Bergson makes sense of Pollock

Hans Namuth, the photographer, writes about his visit to Jackson Pollock's studio:

"A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor … There was complete silence … Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter"

Referring to his "drip" style, Pollock states, “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk round it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the methods of the Indian sand painters of the West.” Pollock objected to the term "accident". His work, a mixture of controllable (his body) and uncontrollable factors (paint viscosity, canvas absorption and gravity) is a beautiful metaphor of Life's chaotic nature. But it's "a part of the painting" that keeps one thinking. Namuth points out Pollock's accomplishment: "He has managed to free the line from its function of representing objects in the world".

Pollock's paintings are the closest artistic reflection of a human's innards because 'representation' doesn't come in the way ! It is pure expression. Just as Bergson argues that words are labels clouding experience, unable to express objective reality or our deep psyche and suggests immediacy and intuition as means to access the 'real', Pollock echoes his thinking in paint: Authentic art is the immediate coincidence with what is - a dimension away from the mental fantasies we dip reality in - It's an unveiling of reality itself and a vision of what is beyond our daily worn out symbols.

The Eternal Deja Vu

Today's mind-blowing Impossible comes courtesy of Douglas Coupland :)

"I take comfort in the fact that there are two human moments that seem to be doled out equally and democratically within the human condition—and that there is no satisfying ultimate explanation for either. One is coincidence, the other is déja vu. It doesn’t matter if you’re Queen Elizabeth, one of the thirty-three miners rescued in Chile, a South Korean housewife or a migrant herder in Zimbabwe—in the span of 365 days you will pretty much have two déja vus as well as one coincidence that makes you stop and say, “Wow, that was a coincidence.” (...)"

"What’s both eerie and interesting to me about déja vus is that they occur almost like metronomes throughout our lives, about one every six months, a poetic timekeeping device that, at the very least, reminds us we are alive. I can safely assume that my thirteen year old niece, Stephen Hawking and someone working in a Beijing luggage-making factory each experience two déja vus a year. Not one. Not three. Two. The underlying biodynamics of déja vus is probably ascribable to some sort of tingling neurons in a certain part of the brain, yet this doesn’t tell us why they exist."

Deja Vus might be triggered by a certain set of events or a specific thought pattern, unique for each of us: You're scrolling through an article, see the color blue and feel the wind caressing your hand - suddenly the station you're visiting for the first time looks familiar. Most likely Deja Vus are an evolutionary bug ! The brain is made aware of a present perception but labels it as a past perception. The now is perceived as a souvenir ! Imagine you save your powerpoint on the 6/6/14 and the computer shows "5/4/13" - Imagine your brain perceiving the present as an eternal past, because two neural paths misfired simultaneously. As if you had lived all your life already and were just reviewing it constantly ! Imagine an eternal life-long Deja Vu !

Hell, Heaven and Now

Daniel Everett, a priest and linguist, was sent into the Amazonian jungle to convert the Piraha people to Christianism:

Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Pirahã discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Pirahã were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion. Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Pirahã. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Pirahã and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.

"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often. So then I find myself with the Pirahã. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."

Beyond religion, Everett closes saying "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Pirahã taught me that very lesson. Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live."

What your desktop can teach you about evolution

In his chapter about our "Sensory Desktop", part of "This Will Make you Smarter", Donald D. Hoffman writes:

Computers are notoriously complex devices, more complex than most of us care to learn. The colors, shapes and locations of icons on a desktop shield us from the computer's complexity, and yet they allow us to harness its power by appropriately informing our behaviors, such as mouse movements and button clicks, that open, delete and otherwise manipulate files. In this way, a graphical desktop is a guide to adaptive behavior.

Graphical desktops make it easier to grasp the idea that guiding adaptive behavior is different than reporting truth. A red icon on a desktop does not report the true color of the file it represents. Indeed, a file has no color.

See ? A file has no color ! It is a mere representation of something far more complex. Series of 0 and 1 computed by electricity, chips and circuits. More amazing is how Donald turns this into a metaphor for evolution:

Just as red does not report the true color of a file, so hotness does not report the true feeling of attractiveness of a face: Files have no intrinsic color, faces have no intrinsic feeling of attractiveness. The color of an icon is an artificial convention to represent aspects of the utility of a colorless file. The initial feeling of attractiveness is an artificial convention to represent mate utility.

The case for veggie sound effects

Wikipedia mentions how Heston Blumenthal "pioneered the use of sound as part of the dining experience with his Sound of the Sea dish where diners listen to a recording of the seaside – crashing waves with occasional sounds of distant seagulls, children's laughter and the horn of a ship, while they eat a dish of king fish". Barry Smith adds:

Flavour perception is the result of multisensory integration of gustatory, olfactory and oral somatosensory information into a single experience whose components we are unable to distinguish. It is one of the most multi-sensory experiences we have and can be influenced by both sight and sound. The colours of wines and the sounds food make when we bite or chew them can have large impacts on our resulting appreciation and assessment - Barry C. Smith, The Senses and the Multisensory in This will make you smarter

With an insight like this, how do you make children eat more veggies and fruits? Not by tuning broccolis into animated cartoons unfortunately. But by making vegetable and fruit eating an unforgettable multisensory experience !

Eating bananas ? Put the sound of the jungle. Bring the rainforest to the kitchen. Play a movie of a chimpanzee jumping from tree to tree to get his banana. Tomato soup ? A volcano video on the side ! Iceberg lettuce for the first time ? Put the sound of an iceberg breaking in the background ! Something memorable ...

Every vegetable serving should come with a soundtrack, imagery and visual effects !

What a person is

Those who watched the movie "Her" might remember Alan Watts. In a book called "The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety", Watts destroys the distinction between nature and nurture. It is merely a nonsensical concept that creates the illusion that there is a "real you" that somewhat gets distorted. Watts, as quoted by Brain-pickings, fleshes out the absurdity of a separate self and ego, by reminding us of the origin of the word "person": 

The person, from the Latin persona, was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through (per) which the sound (sonus) came.

W. T. Fitch chops down this separateness even more:

The antidote to "nature versus nurture" thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of "instincts to learn" (...) Songbird vocal learning is the classic example of an instinct to learn. The songbird's drive to listen, and to sing, and to shape its song to that which it heard, is all instinctive. (...) Nonetheless, the actual song that it sings is learned, passed culturally from generation to generation. (...)  If the young bird hears no song, it will produce only an impoverished squawking, not a typical song.

What we are is not a "mix" of nature and nurture. We are a whole with a will.

Privacy is an anomaly

There have been such passionate pleadings in favor of "privacy" that one wonders why and how we've become so passionate about keeping things to ourselves ?

Up until the 19th century, most houses had few or no internal walls. Bathing was a public act. For most of the post-Roman era, the very concept of “solitude” was limited to clergy, who dedicated their lives to private worship. “Intercourse, birth, death, just about every aspect of the life cycle plays out with some sort of audience,” architectural historian Bernard Herman explained to me.

Perhaps the real concern is with information privacy? Well, that’s new too. The “right to privacy” was not coined until 1890, by future Chief Justice Louis Brandeis. The right to privacy would not be recognized by the Supreme Court until the landmark 1967 case, Katz v. The United States

Gregory Ferenstein, Techcrunch

1967 ! Privacy started with a tribe member’s first wooden wall: A way to choose what he wanted to share with his community, a means to carve his social image. Walls are the original, real-world version of Facebook’s sharing settings.

“So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be interested in privacy, but I am suggesting to you that it’s an accident, in some respect, of the urban revolution,” concludes Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet evangelist.

Let's Flip Education

Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally — doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside; learning about sex — free of their parents. Those four ‘missing’ years of school could be added on, at a much later age. At, say, age 50-54 everyone would have to go back to school. (One could get a deferment for a few years, in special cases, if one was in a special work or creative project that couldn’t be broken off.) In this 50-54 schooling, have strong pressure to learn a new job or profession — plus liberal arts stuff, general science (ecology, biology), and language skills.

Susan Sontag - As consciousness is harnessed into flesh

Nothing to add :)