un angolo lucente

"È permesso ascoltare musica se non è fatta apposta per il divertimento e per la distrazione." Ayatollah Ali al Sistani (1930-)

We begin where we are.
So, where are we?
Better, before we move from A to B, to know that we are at A.
How do we know where we are?
By getting to know ourselves.
How do we get to know ourselves?

We put part of our attention on the outside, and part of our attention on the inside.
We divide our attention between what we are doing, and our internal responses to what we are doing.
We watch what we are doing, while simultaneously watching our responses:
sensing our physical relaxation;
our thinking;
our feeling.

So, how well we get to know ourselves is determined by our capacity to divide the attention.
That is, how well we get to know ourselves is determined by the quality of our attention.
We know ourselves to the degree that our attention is available to know ourselves.
The extent of our attention in time is called our Present Moment.
The spacial extent of our attention is reflected in how far, geographically, our interests & influence extend.
This is sometimes referred to as our level of Being.
So, how much attention do we have?
The quick answer, from someone who has been looking at this for a long time, is not very much.

RF

The quality of our perceptions determines the quality of our judgement. Our judgement determines how we interact with the world.
How we interact with the world changes the world. So, the quality of our perceptions changes the world.
RF

So, acting in the world is a way of practising our discipline; the aim is to “acquire” discipline. Discipline then becomes our framework for action, and any “success in the world” a by-product of that aim. A sufficiency of worldly success, in this sense, is that we may continue to refine our practice.

Also, refection on negativity; the extent to which media life is driven by negativity; how this damages the culture & ourselves personally. What a struggle: to be within a field of negativity and not going with the current, particularly when there are so many “good reasons” for being negative.

RF

station is where we live, state is where we are visiting. we all have a particular centre of gravity, our own "quality of vibration". this is not fixed for eternity, but changes as we grow & develop (cf the scheme of the Idiots). nevertheless, for a period of time (however long that may be) this is our particular resonating frequency, or note, in the symphony of life.

state is brief: it’s where we are for a short amount of time, how we are feeling at this moment. state can be higher or lower: for example, inspired or despairing. in exceptional cases of a higher state, this may last for perhaps 3 days, and then we return to our station. if we have been in a higher state, this feels like falling to earth. in a higher state, we might say we are "visiting a better place"; although my hunch is, the better place is visiting us.

so, state is temporary; station is governed by our level of personal development & ongoing.

a danger of knowing a higher state, for the immature and/or inexperienced, is to confuse this with one’s station. that is, to believe we belong by virtue of our being and/or personal capacity to a world that is, actually, beyond us. for example, professional is often mistaken for mastery, and mastery for genius. if we are fortunate enough to be around an exceptional person, we find we enter the world to which they belong. it is a fantasy to think that this is our world; ie our state changes in the presence of the remarkable, but we don’t live there - we are only visiting!

RF

The Greeks assumed that the cosmos is perfectly ordered and arranged; the word cosmos itself means both "all that is" and "beauty." Pythagoras therefore figured that the distance between the planets must reflect the order and harmony of the universe. But harmony is based on mathematics: Divide a string into the ratios 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4, pluck it, and you hear something beautiful. So, Pythagoras reasoned, the heavenly spheres must fall into those ratios. Since they move, they must also make sound as they whir, a sound that must therefore be harmonious and beautiful. We're not aware of the second because we've been hearing it since birth. It's become background "noise." Thus did the Greeks deduce that we must all live within an unheard beauty.

Now that everything in the connected world can serve as metadata, knowledge is empowered beyond fathoming. We not only find what we need based on whatever slight traces we have in our hand, we can see connections that would have escaped notice in the first two orders. The power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order, everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata.

We've tried to settle on a single, comprehensive framework for knowledge, with categories so clear and comprehensive that experts can put each thing in its proper place. Institutions grew to maintain the knowledge framework. Their ability to certify experts and to vouch for knowledge made them powerful and, sometimes, rich. So when the miscellaneous shakes our certainty in the nature of knowledge, more than the future of the catalogue is at stake. Because a third-order miscellany is digital, not physical, we no longer have to agree on a single framework. Things have their places, not a single place. We get to create our own categories, ones that suit our way of thinking. Experts can be helpful, but in the age of the miscellaneous they and their institutions are no longer in charge of our ideas.

Given the title of his book [Origin of the Species], we can be confident that Darwin did not mean to say that species are merely fictitious or arbitrary ways of carving up the animal kingdom. Darwin was pointing to the difficulty of defining perfectly - note his swipe at essentialism in the phrase "essence of the term species" - what for him was a very real joint of nature. But biologists have argued ever since Darwin over where exactly to carve. One expert, Marc Ereshefsky, counts a dozen different concepts. Some scientists argue quite seriously that species denote nothing real, a position held by none less than Thomas Jefferson, who argued that "Classes, orders, genera, species, are not of her [Nature's] work. Her creation is of individuals." So, arguments over the long-billed lark go on. Having lost essentialism, we don't have a replacement that does as good a job at divvying up the things of the world. We don't even have confidence that there is an inarguable way to divide the world into types of things. And that's a problem, because as the world becomes more miscellaneous, if we can't pin something down, we can't coalesce information around it. Essentialism is still with us, even if it is no longer an option for evolutionary scientists. As the philosopher James Danaher points out, we think there is a disease called "cancer" with some essential traits. The cure, we've assumed, will attack those essential traits. But cancer now seems to be a collection of hundreds of diseases. What we call breast cancer alone may include dozens of different diseases, each of which may have multiple causes. The same may be true of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, the midlife crisis, and the common cold. The search for a cure for each of these is a result of our essentialism…essentialism makes the world seem more manageable, but it can lead us to miss what's really going on.

We'll never be done making sense of these piles of information. Because tags are created by ordinary people using words that are meaningful to them, there will always be ambiguity. Is "SF San Francisco, San Fernando, or Sally Field? That ambiguity can be a problem if you have to find absolutely every resource available. But if you're at Flickr to browse photos of San Francisco because you're planning to go as a tourist, it won't really matter if some of the more than 680,000 pictures tagged "San Francisco' are actually pictures of San Francisco in Guatemala or if you miss a few thousand photos of the Golden Gate because they were tagged "SF." The ambiguity may even introduce you to other San Franciscos we want to visit.

In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning even though we can't yet know what we'll do with this new domain. Certainly some will mine it for knowledge that will change our lives through science and business. But knowledge will be only one product. Knowledge's new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning. Knowledge is thus not being dethroned. We are way too good at knowing, and our continued progress - and survival - depends on it. But knowledge is now not our only project or our single highest calling. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning.

Over the course of time we have largely let go of our Aristotelian belief that there is only one right and true tree of knowledge, but we have behaved as if the rule was still in effect because we have had to use atoms - usually paper - to preserve and transmit information…In the third order of order, a leaf can hang on many branches, it can hang on different branches for different people, and it can change branches for the same person if she decides to look at the subject differently. It's not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-envision four-dimensional tree. In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.


Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder


David Weinberger

En tant que premier principe dont le reste dérive, elle connaît, et en tant que ce qui est le plus subtil, elle est moteur. (Aristote, De l'âme, I, II, 405 a 21)

387. Io ho due livres de chevet: il De rerum natura di Lucrezio e Le Metamorfosi di Ovidio. Vorrei che tutto ciò che scrivo derivasse dall'uno o dall'altro, o da entrambi. Palomar gravita decisamente dalla parte di Lucrezio; il risultato che desideravo ottenere è quella sua conoscenza minuziosa della natura delle cose, così minuziosa che la loro stessa sostanza si dissolve sul punto di essere afferrata. Per anni ho cercato di appuntarmi tutto quello che mi sembrava un'esperienza di "conoscenza". Per conoscere devi incominciare dalla superficie: prendi un oggetto e lo descrivi. Ogni oggetto pone un problema di lettura... Palomar è un tentativo di lettura delle cose.

[Da un'intervista di Paul Fournel a Italo Calvino in Italo Calvino newyorkese di Dido Sacchettoni a cura di Anna Botta e Domenico Scarpa]

grazie ad http://akatalepsia.blogspot.com/

Più grande la necessità, più grande l'aiuto disponibile, se avete nostalgia di me chiedete a Diogene Malamati.



Ma andate anche a vedervi La Teoria delle Ombre.

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