exclusion of all else - like a meditating…
The ingenuity and effective logic that enabled chemists to determine complex molecular structures from the number of isomers, the reactivity of the molecule and of its fragments, the freezing point, the empirical formula, the molecular weight, etc., is one of the outstanding triumphs of the human mind.
At this point I want to introduce a distinction between mind viruses that arose spontaneously and ones that were invented by human consciousness. I'll call the naturally arising ones cultural viruses and the human-crafted ones designer viruses. A designer virus is carefully crafted to infect people with a set of memes…
Your wife can be shown the principles of relaxation and she can be taught the consciousness of her muscles' state of tension in prenatal classes under the supervision of experienced teachers. Being a human animal, however, she needs to practice these principles at home daily in order to perfect them. This you can help…