Why the Market Must be Governed

This is a presentation I have been playing with the ideas are still very rough, but I think they should be shared if they are to be improved. :) The thesis is simple – challenge a fundamentalist neo-classical concept of ‘free market’ economics – the concept of Equilibrium – which is based on the 19th Century physics of a closed system of atomistic, isolated entities....

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Stepping into a new familial meme pool

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other worlds, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale. G. K. Chesterton In addition to an anxiety engendered by a parental love award on a basis of competitive merit - Margaret Mead points out, the American child...

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What would McLuhan say to the idea that Google is making us stupid?

The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. Marshall McLuhan 1967...

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Ten Days at Monk Camp

Today, well I guess I mean yesterday, I finished my third 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. A wonderful, an intense experience - essentially requiring no talking, eye-contact, writing, reading, electronics, connection to the outside world. Two meals a day and (depending on capacity, 7-9 hours of meditative sitting a day). Why would someone do this. :) Meditation in essence is a pragmatic technique and practice of mind-training - training the...

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Some Wandering Thoughts on the Metaphor of the Stage

The metaphor of the stage is an interesting one. There is a theory of the mind/consciousness "the theater of consciousness the workspace of the mind" http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/baars/other/BaarsJCS1997.pdf that talks of the brain (and the minds extension) creates consciousness through the construction of a 'stage'. This is much the same as Nicholas Humphrey in his lovely short easy to grasp book "Seeing Red" posits as the 'platform'...

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