Showing posts with label digital consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital consciousness. Show all posts

Sunday, March 20, 2016

The Origins of Consciousness in the Technological Age



Published on Jan 20, 2014
Panelists:

Graham Hancock is the bestselling author of The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis, Heaven's Mirror and other investigations of historical mysteries. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have sold over five million copies worldwide. His public lectures and broadcasts, including two major TV series, Quest for the Lost Civilisation, and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, have further established his reputation as an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity's past. In 2005 Graham published Supernatural: Meetings with The Ancient Teachers of Mankind, an investigation of shamanism and the origins of religion. While researching Supernatural Hancock travelled to the Amazon to drink visionary brew Ayahuasca - the Vine of Souls - used by shamans for more than 4,000 years.

Dennis McKenna's professional and personal interests are focused on the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia, where his doctoral research focused on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally-active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Dr. McKenna received post-doctoral research fellowships in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and in the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and serves on the advisory board of non-profit organizations in the fields of ethnobotany and botanical medicines. Dr. McKenna is well known as the brother of Terence McKenna, a cultural icon in the psychedelic community. Together they are co-authors of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1st Edition: HarperCollins 1993) and Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (under the pseudonyms O.N. Oeric & O.T. Oss) (And/Or Press, 1976; 2nd Edition, Lux Natura, 1986). He has recently completed a new memoir entitled: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna. http://brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss...

Mark Pesce - Inventor, Writer, Educator and Futurist - Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for a quarter of a century. His work has kept him on the forefront of emerging developments in science, technology and media. With a unique ability to make abstract concepts clear for lay audiences and to further the knowledge of the technologically savvy, he is a highly sought after public speaker, lecturing throughout the world on a variety of topics -- from the latest trends on the Internet, to current developments in neuroeconomics, to the future of design in an energy-conscious world. Pesce is first and foremost a storyteller, taking everyday examples from the world around us, then using these to illuminate the finer features of world that seems to be changing more rapidly every day. The author of five books and numerous articles, Pesce is widely respected as a technologist, futurist, philosopher and communicator who can translate abstract concepts into concrete explanations. Mainstream publications such as Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the interactive era. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age. For the last three seasons, Pesce has been a panelist on the hit ABC show THE NEW INVENTORS. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. His mandate - to bring cinema and broadcast television into the interactive era - led him to create a program that encouraged creative vision and is now producing a generation of award-winning entertainment professionals who are shaping the media of the 21st century.

Mitch Schultz began his life journey in Memphis, Tennessee and has since called Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, Europe and Peru home. Guided by his lifelong love of storytelling, Mitch has cultivated a multi-disciplinary expertise in transmedia and culture hacking through writing, directing, and producing. He earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Texas at Austin, primarily focused on media production, communication theory, and information mapping. Soon after, Mitch completed his Masters of Fine Arts at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Following Schultz's 2011 award winning documentary, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, he launched the DMTRMX project, a multi-platform experience that serves as the model for the four-part MNTTKA Manifesto.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The War on some drugs meets Virgin Google U.N and wikileaks

  The War on some drugs meets Virgin Google U.N and wikileaks

I get my pot absolutely free from the Women's Alliance for medical marijuana which doesn't charge, its a cooperative and we do what we can to keep it going, now they have been raided we're gonna have to do more, we're gonna have to decentralize even further, decentralize the production, the making of the tinctures, the cookies, the brownies and whatever forms we wanna take it in that's best for our condition, some people still smoke it, and were gonna have to decentralize the growth and production and distribution.--Robert Anton Wilson, 2002, Santa Cruz CA.


I was about to start a piece about the proposed Dutch changes in laws concerning their famous cannabis coffee shops, due to the fact that today, April 18th 2012, my employers and some representatives from other Dutch Coffee Shops lodged a court injunction against the Dutch Government and their plans to implement the ‘weed pass’ nationwide, not only in the problematic southern (boarder) states.

However, I was interrupted by discovering a short excerpt from a video interview with Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange in which he speaks about Marijuana, the so called ‘war on drugs’ and cognitive liberty in an intelligent, witty and precise manner. The entire debate, the first of a new series developed by Google called ‘Versus War On Drugs’

It has been a part of my fantasy writings over the last three years since Wikileaks burst onto the global scene, that they might eventually highlight the crooked ‘war on drugs’ along with their long list of unfairly secretive business transactions and government/corporate corruption. After all, the ‘war on some drugs’ spans the globe, wastes Trillions of Dollars and brings terror and torture into the lives of Billions.

Although provoked by the questioner, Assange throws down his libertarian wisdom and sense of individualist anarchism, in my view, all over the ‘war on some drugs’, which leads to a much clearer view of the current Dutch coffee shop debacle, and the sense of discrimination applied further to the neurological realm.

The similarities between the fights for digital freedoms and the fights for cognitive freedoms seem to be converging at an ever increasing, exponential rate. As Douglas Rushkoff has put it ‘program or be programmed’ implying we have the means to program ourselves and our environment if we choose to engage. But engage with what?

Some brave and noble folk are perpetually fighting the digital baddies, or those government think tanks, those lawyers and those entertainment industry cry-babies, by challenging their draconian proposed measures and new laws and terror scenarios with superior information, scientific and balanced feedback, and most importantly a decentralized network philosophy. The EFF, Wikileaks, and boing boing contributors exhibit these positive attributes and almost singlehandedly threaten any proposed ‘new world order’ once again by obsoleting the opposition with superior methodology, intelligence and strategy.

We the cannabis culture, or we the collective of self-owning ones who enjoy cannabis and its many benefits (health, speech, thought, economy) welcome the intelligent decentralized strategies performed by example by these defenders of ‘equalibrium’ and ‘fairness’ with a particular fondness of going after the biggest, baddest sons of bitches out there, the so called ‘intelligence services’ and private ‘spy agencies’, the military industrial complex and surveillance industries, and of course, lets not forget the limp and mostly empty ‘mainstream media’ that apparently could not and today cannot compare with even 5 % of Wikileaks, or Boingboing for that matter, based on information content (based on predictability of story and coverage of events). Try it, go on. Go to BBC website, and then to Wikileaks, then the daily mail, and then boingboing. Now, anything surprise you? I recall the saying "an empty vessel sounds loudest'

May I attempt to further suppose that the key to keeping the ‘coffee-shop’ scene and industry (that I personally work in) alive and kicking is.... surprise or unpredictability in the face of the easily guessed at(that which is low in information) the same old game and the same old tactics which often involve bullying, meaningless statements plus the arts and crafts of ‘disinformation’. Superior experimental intelligence cuts through these centrist authoritarian/totalitarian games like a warm knife through soft hash.

After watching the full Google versus debate I feel like I have ingested a few grams of some psychedelic compound, when listening to the crazy prohibitionists and corporate military propagandists repeat their 'rhetoric' I started having hallucinations that Julian Assange was in the debate, and Russel Brand too, who for me, were the only characters who added any spice and anything approaching a representation of the 'drug culture' but no MUSIC, no ART, no LITERATURE or COMEDY was presented as evidence, no mention of Terence Mckenna, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Sasha Shulgin, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kessey, no, not a trace.

Whereas, for me, these are the individual thinkers and writers who dedicated their lives to coming to understand the question of 'alchemically mediated consciousness' and so then, by default the major blockage and 'befuddlement' factor: the age old inquisition, the prohibition and the wars against altered states of consciousness, and it's current incarnation: the global war on SOME drugs.

And please, lets not forget the terminology used to disrupt the thinking process, once more, 'the war on drugs' actually functions as a 'war on SOME drugs' and the lack of definitions in this particular area, being that it involves complex chemical neurological and environmental factors, remains a consistant strategy employed by the prohibitionists and inquisitors world wide. Beware of the FNORDS!

"There's more of everything, the more they fight it the more drugs appear, it's like Lao Tzu said "The more laws they pass the more criminals they create and the more weapons they create the more terror stalks the land" - the more clearer the explanations the more frogs fall out of the sky.--Robert Anton Wilson, 2002, Santa Cruz CA.

Watch for yourself here:



Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt. 18th April 2012.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=gSrN2zIRwN8