Most discussions about magic certainly raise the pragmatist’s eyebrow. However, people who dismiss magic as a whole because of the explanations provided overlook the fact that we only make explanations if there’s something there to explain. In a sense, this is why there is a growing number of magicians and sorcerers delving into obscure and [...]
Originally published in 1978, and republished with the additional text Psychonaut in 1987.
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Feedback loops can be thought of as self-perpetuating situations, or active tautological events. The study of language evolution provides a way of thinking about the effect of feedback loops over time.
Note: We were both unaware of the book I Am A Strange Loop (2007) by Douglas Hofstadler at the time [...]
Objects of Persuasion, focusing on the cognitive elements of persuasion, featuring a number of speakers. This video is an hour long, and we suggest some people keep a notebook at hand.
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Several versions of this type of application are available for experimentation.
Semacode
ScanLife
NeoReader
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Grof, Stanislav and Bennet Hal Z. (1993) The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
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Phage is a term taken from the study of viruses and applied here as an analogy, along with the term capsid used earlier in the text. Phages are viruses which devour the cellular structure, creating copies of themselves in the process.
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See Chapter Nine, the discussion about the massive multiplayer online worlds and specifically the differences between Second Life and World of Warcraft. Also see Footnote 55, regarding the effect of stress on a group mind.
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Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes. The following video was produced by Michael Wesch and is titled The Machine is Us/ing Us from MediatedCultures
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The following clip of Howard Bloom comes from The Pitch, Poker, and the Public, an interesting documentary on the art of the sales pitch:
Howard Bloom’s book The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History succinctly presents some very powerful ideas about the structure of society as organism.
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We highly recommend the Appendices in Shea, R. and Wilson, R.A. (1975) Leviathan, especially Gimel and Lamed. Sorting out the contradictory statements on magic from a historical perspective is a perplexing, yet enlightening task. However, essentially all magic boils down to the two words, “Reinforce Often.”
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Lynch, Aaron. (1996) Thought Contagion. In this book, his analysis of Mormonism through the lens of memetics places emphasis on generational transmission, and highlights these factors as evolutionary pressures.
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Marx, K and Engles, F. in “The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas”
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Or that the communication methods themselves are predisposed toward carrying a specific type of “social change” meme – twitter, for example, was predisposed to carry a ‘twitter revolution’ meme, regardless of any real world situation.
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A capsid is the outer protein shell of a virus, responsible for protecting the internal operating system of the virus, detecting suitable surrounding carriers for viral infection (i.e. cell walls) and for forming an opening into the suitable carriers. In memetics, the capsid is referring to the casing of a meme, or the point of [...]
Teilhard writes of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the singularity.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1959) The Phenomena of Man
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The teleconference is also an ideal interface for a mastermind group working non-locally, especially when supplemented with file and document sharing online.
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