sexta-feira, 29 de outubro de 2010
quarta-feira, 27 de outubro de 2010
Genesis (da propaganda)
No princípio criou Deus o Paraíso. E, para estragar tudo, o Capeta criou o consumo, quando a Serpente deu a maçã a Eva e assim gerou a primeira consumidora: Eva. Que, não satisfeita em comprar o Fruto Proibido, vendeu-o a Adão.Expulsos do Paraíso, o Primeiro Homem e a Primeira Mulher habitaram a Terra e seus filhos de tal forma pecaram que Deus castigou-os com o Dilúvio. Passados os quarenta dias e quarenta noites das águas, Deus criou o primeiro luminoso publicitário da história: o Arco-Iris. E a primeira mala-direta: a pomba que trouxe a Noé o ramo de oliveira.
Havia sido dada a partida. Na continuação, a Igreja criou o primeiro logotipo, o mais perfeito da História: a Cruz. E colocou esta marca na ponta do primeiro display do mundo: o prédio da Igreja, o mais alto, o que mais se destacava na paisagem de todas as cidades do mundo civilizado.. Para mostrar a todos os viajantes e passantes: é ali, naquele lugar, que mora o meu Deus. Dentro da Igreja, uma vasta campanha iconográfica dos anjos e santos do Paraíso prenunciava aos crentes as delícias da vida eterna, com todos os benefícios da salvação. Nascia assim o marketing de incentivos.
Imediatamente abaixo do logotipo, a Igreja criou a primeira mídia do mundo. Aquela que anunciava os nascimentos, as tentativas de invasão dos inimigos, os casamentos, os incêndios, aquela que conclamava o povo à oração: o sino. E durante os ofícios religiosos, a Igreja já empregava um instrumento condicionador do consumo de seus serviços: a música barroca, como primeiro gênero de trilha sonora.
Dentro do Templo, sábia, a Igreja criou o primeiro Instituto de Pesquisas: o confessionário. Ali se conheciam as intrigas palacianas, os segredos políticos e econômicos, os cambalachos financeiros, permitindo aos administradores da Igreja controlar a vida secular. De tal modo o segredo era importante para a inteligência da Igreja que reza a tradição que o Geral da Ordem da Sociedade de Jesus, os jesuítas, também conhecido na Idade Média como o “Papa Negro”, ao expirar, somente passava seu cargo para aquele membro da ordem que possuísse um segredo “capaz de fazer cair uma cabeça coroada”, segredo esse que lhe era sussurado no ouvido moribundo.
Tão pronto surgiram as corporações, a sapiência da Igreja, que criou a palavra propaganda através do estabelecimento da Congregatio Propaganda Fidei, ou “congregação para a propagação da fé” passou a ser copiada na difusão dos benefícios dos produtos produzidos por suas artes e ofícios. Surgiam assim as “enseignes” ou placas de lojas, os pregões públicos, os folhetins, os cartazes anunciando a chegada de navios e suas cobiçadas cargas, os anúncios de vendas de escravos e até mesmo as delícias de uma profissão mais antiga que a propaganda: a prostituição.
Nascida no seio da Igreja, a propaganda passou a fazer letra morta dos pios princípios que a geraram. E em todos os séculos que se encadearam até o surgimento de nossos dias, a propaganda passou a se orientar por uma rosa dos ventos cujos pontos cardeais passaram a ser sexo, amor, dinheiro e fama.
Nos quase duzentos anos de existência da publicidade, tal como hoje a conhecemos, nunca logrou ela fugir, jamais conseguiu ela escapar do contexto onde reinam, absolutos, esses quatro cavaleiros apocalípticos.
Muitos se rebelam contra essa verdade, querendo dar à propaganda uma cândida roupa nova de vestal que ela se nega honestamente a trajar. Porta-voz da sociedade de consumo, nenhum outro papel lhe resta senão o de exercer seu mister, tal como faziam as honradas hetairas de outrora. A preços cada vez mais módicos, é claro….
Havia sido dada a partida. Na continuação, a Igreja criou o primeiro logotipo, o mais perfeito da História: a Cruz. E colocou esta marca na ponta do primeiro display do mundo: o prédio da Igreja, o mais alto, o que mais se destacava na paisagem de todas as cidades do mundo civilizado.. Para mostrar a todos os viajantes e passantes: é ali, naquele lugar, que mora o meu Deus. Dentro da Igreja, uma vasta campanha iconográfica dos anjos e santos do Paraíso prenunciava aos crentes as delícias da vida eterna, com todos os benefícios da salvação. Nascia assim o marketing de incentivos.
Imediatamente abaixo do logotipo, a Igreja criou a primeira mídia do mundo. Aquela que anunciava os nascimentos, as tentativas de invasão dos inimigos, os casamentos, os incêndios, aquela que conclamava o povo à oração: o sino. E durante os ofícios religiosos, a Igreja já empregava um instrumento condicionador do consumo de seus serviços: a música barroca, como primeiro gênero de trilha sonora.
Dentro do Templo, sábia, a Igreja criou o primeiro Instituto de Pesquisas: o confessionário. Ali se conheciam as intrigas palacianas, os segredos políticos e econômicos, os cambalachos financeiros, permitindo aos administradores da Igreja controlar a vida secular. De tal modo o segredo era importante para a inteligência da Igreja que reza a tradição que o Geral da Ordem da Sociedade de Jesus, os jesuítas, também conhecido na Idade Média como o “Papa Negro”, ao expirar, somente passava seu cargo para aquele membro da ordem que possuísse um segredo “capaz de fazer cair uma cabeça coroada”, segredo esse que lhe era sussurado no ouvido moribundo.
Tão pronto surgiram as corporações, a sapiência da Igreja, que criou a palavra propaganda através do estabelecimento da Congregatio Propaganda Fidei, ou “congregação para a propagação da fé” passou a ser copiada na difusão dos benefícios dos produtos produzidos por suas artes e ofícios. Surgiam assim as “enseignes” ou placas de lojas, os pregões públicos, os folhetins, os cartazes anunciando a chegada de navios e suas cobiçadas cargas, os anúncios de vendas de escravos e até mesmo as delícias de uma profissão mais antiga que a propaganda: a prostituição.
Nascida no seio da Igreja, a propaganda passou a fazer letra morta dos pios princípios que a geraram. E em todos os séculos que se encadearam até o surgimento de nossos dias, a propaganda passou a se orientar por uma rosa dos ventos cujos pontos cardeais passaram a ser sexo, amor, dinheiro e fama.
Nos quase duzentos anos de existência da publicidade, tal como hoje a conhecemos, nunca logrou ela fugir, jamais conseguiu ela escapar do contexto onde reinam, absolutos, esses quatro cavaleiros apocalípticos.
Muitos se rebelam contra essa verdade, querendo dar à propaganda uma cândida roupa nova de vestal que ela se nega honestamente a trajar. Porta-voz da sociedade de consumo, nenhum outro papel lhe resta senão o de exercer seu mister, tal como faziam as honradas hetairas de outrora. A preços cada vez mais módicos, é claro….
Sobre a Jornada
O patrocinador do vídeo no fim veio no pacote. Um dia conto como porque se tornou o que é, afinal as grandes são nucleares, não lunares.
quinta-feira, 21 de outubro de 2010
Controlling the Bicameral Minds
Um texto destes não poderia vir de outro lugar que os AcephalicSwines, um grupo top que participo na internet. O conceito de místico é heterodoxo, o poder envolvido no texto é real e é interessante que tais complexos sejam descortinados para a sociedade pensante, afinal, não somos malucos e a magia é bem descrita no longo artigo. Aliás, bem longo, embora valha o tempo investido, mesmo que seja uma leitura misticamente seletiva [mode comédia=on]. Na real, ninguém é capaz de descortinar completamente a realidade dos santos fantasmas, mas uma boa dose de ceticismo e método científico colocam os pensamentos nos devidos lugares. Ao texto.
CONTROLLING MYSTICS THROUGH THEIR BICAMERAL MINDS
by John Flint and Eric Savage
What is the Bicameral Mind?
http://www.neo-techsociety.com/myaccount/library/discovery/nt3.html
The bicameral mind is a human mind functioning in a particular, unconscious mode or manner...in the manner intended by nature. While the bicameral mind[ 1 ] exists in all people, it can be controlled or dominated by a special mode of consciousness developed not through mother nature but volitionally by each individual being. That mind control or domination can be exercised by an individual over himself and others. Or an individual can allow that mode of consciousness in others to control or dominate his or her bicameral mind.
The bicameral mind (two-chamber mind) is one that functions as an unconscious, two-step process. Automatic reactions and thoughts originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and are transmitted to the left hemisphere as instructions to be acted upon. The bicameral functioning is nature's automatic, learned mode of response without regard to conscious thinking. By contrast, man-made consciousness functions through a deliberate, volitional thought process that is independent of nature's bicameral thought process.
Until approximately 3000 years ago, man's brain functioned entirely in nature's automatic bicameral mode. But the automatic bicameral mind became inadequate to handle the mounting problems as societies became more complex. To survive, man was forced to invent a new way of thinking -- a new mode called consciousness that could solve infinitely more complex problems. That consciousness mode involved his newly discovered powers of introspection. His thinking process was further enhanced by new thoughts and insights created by comparisons done through metaphors and analogs.
Consciousness allows a person to make his or her own decisions rather than relying on nature's bicameral process that automatically follows learned customs, traditional rules, and external "authorities". Metaphors and analogs increase a person's range and power of thinking infinitely beyond nature's range. Yet, despite the great advantages in using the man-invented mode of thinking, most people today depend to various degrees on their automatic bicameral mentality and external "authorities" to make their decisions for them.
That bicameral mentality lures people into searching for "sure-thing" guidance from "higher authorities", rather than using their own consciousness for making decisions and determining their actions. Thus, in their search for prepackaged truth and automatic guidance, people seek "higher authorities": religion, politics, true-believer movements, leaders, gurus, cults, astrology, fads, drugs, feelings, and even forms of poetry, music, medicine, nutrition, and psychology. The bicameral mind seeks outside sources that will tell it how to think and act. ...Anyone can exploit the automatic bicameral mind in others by setting up "authorities" for influencing or controlling that bicameral mentality seeking external guidance.
Bicameral mentalities avoid human self-responsibility by seeking and obeying external decision makers. In poker, for example, bicameral tendencies leave players open to being controlled by any conscious individual acting as an external decision maker and authority. In addition, the single, biggest money-losing, mystical concept -- the belief in luck -- is rooted in the bicameral mentality. In fact, most gamblers rely on the phantom "authority" of luck to escape the only valid authority: their own rational consciousness.
Understanding bicameral tendencies in others can provide unbeatable advantages by knowing the external forces that control most people. That understanding enables one not only to predict the actions of others but to control their actions. A poker player, for example, can create unbeatable advantages by projecting any number of phantom "authorities" to which his opponents will obey, act, or react.
The principle of advantageously controlling the bicameral minds of others applies not only to poker but to all competitive situations involving two or more people. Poker, however, provides crisp, clear examples of using the bicameral mind to control people. More important, poker provides countless metaphors to which everyone can relate. Also, most poker players are gamblers. And gambling is a bicameral activity in which people abandon their own rational consciousness to phantom "authorities" such as feelings, luck, priests, and politicians.
The Bicameral Mind in Poker
Poker games exist because of the bicameral urge in most players to gamble. That urge resides in the desire to escape the responsibility for consistently making rational decisions needed to prosper by producing values for others. Gamblers try to escape (at least temporarily) that self-responsibility through an activity such as poker. And through their bicameral urges, gamblers can be controlled by others.
Even the best professional player can succumb to bicameral urges: By playing poker for a living, for example, he avoids involvement in a productive career that demands much more independent, rational thinking than poker. But, the good player can also use poker as a discipline to strengthen both his conscious integrating processes and his abilities to control others.
Exploiting Bicameral Tendencies in Opponents
Through understanding those bicameral urges in others, a good player can generate unbeatable advantages. He creates those advantages by conjuring up external "authorities" for guiding his opponents into actions that benefit him. For example, an opponent is told to "open up" (bet more loosely) because good player X always bets aggressively in the same situation -- and good player X always ends up winning heavily. In that way, player X is set up as an external "authority" for misleading the opponent into making wrong moves based on facts bicamerally accepted out of context. Even greater advantages are gained by realizing that an opponent is bicamerally using rules, information, and odds gleaned from "authorities" such as authors of noncognitive poker books. (Of the 170 poker books published in the past century, only Wallace's book, The Advanced Concepts of Poker, is fully cognitive.)
Bicameral tendencies can also be exploited through subtle maneuvers. For example, mumbling very quietly (almost subaudibly) words that will influence or trigger reactions in opponents who subconsciously hear those "voices". To those opponents, the subconscious voice automatically acts as an external "authority" to be followed. As another example, a player who is hesitant about attending a game after several losing sessions is fed whatever out-of-context facts or spurious "truth" he wants to hear such as, "The worst thing a player can do is quit just as his losing streak is about to end. That's when the odds are the greatest for shifting from a bad-luck streak to a good-luck streak. Managing luck streaks is the whole idea of winning. All winners know that." With such specious "truths" and non sequiturs, the good player establishes himself as an external "authority" in controlling his opponents.
But most important, as demonstrated in the original Neo-Tech Prediscovery, poker generates accurate metaphors needed to identify and then exploit the bicameral tendencies existing in most people. Indeed, those tendencies are readily exploitable beyond the card tables with the same kind of phantom or external "authorities" set up either overtly or subliminally. Such external "authorities" can be established, for example, in religion, politics, psychology, medicine, business, and personal relationships as shown in Neo-Tech II. ...Understanding the bicameral mind is invaluable not only for controlling others but for avoiding being controlled by others.
The discovery of controlling people through their bicameral minds evolved from a more basic discovery made by Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University. His discovery was first identified and then integrated in the following article written for the Neo-Tech Research and Writing Institute.
CONSCIOUSNESS: THE END OF AUTHORITY
by
Frank R. Wallace
A person could make an excellent bet by wagering a hundred ounces of gold that Julian Jaynes's book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will someday rank among the ten most important books ever written. ...Jaynes's book signals the end of a 10,000-year reign of authoritarian institutions. His book also marks the beginning of a new era of individual consciousness during which people will increasingly act on the authority of their own brains. That movement toward self-responsibility will increasingly weaken the influences of external or mystical "authorities" such as government and religion.
The discovery of the bicameral mind solves the missing-link problem that has defied all previous theories of human evolution. But more important, that discovery is generating a new field of knowledge called Neothink with which all human life can evolve into abiding prosperity and happiness through powerfully competitive Neo-Tech advantages.
Dr. Jaynes discovered that until 3000 years ago essentially all human beings were void of consciousness.[ 2 ] Man along with all other primates functioned by mimicked or learned reactions. But, because of his much larger, more complex brain, man was able to develop a coherent language beginning about 8000 B.C. He was then guided by audio hallucinations. Those hallucinations evolved in the right hemisphere of the brain and were "heard" as communications or instructions in the left hemisphere of the brain (the bicameral or two-chamber mind). ...In effect, human beings were super-intelligent but automatically reacting animals who could communicate by talking. That communication enabled human beings to cooperate closely to build societies, even thriving civilizations.
Still, like all other animals, man functioned almost entirely by an automatic guidance system that was void of consciousness -- until about 1000 B.C. when he was forced to invent consciousness to survive in the collapsing bicameral civilizations. ...Today, man's survival still depends on his choice of beneficially following his own consciousness or destructively following the voices of external "authorities".
The major components of Jaynes's discovery are:
All civilizations before 1000 B.C. -- such as Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, pharaonic Egypt -- were built, inhabited, and ruled by nonconscious people.
Ancient writings such as the Iliad and the early books of the Old Testament were composed by nonconscious minds that automatically recorded and objectively reported both real and imagined events. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works such as the Odyssey and the newer books of the Old Testament.
Ancient people learned to speak, read, write, as well as carry out daily life, work, and the professions all while remaining nonconscious throughout their lives. Being nonconscious, they never experienced guilt, never practiced deceit, and were not responsible for their actions. They, like any other animal, had no concept of guilt, deception, evil, justice, philosophy, history, or the future. They could not introspect and had no internal idea of themselves. They had no subjective sense of time or space and had no memories as we know them. They were nonconscious and innocent. They were guided by "voices" or strong impressions in their bicameral minds -- nonconscious minds structured for nature's automatic survival.
The development of human consciousness began about 3000 years ago when the automatic bicameral mind began breaking down under the mounting stresses of its inadequacy to find workable solutions in increasingly complex societies. The hallucinated voices became more and more confused, contradictory, and destructive.
Man was forced to invent and develop consciousness in order to survive as his hallucinating voices no longer provided adequate guidance for survival.
Today, after 3000 years, most people retain remnants of the bicameral guidance system in the form of mysticism and the desire for external authority.
Except for schizophrenics, people today no longer hallucinate the voices that guided bicameral man. Yet, most people are at least partly influenced and are sometimes driven by the remnants of the bicameral mind as they seek, to varying degrees, automatic guidance from the mystical "voices" of others -- from the commanding voices of false external "authorities".
Religions and governments are rooted in the nonconscious bicameral mind that is obedient to the "voices" of external "authorities" -- obedient to the voice of "God", gods, rulers, and leaders.
The discovery that consciousness was never a part of nature's evolutionary scheme (but was invented by man) eliminates the missing-link in human evolution.
Essentially all religious and most political ideas today survive through those vestiges of the obsolete bicameral mind. The bicameral mind seeks omniscient truth and automatic guidance from external "authorities" such as political or spiritual leaders -- or other "authoritarian" sources such as manifested in idols, astrologers, gurus. Likewise, politicians, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists, professors, doctors, journalists and TV anchormen become "authoritarian voices".
The idea of civilizations consisting entirely of nonconscious, yet highly intelligent, automatic-reacting people and the idea of man bypassing nature to invent his own consciousness initially seems incredible. But as Jaynes documents his evidence in a reasoned and detached manner, the existence of two minds in all human beings becomes increasingly evident: (1) the obsolete, nonconscious (bicameral) mind that seeks guidance from external "authorities" for important thoughts and decisions, especially under stressed or difficult conditions; and (2) the newly invented conscious mind that bypasses external "authorities" and provides thoughts and guidance generated from one's own mind. ...Understanding Jaynes's discoveries unlocks the 10,000 year-old secret of controlling the actions of people through their mystical or bicameral minds.
What evidence does Jaynes present to support his discoveries? After defining consciousness, he systematically presents his evidence to prove that man was not conscious until 3000 years ago when the bicameral civilizations collapsed and individuals began inventing consciousness in order to survive. Jaynes's proof begins with the definition of consciousness:
Defining and Understanding Consciousness
Julian Jaynes defines both what consciousness is and what it is not. After speculating on its location, he demonstrates that consciousness itself has no physical location, but rather is a particular organization of the mind and a specific way of using the brain. Jaynes then demonstrates that consciousness is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for concept formation, learning, thinking, or even reasoning. He illustrates how all those mental functions can be performed automatically, intelligently, but unconsciously. Furthermore, consciousness does not contribute to and often hinders the execution of learned skills such as speaking, listening, writing, reading --as well as skills involving music, art, and athletics. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and without consciousness, those same actions and skills can be controlled or driven by external influences, "authorities", or "voices" emanating under conditions described later. ...But first an understanding of consciousness is important:
Consciousness requires metaphors (i.e., referring to one thing in order to better understand or describe another thing -- such as the head of an army, the head of a household, the head of a nail). Consciousness also requires analog models, (i.e., thinking of a map of California, for example, in order to visualize the entire, physical state of California). Thinking in metaphors and analog models creates the mind space and mental flexibility needed to bypass the automatic, bicameral processes.[ 3 ]
The bicameral thinking process functions only in concrete terms and narrow, here-and-now specifics. But the conscious thinking process generates an infinite array of subjective perceptions that permit ever broader understandings and better decisions.
Metaphors of "me" and analog models of "I" allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. In turn, consciousness expands by creating more and more metaphors and analog models. That expanding consciousness allows a person to "see" and understand the relationship between himself and the world with increasing accuracy and clarity.
Consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated analog world that parallels the actual world. Man, therefore, could not invent consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analog models.
The genus Homo began about two million years ago. Rudimentary oral languages developed from 70,000 B.C. to about 8000 B.C. Written languages began about 3000 B.C. and gradually developed into syntactical structures capable of generating metaphors and analog models. Only at that point could man invent and experience consciousness.
Jaynes shows that man's early writings (hieroglyphics, hiertatic, and cuneiform) reflect a mentality totally different from our own. They reflect a nonmetaphoric, nonconscious mentality. Jaynes also shows that the Iliad, which evolved as a sung poem about 1000 B.C., contains little if any conscious thought. The characters in the Iliad (e.g., Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Helen) act unconsciously in initiating all their major actions and decisions through "voices", and all speak in hexameter rhythms (as often do modern-day schizophrenics when hallucinating). Hexameter rhythms are characteristic of the rhythmically automatic functionings of the right-hemisphere brain. Moreover, the Iliad is entirely about action...about the acts and consequences of Achilles. The Iliad never mentions subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone's mind. The language is nonconscious -- an objective reporting of facts that are concrete bound and void of introspection and abstract thought.
With a conscious mind, man can introspect; he can debate with himself; he can become his own god, voice, and decision maker. But before the invention of consciousness, the mind functioned bicamerally: the right hemisphere (the poetic, god-brain) hallucinated audio instructions to the left hemisphere (the analytical, man-brain), especially in unusual or stressful situations. Essentially, man's brain today is physically identical to the ancient bicameral brain; but with his discovery or more precisely his invention of consciousness, he can now choose to focus on integrating the functions of the left and right hemispheres.
Beginning about 9000 B.C. -- as oral languages developed -- routine or habitual tasks became increasingly standardized. The hallucinating voices for performing those basic tasks, therefore, became increasingly similar among groups of people. The collectivization of "voices" allowed more and more people to cooperate and function together through their bicameral minds. The leaders spoke to the "gods" and used the "voices" to lead the masses in cooperative unison. That cooperation allowed nomadic hunting tribes to gradually organize into stationary, food-producing societies. The continuing development of oral language and the increasing collectivization of bicameral minds allowed towns and eventually cities to form and flourish.
The bicameral mind, however, became increasingly inadequate for guiding human actions as societies continued to grow in size and complexity. By about 1000 B.C., the bicameral mind had become so inadequate that man's social structures began collapsing. Under threat of extinction, man invented a new way to use his brain that allowed him to solve the much more complex problems needed to survive -- he invented a new organization of the mind called consciousness.
Jaynes eliminated the missing link in the evolution of man by discovering that consciousness never existed in the evolutionary processes -- consciousness was invented by man.
The Development of Consciousness
Dr. Jaynes shows through abundant archaeological, historical, and biological evidence that the towns, cities, and societies from 9000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. were established and developed by nonconscious people. Those societies formed and grew through common hallucinating voices attributed to gods, rulers, and the dead -- to external "authorities". Various external symbols that "spoke" (such as graves, idols, and statues) helped to reinforce and expand the authority of those common "voices". Such "voices" continued to expand their reach through increasingly visible and awe-inspiring symbols such as tombs, temples, colossuses, and pyramids.
But as those unconscious societies became more complex and increasingly intermingled through trade and wars, the "voices" became mixed and contradictory. With the "voices" becoming muddled, their effectiveness in guiding people diminished. Rituals and importunings became ever more intense and elaborate in attempts to evoke clearer "voices" and better guidance. The development of writing and the permanent recording of instructions and laws during the second millennium B.C. further weakened the authority and effectiveness of hallucinated voices. As the "voices" lost their effectiveness, they began falling silent. And without authoritarian "voices" to guide and control its people, those societies suddenly began collapsing with no external cause.
As the bicameral mind broke down and societies collapsed, individuals one by one began inventing consciousness to make decisions needed to survive in the mounting anarchy and chaos. On making conscious and volitional decisions, man for the first time became responsible for his actions. Also, for short-range advantages and easy power, conscious man began discovering and using deceit and treachery -- behaviors not possible from nonconscious, bicameral minds. ...Before inventing consciousness, man was as guiltless and amoral as any other animal since he had no volitional choice in following his automatic guidance system of hallucinated voices.
As the "voices" fell silent, man began contriving religions and prayers in his attempts to communicate with the departed gods. Jaynes shows how man developed the concept of worship, heaven, angels, demons, exorcism, sacrifice, divination, omens, sortilege, augury in his attempts to evoke guidance from the gods -- from external "authorities".
All such quests for external "authority" hark back to the breakdown of the hallucinating bicameral mind -- to the silencing and celestialization of the once "vocal" and earthly gods.
Much direct evidence for the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the development of consciousness comes from writings scribed between 1300 B.C. and 300 B.C. Those writings gradually shift from nonconscious, objective reports to conscious, subjective expressions that reflect introspection. The jump from the nonconscious writing of the Iliad to the conscious writing of the Odyssey (composed perhaps a century later) is dramatically obvious. In the Odyssey, unlike the Iliad, characters possess conscious self-awareness, introspection powers, and can sense right, wrong, and guilt. ...That radical difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey is, incidentally, further evidence that more than one poet composed the Homeric epics.
The transition from the nonconscious Iliad to the conscious Odyssey marks man's break with his 8000-year-old hallucinatory guidance system. By the sixth century B.C., written languages began reflecting conscious ideas of morality and justice similar to those reflected today.
The Old Testament of the Bible also illustrates the transition from the nonconscious writing of its earlier books (such as Amos, circa 750 B.C.) to the fully conscious writing of its later books (such as Ecclesiastes, circa 350 B.C.). Amid that transition, the book of Samuel records the first known suicide -- an act that requires consciousness. And the book of Deuteronomy illustrates the conflict between the bicameral mind and the conscious mind.
Likewise, the transition to consciousness is observed in other parts of the world: Chinese literature moved from bicameral nonconsciousness to subjective consciousness about 500 B.C. with the writings of Confucius. And in India, literature shifted to subjective consciousness around 400 B.C. with the Upanishadic writings.
American Indians, however, never developed the sophisticated, metaphorical languages needed to develop full consciousness. As a result, their mentalities were probably bicameral when they first encountered the European explorers. For example, with little or no conscious resistance, the Incas allowed the Spanish "white gods" to dominate, plunder, and slaughter them.
The Bicameral Mind in Today's World
Dr. Jaynes identifies many vestiges of the bicameral mentality that exist today. The most obvious vestige is religion and its symbols. Ironically, early Christianity with its teachings of Jesus was an attempt to shift religion from the outmoded bicameral and celestial mind of Moses to the newly conscious and earthly mind of man. Christianity then discovered a devastatingly effective tool for authoritarian control -- guilt. Indeed, guilt not only worked on conscious minds, but required conscious minds to be effective.
Despite religion, conscious minds caused the gradual shifts from governments of gods to governments of men and from divine laws to secular laws. Still, the vestiges of the bicameral mind combined with man's longing for guidance produced churches, prophets, oracles, sibyls, diviners, cults, mediums, astrologers, saints, idols, demons, tarot cards, seances, Ouija boards, glossolalia, fuhrers, ayatollahs, popes, peyote, Jonestown, born-agains.
Jaynes shows how such external "authorities" exist only through the remnants of the bicameral mind. Moreover, he reveals a four-step paradigm that can reshuffle susceptible minds back into hallucinating, bicameral mentalities. The ancient Greeks used a similar paradigm to reorganize or reprogram the minds of uneducated peasant girls into totally bicameral mentalities so they could become oracles and give advice through hallucinated voices -- voices that would rule the world (e.g., the oracle at Delphi). ...Today, people who deteriorate into schizophrenic psychoses follow similar paradigms.
A common thread united most oracles, sibyls, prophets, and demon-possessed people: Almost all were illiterate, all believed in spirits, and all could readily retrieve the bicameral mind. Today, however, retrieval of the bicameral mind is schizophrenic insanity. Also, today, as throughout history, a symptomatic cure for "demon-possessed" people involves exorcising rituals that let a more powerful "authority" or god replace the "authority" of the demon. The New Testament, for example, shows that Jesus and his disciples became effective exorcists by substituting one "authority" (their god) for another "authority" (another god or demon).
As the voices of the oracles became confused and nonsensical, their popularity waned. In their places, idolatry revived and then flourished. But as Christianity became a popular source of external "authority", Christian zealots began physically destroying all competing idols. They then built their own idols and symbols to reinforce the external "authority" of Christianity.
Among today's vestiges of the bicameral mentality is the born-again movement that seeks external guidance. In that movement, people surrender their self-choice and self-decision making in exchange for false promises of protection and guidance. Such vestiges dramatize man's resistance to use his own invention of consciousness to guide his life.
The chanting cadence of poetry and the rhythmic beat of music are also rooted in the bicameral mentality. In ancient writings, the hallucinated voices of the gods were always in poetic verse, usually in dactylic hexameter and sometimes in rhyme or alliteration -- all characteristic of right-brain functionings. The oracles and prophets also spoke in verse. And today schizophrenics often speak in verse when they hallucinate.
Poetry and chants can have authoritarian or commanding beats and rhythms that can effectively block consciousness. Poetry is the language of the gods -- it is the language of the artistic, right-hemispheric brain. Plato recognized poetry as a divine madness.
Most poetry and songs have an abruptly changing or a discontinuous pitch. Normal speech, on the other hand, has a smoothly changing pitch. Jaynes demonstrates that reciting poetry, singing, and playing music are right-brain functions, while speaking is a left-brain function. That is why people with speech impediments can often sing, chant, or recite poetry with flawless clarity. Conversely, almost anyone trying to sing a conversation will find his words quickly deteriorating into a mass of inarticulate cliches.
Likewise, listening to music and poetry is a right-brain function. And music, poetry, or chants that project authority with loud or rhythmic beats can suppress left-brain functions to temporarily relieve anxiety or a painfully troubled consciousness.
Jaynes goes on to show phenomena such as hypnosis, acupuncture, and déjà vu also function through vestiges of the bicameral mind. And he demonstrates how hypnosis steadily narrows the sense of self, time, space, and introspection as consciousness shrinks and the mind reverts to a bicameral type organization. Analogously, bicameral and schizophrenic minds have little or no sense of self, time, space or introspection. The hypnotized mind is urged to obey the voice of the hypnotist; the bicameral mind is compelled to obey the "voices" of "authority" or gods. By sensing oneself functioning in the narrow-scope, unaware state of hypnosis, gives one an idea of functioning in the narrow-scope, unaware state of bicameral man.
Jaynes also identifies how modern quests for external "authority" are linked to the bicameral mind. Many such quests use science to seek authority in the laws of nature. In fact, today, science is surpassing the waning institutional religions as a major source of external "authority". And rising from the vestiges of the bicameral mind are an array of scientisms (pseudoscientific doctrines, faiths, and cults) that select various natural or scientific facts to subvert into apocryphal, authoritarian doctrines. That subversion is accomplished by using facts out of context to fit promulgated beliefs. Such mystical scientisms include astrology, ESP, Scientology, Christian Science and other "science" churches, I Ching, behaviorism, sensitivity training, mind control, meditation, hypnotism, as well as specious nutritional, health, and medical fads.
Today the major worldwide sources of external "authority" are the philosophical doctrines of religion (along with the other forms of mysticism and "metaphysics") combined with political doctrines such as Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. All such doctrines demand the surrender of the individual's ego (sense of self or "I") to a collective, obedient faith toward the "authority" of those doctrines. In return, those doctrines offer automatic answers and lifetime guidance from which faithful followers can survive without the responsibility or effort of using their own conscious minds. Thus, all current political systems represent a regression into mysticism -- from conscious man back to bicameral man.
Despite their constant harm to everyone, most modern-day external "authorities" and master neocheaters thrive by using the following two-step neocheating technique to repress consciousness and activate the bicameral mind in their victims.
First man is made to feel guilty. He is condemned for having lost his "innocence" by inventing consciousness. He is condemned for assuming the responsibility to use his own mind to guide his life. He is condemned for exchanging his automatic, bicameral life for a volitional, conscious life...condemned for exchanging his nature-given bicameral mind for a superior, man-invented conscious mind.
Then man is offered automatic solutions to problems and guidance through life -- is offered an "effortless" Garden of Eden or a utopian hereafter if he exchanges his own invented consciousness for faith in external "authority": bicameral faith in some leader, doctrine, or god. He is offered the "reward" of protection and the escape from the self-responsibility of making one's own decisions to guide one's own life. But for that "reward", he must renounce his own mind to follow someone else's mind or wishes disguised as "truths" promulgated by some external "authority" or higher power.
But, in reality, no valid external "authority" or higher power can exist or ever has existed. Valid authority evolves only from one's own independent, conscious mode of thinking. When that fact is fully realized, man will emerge completely from his bicameral past and move into a future that accepts individual consciousness as the only authority. ...Man will then fully evolve into a prosperous, happy individual who has assumed full responsibility for his own thinking and life.
Still, the resistance to self-responsibility is formidable. The bicameral mentality grips those seeking mysticism or other "authorities" for guidance. Those who accept external "authority" allow government officials, religious leaders, environmental and anti-abortion movements, faith, homilies, cliches, one-liners, slogans, the familiar, habits, and feelings to automatically guide their actions. The Neo-Tech Discovery demonstrates how throughout history billions of people because of their bicameral tendencies unnecessarily submit to the illusionary external "authorities" of parasitical Establishments, governments, and religions. Such submission is always done at a net loss to everyone's well being and happiness.
The Implications of Neo-Tech
To some, the implications of Neo-Tech (fully integrated honesty) are frightening, even terrifying. To others, the implications are electrifying and liberating. ...The implications of Neo-Tech are that each individual is solely responsible for his or her own life -- responsible for making the efforts required for learning how to honestly guide one's own life toward growing prosperity and happiness. No automatic, effortless route to knowledge or guidance exists.
No valid external "authority" exists that one can automatically live by. To live effectively, an individual must let only the authority of his own consciousness guide his activities. All consistently competent people have learned to act on reality -- not on their feelings or someone else's feelings or doctrines. An individual must accept the responsibility to guide his or her own life in order to live competently, successfully, happily.
People knowledgeable about Neo-Tech have the tools to control all others who act on their bicameral tendencies. ...Equally important, people knowledgeable about Neo-Tech have the tools to control their own lives and destinies, free from crippling mysticism and harmful neocheating.
EPILOGUE: THE END OF MYSTICISM
Neo-Tech I-V provides the knowledge needed for identifying the bicameral elements of any statement or action by anyone or any group (e.g., church, government, media, politician, priest, businessman, doctor, friend, parent, spouse, self). Armed with Neo-Tech, people can free themselves from the control or influence of mysticism and external "authority". And hopefully, by the year 2000, the discoveries of Neo-Tech and Neothink will have eliminated all vestiges of the bicameral mentality -- all vestiges of mysticism and external "authority".
Without the bicameral mentality, all mysticism and external "authority" will wither and vanish, for they have no validity except that which is granted to them by the bicameral mentalities. With political and religious influences disappearing, the mechanisms for "authorities" to harm individuals and wage wars will also disappear. Thus, if civilization is prospering by the year 2000, Jaynes's discovery along with the discoveries of Neo-Tech and Neothink will have contributed to that prosperity by ending the symbiotic, mystical relationships of bicameral mentalities with authoritarian societies (which now hold nuclear weapons). Such mystical relationships would sooner or later cause the annihilation of any civilization.
If our civilization is flourishing by the year 2000, rational human consciousness will have eliminated mysticism and external "authority" through fully integrated honesty (Neo-Tech). And without external "authority", governments and their wars will be impossible. Best of all, without external "authority" or mysticism, no one will be forcibly controlled, impeded, or drained by others. Without the chains of mysticism, non-aging biological immortality will become commercially available to every productive person wanting to enjoy life and happiness forever.
WAR OF TWO WORLDS
Value Producers vs. Value Destroyers
The Final War
For 2000 years, professional mystics have prophesied that the world will end during the 20th century. Now, today, late in the 20th century, their world is indeed ending. Their world is ending through the emerging war with the other world -- the world of fully integrated honesty, the world of Neo-Tech. Their world, being an uncompetitive remnant of nature's bicameral past, is fatally diseased with mysticism. Thus, in their final war with Neo-Tech, their dying world will crumble to nothing.
Who Will Win at Armageddon?
Professional mystics and value-destroying neocheaters have encountered their Antichrist in Neo-Tech. Their Armageddon has come; the ultimate battle has begun. The battle is between good and evil, between honesty and dishonesty, between value producers and value destroyers, between Neo-Tech and mysticism. ...Yes, good will triumph over evil. And, as everyone will soon discover, they, the professional mystics and neocheaters, are and always have been the arch evil disguised as the good. But, now, through the war of two worlds, their world will end forever. ...With their world gone forever, war and value destruction will vanish forever.
Why Neo-Tech Vanquishes Mysticism and Neocheating
In the world of mysticism, cause and effect are irrationally reversed: feelings beget actions instead of actions begetting feelings. For example, in the world of mysticism, arbitrary and cynical feelings beget unhappy, destructive livings. While, in the world of Neo-Tech, consistent and productive livings beget happy, constructive feelings. The mystical world is sick and out of control. The Neo-Tech world is healthy and in control. ...Thus, Neo-Tech will always vanquish mysticism in any confrontation, battle, or war.
Footnotes:
[ 1 ] The bicameral mind was first identified by Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company.
[ 2 ] An interesting note that underscores the recency of consciousness: A person living to 70 years today will have spanned over 2% of the time since human beings have been conscious.
[ 3 ] Metaphors and analog models bring the right hemisphere brain functions to the left hemisphere with a much broader, wide-scope view which enables ever more powerful conceptual thinking.
CONTROLLING MYSTICS THROUGH THEIR BICAMERAL MINDS
by John Flint and Eric Savage
What is the Bicameral Mind?
http://www.neo-techsociety.com/myaccount/library/discovery/nt3.html
The bicameral mind is a human mind functioning in a particular, unconscious mode or manner...in the manner intended by nature. While the bicameral mind[ 1 ] exists in all people, it can be controlled or dominated by a special mode of consciousness developed not through mother nature but volitionally by each individual being. That mind control or domination can be exercised by an individual over himself and others. Or an individual can allow that mode of consciousness in others to control or dominate his or her bicameral mind.
The bicameral mind (two-chamber mind) is one that functions as an unconscious, two-step process. Automatic reactions and thoughts originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and are transmitted to the left hemisphere as instructions to be acted upon. The bicameral functioning is nature's automatic, learned mode of response without regard to conscious thinking. By contrast, man-made consciousness functions through a deliberate, volitional thought process that is independent of nature's bicameral thought process.
Until approximately 3000 years ago, man's brain functioned entirely in nature's automatic bicameral mode. But the automatic bicameral mind became inadequate to handle the mounting problems as societies became more complex. To survive, man was forced to invent a new way of thinking -- a new mode called consciousness that could solve infinitely more complex problems. That consciousness mode involved his newly discovered powers of introspection. His thinking process was further enhanced by new thoughts and insights created by comparisons done through metaphors and analogs.
Consciousness allows a person to make his or her own decisions rather than relying on nature's bicameral process that automatically follows learned customs, traditional rules, and external "authorities". Metaphors and analogs increase a person's range and power of thinking infinitely beyond nature's range. Yet, despite the great advantages in using the man-invented mode of thinking, most people today depend to various degrees on their automatic bicameral mentality and external "authorities" to make their decisions for them.
That bicameral mentality lures people into searching for "sure-thing" guidance from "higher authorities", rather than using their own consciousness for making decisions and determining their actions. Thus, in their search for prepackaged truth and automatic guidance, people seek "higher authorities": religion, politics, true-believer movements, leaders, gurus, cults, astrology, fads, drugs, feelings, and even forms of poetry, music, medicine, nutrition, and psychology. The bicameral mind seeks outside sources that will tell it how to think and act. ...Anyone can exploit the automatic bicameral mind in others by setting up "authorities" for influencing or controlling that bicameral mentality seeking external guidance.
Bicameral mentalities avoid human self-responsibility by seeking and obeying external decision makers. In poker, for example, bicameral tendencies leave players open to being controlled by any conscious individual acting as an external decision maker and authority. In addition, the single, biggest money-losing, mystical concept -- the belief in luck -- is rooted in the bicameral mentality. In fact, most gamblers rely on the phantom "authority" of luck to escape the only valid authority: their own rational consciousness.
Understanding bicameral tendencies in others can provide unbeatable advantages by knowing the external forces that control most people. That understanding enables one not only to predict the actions of others but to control their actions. A poker player, for example, can create unbeatable advantages by projecting any number of phantom "authorities" to which his opponents will obey, act, or react.
The principle of advantageously controlling the bicameral minds of others applies not only to poker but to all competitive situations involving two or more people. Poker, however, provides crisp, clear examples of using the bicameral mind to control people. More important, poker provides countless metaphors to which everyone can relate. Also, most poker players are gamblers. And gambling is a bicameral activity in which people abandon their own rational consciousness to phantom "authorities" such as feelings, luck, priests, and politicians.
The Bicameral Mind in Poker
Poker games exist because of the bicameral urge in most players to gamble. That urge resides in the desire to escape the responsibility for consistently making rational decisions needed to prosper by producing values for others. Gamblers try to escape (at least temporarily) that self-responsibility through an activity such as poker. And through their bicameral urges, gamblers can be controlled by others.
Even the best professional player can succumb to bicameral urges: By playing poker for a living, for example, he avoids involvement in a productive career that demands much more independent, rational thinking than poker. But, the good player can also use poker as a discipline to strengthen both his conscious integrating processes and his abilities to control others.
Exploiting Bicameral Tendencies in Opponents
Through understanding those bicameral urges in others, a good player can generate unbeatable advantages. He creates those advantages by conjuring up external "authorities" for guiding his opponents into actions that benefit him. For example, an opponent is told to "open up" (bet more loosely) because good player X always bets aggressively in the same situation -- and good player X always ends up winning heavily. In that way, player X is set up as an external "authority" for misleading the opponent into making wrong moves based on facts bicamerally accepted out of context. Even greater advantages are gained by realizing that an opponent is bicamerally using rules, information, and odds gleaned from "authorities" such as authors of noncognitive poker books. (Of the 170 poker books published in the past century, only Wallace's book, The Advanced Concepts of Poker, is fully cognitive.)
Bicameral tendencies can also be exploited through subtle maneuvers. For example, mumbling very quietly (almost subaudibly) words that will influence or trigger reactions in opponents who subconsciously hear those "voices". To those opponents, the subconscious voice automatically acts as an external "authority" to be followed. As another example, a player who is hesitant about attending a game after several losing sessions is fed whatever out-of-context facts or spurious "truth" he wants to hear such as, "The worst thing a player can do is quit just as his losing streak is about to end. That's when the odds are the greatest for shifting from a bad-luck streak to a good-luck streak. Managing luck streaks is the whole idea of winning. All winners know that." With such specious "truths" and non sequiturs, the good player establishes himself as an external "authority" in controlling his opponents.
But most important, as demonstrated in the original Neo-Tech Prediscovery, poker generates accurate metaphors needed to identify and then exploit the bicameral tendencies existing in most people. Indeed, those tendencies are readily exploitable beyond the card tables with the same kind of phantom or external "authorities" set up either overtly or subliminally. Such external "authorities" can be established, for example, in religion, politics, psychology, medicine, business, and personal relationships as shown in Neo-Tech II. ...Understanding the bicameral mind is invaluable not only for controlling others but for avoiding being controlled by others.
The discovery of controlling people through their bicameral minds evolved from a more basic discovery made by Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University. His discovery was first identified and then integrated in the following article written for the Neo-Tech Research and Writing Institute.
CONSCIOUSNESS: THE END OF AUTHORITY
by
Frank R. Wallace
A person could make an excellent bet by wagering a hundred ounces of gold that Julian Jaynes's book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will someday rank among the ten most important books ever written. ...Jaynes's book signals the end of a 10,000-year reign of authoritarian institutions. His book also marks the beginning of a new era of individual consciousness during which people will increasingly act on the authority of their own brains. That movement toward self-responsibility will increasingly weaken the influences of external or mystical "authorities" such as government and religion.
The discovery of the bicameral mind solves the missing-link problem that has defied all previous theories of human evolution. But more important, that discovery is generating a new field of knowledge called Neothink with which all human life can evolve into abiding prosperity and happiness through powerfully competitive Neo-Tech advantages.
Dr. Jaynes discovered that until 3000 years ago essentially all human beings were void of consciousness.[ 2 ] Man along with all other primates functioned by mimicked or learned reactions. But, because of his much larger, more complex brain, man was able to develop a coherent language beginning about 8000 B.C. He was then guided by audio hallucinations. Those hallucinations evolved in the right hemisphere of the brain and were "heard" as communications or instructions in the left hemisphere of the brain (the bicameral or two-chamber mind). ...In effect, human beings were super-intelligent but automatically reacting animals who could communicate by talking. That communication enabled human beings to cooperate closely to build societies, even thriving civilizations.
Still, like all other animals, man functioned almost entirely by an automatic guidance system that was void of consciousness -- until about 1000 B.C. when he was forced to invent consciousness to survive in the collapsing bicameral civilizations. ...Today, man's survival still depends on his choice of beneficially following his own consciousness or destructively following the voices of external "authorities".
The major components of Jaynes's discovery are:
All civilizations before 1000 B.C. -- such as Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, pharaonic Egypt -- were built, inhabited, and ruled by nonconscious people.
Ancient writings such as the Iliad and the early books of the Old Testament were composed by nonconscious minds that automatically recorded and objectively reported both real and imagined events. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works such as the Odyssey and the newer books of the Old Testament.
Ancient people learned to speak, read, write, as well as carry out daily life, work, and the professions all while remaining nonconscious throughout their lives. Being nonconscious, they never experienced guilt, never practiced deceit, and were not responsible for their actions. They, like any other animal, had no concept of guilt, deception, evil, justice, philosophy, history, or the future. They could not introspect and had no internal idea of themselves. They had no subjective sense of time or space and had no memories as we know them. They were nonconscious and innocent. They were guided by "voices" or strong impressions in their bicameral minds -- nonconscious minds structured for nature's automatic survival.
The development of human consciousness began about 3000 years ago when the automatic bicameral mind began breaking down under the mounting stresses of its inadequacy to find workable solutions in increasingly complex societies. The hallucinated voices became more and more confused, contradictory, and destructive.
Man was forced to invent and develop consciousness in order to survive as his hallucinating voices no longer provided adequate guidance for survival.
Today, after 3000 years, most people retain remnants of the bicameral guidance system in the form of mysticism and the desire for external authority.
Except for schizophrenics, people today no longer hallucinate the voices that guided bicameral man. Yet, most people are at least partly influenced and are sometimes driven by the remnants of the bicameral mind as they seek, to varying degrees, automatic guidance from the mystical "voices" of others -- from the commanding voices of false external "authorities".
Religions and governments are rooted in the nonconscious bicameral mind that is obedient to the "voices" of external "authorities" -- obedient to the voice of "God", gods, rulers, and leaders.
The discovery that consciousness was never a part of nature's evolutionary scheme (but was invented by man) eliminates the missing-link in human evolution.
Essentially all religious and most political ideas today survive through those vestiges of the obsolete bicameral mind. The bicameral mind seeks omniscient truth and automatic guidance from external "authorities" such as political or spiritual leaders -- or other "authoritarian" sources such as manifested in idols, astrologers, gurus. Likewise, politicians, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists, professors, doctors, journalists and TV anchormen become "authoritarian voices".
The idea of civilizations consisting entirely of nonconscious, yet highly intelligent, automatic-reacting people and the idea of man bypassing nature to invent his own consciousness initially seems incredible. But as Jaynes documents his evidence in a reasoned and detached manner, the existence of two minds in all human beings becomes increasingly evident: (1) the obsolete, nonconscious (bicameral) mind that seeks guidance from external "authorities" for important thoughts and decisions, especially under stressed or difficult conditions; and (2) the newly invented conscious mind that bypasses external "authorities" and provides thoughts and guidance generated from one's own mind. ...Understanding Jaynes's discoveries unlocks the 10,000 year-old secret of controlling the actions of people through their mystical or bicameral minds.
What evidence does Jaynes present to support his discoveries? After defining consciousness, he systematically presents his evidence to prove that man was not conscious until 3000 years ago when the bicameral civilizations collapsed and individuals began inventing consciousness in order to survive. Jaynes's proof begins with the definition of consciousness:
Defining and Understanding Consciousness
Julian Jaynes defines both what consciousness is and what it is not. After speculating on its location, he demonstrates that consciousness itself has no physical location, but rather is a particular organization of the mind and a specific way of using the brain. Jaynes then demonstrates that consciousness is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for concept formation, learning, thinking, or even reasoning. He illustrates how all those mental functions can be performed automatically, intelligently, but unconsciously. Furthermore, consciousness does not contribute to and often hinders the execution of learned skills such as speaking, listening, writing, reading --as well as skills involving music, art, and athletics. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and without consciousness, those same actions and skills can be controlled or driven by external influences, "authorities", or "voices" emanating under conditions described later. ...But first an understanding of consciousness is important:
Consciousness requires metaphors (i.e., referring to one thing in order to better understand or describe another thing -- such as the head of an army, the head of a household, the head of a nail). Consciousness also requires analog models, (i.e., thinking of a map of California, for example, in order to visualize the entire, physical state of California). Thinking in metaphors and analog models creates the mind space and mental flexibility needed to bypass the automatic, bicameral processes.[ 3 ]
The bicameral thinking process functions only in concrete terms and narrow, here-and-now specifics. But the conscious thinking process generates an infinite array of subjective perceptions that permit ever broader understandings and better decisions.
Metaphors of "me" and analog models of "I" allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. In turn, consciousness expands by creating more and more metaphors and analog models. That expanding consciousness allows a person to "see" and understand the relationship between himself and the world with increasing accuracy and clarity.
Consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated analog world that parallels the actual world. Man, therefore, could not invent consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analog models.
The genus Homo began about two million years ago. Rudimentary oral languages developed from 70,000 B.C. to about 8000 B.C. Written languages began about 3000 B.C. and gradually developed into syntactical structures capable of generating metaphors and analog models. Only at that point could man invent and experience consciousness.
Jaynes shows that man's early writings (hieroglyphics, hiertatic, and cuneiform) reflect a mentality totally different from our own. They reflect a nonmetaphoric, nonconscious mentality. Jaynes also shows that the Iliad, which evolved as a sung poem about 1000 B.C., contains little if any conscious thought. The characters in the Iliad (e.g., Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Helen) act unconsciously in initiating all their major actions and decisions through "voices", and all speak in hexameter rhythms (as often do modern-day schizophrenics when hallucinating). Hexameter rhythms are characteristic of the rhythmically automatic functionings of the right-hemisphere brain. Moreover, the Iliad is entirely about action...about the acts and consequences of Achilles. The Iliad never mentions subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone's mind. The language is nonconscious -- an objective reporting of facts that are concrete bound and void of introspection and abstract thought.
With a conscious mind, man can introspect; he can debate with himself; he can become his own god, voice, and decision maker. But before the invention of consciousness, the mind functioned bicamerally: the right hemisphere (the poetic, god-brain) hallucinated audio instructions to the left hemisphere (the analytical, man-brain), especially in unusual or stressful situations. Essentially, man's brain today is physically identical to the ancient bicameral brain; but with his discovery or more precisely his invention of consciousness, he can now choose to focus on integrating the functions of the left and right hemispheres.
Beginning about 9000 B.C. -- as oral languages developed -- routine or habitual tasks became increasingly standardized. The hallucinating voices for performing those basic tasks, therefore, became increasingly similar among groups of people. The collectivization of "voices" allowed more and more people to cooperate and function together through their bicameral minds. The leaders spoke to the "gods" and used the "voices" to lead the masses in cooperative unison. That cooperation allowed nomadic hunting tribes to gradually organize into stationary, food-producing societies. The continuing development of oral language and the increasing collectivization of bicameral minds allowed towns and eventually cities to form and flourish.
The bicameral mind, however, became increasingly inadequate for guiding human actions as societies continued to grow in size and complexity. By about 1000 B.C., the bicameral mind had become so inadequate that man's social structures began collapsing. Under threat of extinction, man invented a new way to use his brain that allowed him to solve the much more complex problems needed to survive -- he invented a new organization of the mind called consciousness.
Jaynes eliminated the missing link in the evolution of man by discovering that consciousness never existed in the evolutionary processes -- consciousness was invented by man.
The Development of Consciousness
Dr. Jaynes shows through abundant archaeological, historical, and biological evidence that the towns, cities, and societies from 9000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. were established and developed by nonconscious people. Those societies formed and grew through common hallucinating voices attributed to gods, rulers, and the dead -- to external "authorities". Various external symbols that "spoke" (such as graves, idols, and statues) helped to reinforce and expand the authority of those common "voices". Such "voices" continued to expand their reach through increasingly visible and awe-inspiring symbols such as tombs, temples, colossuses, and pyramids.
But as those unconscious societies became more complex and increasingly intermingled through trade and wars, the "voices" became mixed and contradictory. With the "voices" becoming muddled, their effectiveness in guiding people diminished. Rituals and importunings became ever more intense and elaborate in attempts to evoke clearer "voices" and better guidance. The development of writing and the permanent recording of instructions and laws during the second millennium B.C. further weakened the authority and effectiveness of hallucinated voices. As the "voices" lost their effectiveness, they began falling silent. And without authoritarian "voices" to guide and control its people, those societies suddenly began collapsing with no external cause.
As the bicameral mind broke down and societies collapsed, individuals one by one began inventing consciousness to make decisions needed to survive in the mounting anarchy and chaos. On making conscious and volitional decisions, man for the first time became responsible for his actions. Also, for short-range advantages and easy power, conscious man began discovering and using deceit and treachery -- behaviors not possible from nonconscious, bicameral minds. ...Before inventing consciousness, man was as guiltless and amoral as any other animal since he had no volitional choice in following his automatic guidance system of hallucinated voices.
As the "voices" fell silent, man began contriving religions and prayers in his attempts to communicate with the departed gods. Jaynes shows how man developed the concept of worship, heaven, angels, demons, exorcism, sacrifice, divination, omens, sortilege, augury in his attempts to evoke guidance from the gods -- from external "authorities".
All such quests for external "authority" hark back to the breakdown of the hallucinating bicameral mind -- to the silencing and celestialization of the once "vocal" and earthly gods.
Much direct evidence for the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the development of consciousness comes from writings scribed between 1300 B.C. and 300 B.C. Those writings gradually shift from nonconscious, objective reports to conscious, subjective expressions that reflect introspection. The jump from the nonconscious writing of the Iliad to the conscious writing of the Odyssey (composed perhaps a century later) is dramatically obvious. In the Odyssey, unlike the Iliad, characters possess conscious self-awareness, introspection powers, and can sense right, wrong, and guilt. ...That radical difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey is, incidentally, further evidence that more than one poet composed the Homeric epics.
The transition from the nonconscious Iliad to the conscious Odyssey marks man's break with his 8000-year-old hallucinatory guidance system. By the sixth century B.C., written languages began reflecting conscious ideas of morality and justice similar to those reflected today.
The Old Testament of the Bible also illustrates the transition from the nonconscious writing of its earlier books (such as Amos, circa 750 B.C.) to the fully conscious writing of its later books (such as Ecclesiastes, circa 350 B.C.). Amid that transition, the book of Samuel records the first known suicide -- an act that requires consciousness. And the book of Deuteronomy illustrates the conflict between the bicameral mind and the conscious mind.
Likewise, the transition to consciousness is observed in other parts of the world: Chinese literature moved from bicameral nonconsciousness to subjective consciousness about 500 B.C. with the writings of Confucius. And in India, literature shifted to subjective consciousness around 400 B.C. with the Upanishadic writings.
American Indians, however, never developed the sophisticated, metaphorical languages needed to develop full consciousness. As a result, their mentalities were probably bicameral when they first encountered the European explorers. For example, with little or no conscious resistance, the Incas allowed the Spanish "white gods" to dominate, plunder, and slaughter them.
The Bicameral Mind in Today's World
Dr. Jaynes identifies many vestiges of the bicameral mentality that exist today. The most obvious vestige is religion and its symbols. Ironically, early Christianity with its teachings of Jesus was an attempt to shift religion from the outmoded bicameral and celestial mind of Moses to the newly conscious and earthly mind of man. Christianity then discovered a devastatingly effective tool for authoritarian control -- guilt. Indeed, guilt not only worked on conscious minds, but required conscious minds to be effective.
Despite religion, conscious minds caused the gradual shifts from governments of gods to governments of men and from divine laws to secular laws. Still, the vestiges of the bicameral mind combined with man's longing for guidance produced churches, prophets, oracles, sibyls, diviners, cults, mediums, astrologers, saints, idols, demons, tarot cards, seances, Ouija boards, glossolalia, fuhrers, ayatollahs, popes, peyote, Jonestown, born-agains.
Jaynes shows how such external "authorities" exist only through the remnants of the bicameral mind. Moreover, he reveals a four-step paradigm that can reshuffle susceptible minds back into hallucinating, bicameral mentalities. The ancient Greeks used a similar paradigm to reorganize or reprogram the minds of uneducated peasant girls into totally bicameral mentalities so they could become oracles and give advice through hallucinated voices -- voices that would rule the world (e.g., the oracle at Delphi). ...Today, people who deteriorate into schizophrenic psychoses follow similar paradigms.
A common thread united most oracles, sibyls, prophets, and demon-possessed people: Almost all were illiterate, all believed in spirits, and all could readily retrieve the bicameral mind. Today, however, retrieval of the bicameral mind is schizophrenic insanity. Also, today, as throughout history, a symptomatic cure for "demon-possessed" people involves exorcising rituals that let a more powerful "authority" or god replace the "authority" of the demon. The New Testament, for example, shows that Jesus and his disciples became effective exorcists by substituting one "authority" (their god) for another "authority" (another god or demon).
As the voices of the oracles became confused and nonsensical, their popularity waned. In their places, idolatry revived and then flourished. But as Christianity became a popular source of external "authority", Christian zealots began physically destroying all competing idols. They then built their own idols and symbols to reinforce the external "authority" of Christianity.
Among today's vestiges of the bicameral mentality is the born-again movement that seeks external guidance. In that movement, people surrender their self-choice and self-decision making in exchange for false promises of protection and guidance. Such vestiges dramatize man's resistance to use his own invention of consciousness to guide his life.
The chanting cadence of poetry and the rhythmic beat of music are also rooted in the bicameral mentality. In ancient writings, the hallucinated voices of the gods were always in poetic verse, usually in dactylic hexameter and sometimes in rhyme or alliteration -- all characteristic of right-brain functionings. The oracles and prophets also spoke in verse. And today schizophrenics often speak in verse when they hallucinate.
Poetry and chants can have authoritarian or commanding beats and rhythms that can effectively block consciousness. Poetry is the language of the gods -- it is the language of the artistic, right-hemispheric brain. Plato recognized poetry as a divine madness.
Most poetry and songs have an abruptly changing or a discontinuous pitch. Normal speech, on the other hand, has a smoothly changing pitch. Jaynes demonstrates that reciting poetry, singing, and playing music are right-brain functions, while speaking is a left-brain function. That is why people with speech impediments can often sing, chant, or recite poetry with flawless clarity. Conversely, almost anyone trying to sing a conversation will find his words quickly deteriorating into a mass of inarticulate cliches.
Likewise, listening to music and poetry is a right-brain function. And music, poetry, or chants that project authority with loud or rhythmic beats can suppress left-brain functions to temporarily relieve anxiety or a painfully troubled consciousness.
Jaynes goes on to show phenomena such as hypnosis, acupuncture, and déjà vu also function through vestiges of the bicameral mind. And he demonstrates how hypnosis steadily narrows the sense of self, time, space, and introspection as consciousness shrinks and the mind reverts to a bicameral type organization. Analogously, bicameral and schizophrenic minds have little or no sense of self, time, space or introspection. The hypnotized mind is urged to obey the voice of the hypnotist; the bicameral mind is compelled to obey the "voices" of "authority" or gods. By sensing oneself functioning in the narrow-scope, unaware state of hypnosis, gives one an idea of functioning in the narrow-scope, unaware state of bicameral man.
Jaynes also identifies how modern quests for external "authority" are linked to the bicameral mind. Many such quests use science to seek authority in the laws of nature. In fact, today, science is surpassing the waning institutional religions as a major source of external "authority". And rising from the vestiges of the bicameral mind are an array of scientisms (pseudoscientific doctrines, faiths, and cults) that select various natural or scientific facts to subvert into apocryphal, authoritarian doctrines. That subversion is accomplished by using facts out of context to fit promulgated beliefs. Such mystical scientisms include astrology, ESP, Scientology, Christian Science and other "science" churches, I Ching, behaviorism, sensitivity training, mind control, meditation, hypnotism, as well as specious nutritional, health, and medical fads.
Today the major worldwide sources of external "authority" are the philosophical doctrines of religion (along with the other forms of mysticism and "metaphysics") combined with political doctrines such as Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. All such doctrines demand the surrender of the individual's ego (sense of self or "I") to a collective, obedient faith toward the "authority" of those doctrines. In return, those doctrines offer automatic answers and lifetime guidance from which faithful followers can survive without the responsibility or effort of using their own conscious minds. Thus, all current political systems represent a regression into mysticism -- from conscious man back to bicameral man.
Despite their constant harm to everyone, most modern-day external "authorities" and master neocheaters thrive by using the following two-step neocheating technique to repress consciousness and activate the bicameral mind in their victims.
First man is made to feel guilty. He is condemned for having lost his "innocence" by inventing consciousness. He is condemned for assuming the responsibility to use his own mind to guide his life. He is condemned for exchanging his automatic, bicameral life for a volitional, conscious life...condemned for exchanging his nature-given bicameral mind for a superior, man-invented conscious mind.
Then man is offered automatic solutions to problems and guidance through life -- is offered an "effortless" Garden of Eden or a utopian hereafter if he exchanges his own invented consciousness for faith in external "authority": bicameral faith in some leader, doctrine, or god. He is offered the "reward" of protection and the escape from the self-responsibility of making one's own decisions to guide one's own life. But for that "reward", he must renounce his own mind to follow someone else's mind or wishes disguised as "truths" promulgated by some external "authority" or higher power.
But, in reality, no valid external "authority" or higher power can exist or ever has existed. Valid authority evolves only from one's own independent, conscious mode of thinking. When that fact is fully realized, man will emerge completely from his bicameral past and move into a future that accepts individual consciousness as the only authority. ...Man will then fully evolve into a prosperous, happy individual who has assumed full responsibility for his own thinking and life.
Still, the resistance to self-responsibility is formidable. The bicameral mentality grips those seeking mysticism or other "authorities" for guidance. Those who accept external "authority" allow government officials, religious leaders, environmental and anti-abortion movements, faith, homilies, cliches, one-liners, slogans, the familiar, habits, and feelings to automatically guide their actions. The Neo-Tech Discovery demonstrates how throughout history billions of people because of their bicameral tendencies unnecessarily submit to the illusionary external "authorities" of parasitical Establishments, governments, and religions. Such submission is always done at a net loss to everyone's well being and happiness.
The Implications of Neo-Tech
To some, the implications of Neo-Tech (fully integrated honesty) are frightening, even terrifying. To others, the implications are electrifying and liberating. ...The implications of Neo-Tech are that each individual is solely responsible for his or her own life -- responsible for making the efforts required for learning how to honestly guide one's own life toward growing prosperity and happiness. No automatic, effortless route to knowledge or guidance exists.
No valid external "authority" exists that one can automatically live by. To live effectively, an individual must let only the authority of his own consciousness guide his activities. All consistently competent people have learned to act on reality -- not on their feelings or someone else's feelings or doctrines. An individual must accept the responsibility to guide his or her own life in order to live competently, successfully, happily.
People knowledgeable about Neo-Tech have the tools to control all others who act on their bicameral tendencies. ...Equally important, people knowledgeable about Neo-Tech have the tools to control their own lives and destinies, free from crippling mysticism and harmful neocheating.
EPILOGUE: THE END OF MYSTICISM
Neo-Tech I-V provides the knowledge needed for identifying the bicameral elements of any statement or action by anyone or any group (e.g., church, government, media, politician, priest, businessman, doctor, friend, parent, spouse, self). Armed with Neo-Tech, people can free themselves from the control or influence of mysticism and external "authority". And hopefully, by the year 2000, the discoveries of Neo-Tech and Neothink will have eliminated all vestiges of the bicameral mentality -- all vestiges of mysticism and external "authority".
Without the bicameral mentality, all mysticism and external "authority" will wither and vanish, for they have no validity except that which is granted to them by the bicameral mentalities. With political and religious influences disappearing, the mechanisms for "authorities" to harm individuals and wage wars will also disappear. Thus, if civilization is prospering by the year 2000, Jaynes's discovery along with the discoveries of Neo-Tech and Neothink will have contributed to that prosperity by ending the symbiotic, mystical relationships of bicameral mentalities with authoritarian societies (which now hold nuclear weapons). Such mystical relationships would sooner or later cause the annihilation of any civilization.
If our civilization is flourishing by the year 2000, rational human consciousness will have eliminated mysticism and external "authority" through fully integrated honesty (Neo-Tech). And without external "authority", governments and their wars will be impossible. Best of all, without external "authority" or mysticism, no one will be forcibly controlled, impeded, or drained by others. Without the chains of mysticism, non-aging biological immortality will become commercially available to every productive person wanting to enjoy life and happiness forever.
WAR OF TWO WORLDS
Value Producers vs. Value Destroyers
The Final War
For 2000 years, professional mystics have prophesied that the world will end during the 20th century. Now, today, late in the 20th century, their world is indeed ending. Their world is ending through the emerging war with the other world -- the world of fully integrated honesty, the world of Neo-Tech. Their world, being an uncompetitive remnant of nature's bicameral past, is fatally diseased with mysticism. Thus, in their final war with Neo-Tech, their dying world will crumble to nothing.
Who Will Win at Armageddon?
Professional mystics and value-destroying neocheaters have encountered their Antichrist in Neo-Tech. Their Armageddon has come; the ultimate battle has begun. The battle is between good and evil, between honesty and dishonesty, between value producers and value destroyers, between Neo-Tech and mysticism. ...Yes, good will triumph over evil. And, as everyone will soon discover, they, the professional mystics and neocheaters, are and always have been the arch evil disguised as the good. But, now, through the war of two worlds, their world will end forever. ...With their world gone forever, war and value destruction will vanish forever.
Why Neo-Tech Vanquishes Mysticism and Neocheating
In the world of mysticism, cause and effect are irrationally reversed: feelings beget actions instead of actions begetting feelings. For example, in the world of mysticism, arbitrary and cynical feelings beget unhappy, destructive livings. While, in the world of Neo-Tech, consistent and productive livings beget happy, constructive feelings. The mystical world is sick and out of control. The Neo-Tech world is healthy and in control. ...Thus, Neo-Tech will always vanquish mysticism in any confrontation, battle, or war.
Footnotes:
[ 1 ] The bicameral mind was first identified by Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company.
[ 2 ] An interesting note that underscores the recency of consciousness: A person living to 70 years today will have spanned over 2% of the time since human beings have been conscious.
[ 3 ] Metaphors and analog models bring the right hemisphere brain functions to the left hemisphere with a much broader, wide-scope view which enables ever more powerful conceptual thinking.
Poética Antiga III
Esta veio a partir de contatos com Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti e Heindel, nos idos de 2002. São todas naïves, mas valem a postagem pela fotografia de uma juventude de desassossegos.
o olho que tudo vê
nada esconde também
sua profundidade é o infinito
sei disso
a vida não despreza ninguém
viajando nesse mar de percepções
o agora sempre diferente
o oculto se revelando aos olhos
tipos, arcas, armas em todo o tipo de gente
a realidade é fantástica
o inusitado é normal
nesse mundo pós-moderno
o surreal
impressionista
abissal
é rumo natural
enquanto isso vou conectando
pela mente viajando
o 7 pintando
pq nosso mundo é a gente que faz!
(2002)
o olho que tudo vê
nada esconde também
sua profundidade é o infinito
sei disso
a vida não despreza ninguém
viajando nesse mar de percepções
o agora sempre diferente
o oculto se revelando aos olhos
tipos, arcas, armas em todo o tipo de gente
a realidade é fantástica
o inusitado é normal
nesse mundo pós-moderno
o surreal
impressionista
abissal
é rumo natural
enquanto isso vou conectando
pela mente viajando
o 7 pintando
pq nosso mundo é a gente que faz!
(2002)
quarta-feira, 20 de outubro de 2010
Poética Antiga II
Esta surge, em 2002, ao ver uma tourada e sofrer com a morte do bovino.
o toureiro
parece um açogueiro
quer matar o bovino
animal tão sereno e lindo
apertam-lhe os bagos
para soltar seus demônios
a platéia urra
do sofrimento desse filho de Deus
maior que Zeus
menor que os homens
mais nem por isso menos importante
que todos os animais nesse planeta flutuante
simboliza o poder humano
sobre seu próprio lado animal
mas será que há razão
em matar um meio-irmão
pelo prazer efêmero de ver o sofrimento alheio?
em praticar o sadismo
ao invés do amor por inteiro?
(2002)
o toureiro
parece um açogueiro
quer matar o bovino
animal tão sereno e lindo
apertam-lhe os bagos
para soltar seus demônios
a platéia urra
do sofrimento desse filho de Deus
maior que Zeus
menor que os homens
mais nem por isso menos importante
que todos os animais nesse planeta flutuante
simboliza o poder humano
sobre seu próprio lado animal
mas será que há razão
em matar um meio-irmão
pelo prazer efêmero de ver o sofrimento alheio?
em praticar o sadismo
ao invés do amor por inteiro?
(2002)
Poética Antiga I
Esta série reativa algumas poesias que fiz nos idos de 2002, 2003, resgatadas em uma visita a uns antigos arquivos em CD
o poder
de poder
crescer
enobrecer
a versão
da infinita solidão
de estar sem ilusão
querer mudar a visão
de poder
o poder...
(2002)
o poder
de poder
crescer
enobrecer
a versão
da infinita solidão
de estar sem ilusão
querer mudar a visão
de poder
o poder...
(2002)
terça-feira, 19 de outubro de 2010
The Experience Economy
Em inglês, há uma significativa diferença entre 2 conceitos que em português se proporciona por adição de uma nova palavra. É a diferença entre economics e economy, em português Economia e Economia Política. É mister de minha parte voltar a esta sintática em outra oportunidade, com mais informação, contudo consigo adiantar que a Economia, do grego Oikós Nomos, ou Lei da Casa, ou Nomes das Coisas da Casa, é antes da técnica quantitativa da Economia "pura", uma questão política, mais de Psicologia Social do que de Utilitarismo sem proposições ontológicas. Enquanto nos anglo-saxões economics é declinação de economy, nos luso-brasileiros é a Economia Política que, por sintática, é a declinação da Economia. A política e avaliação subordinadas ao utilitarismo, o uso à idéia do uso. Típico de sub-desenvolvimento intelectual.
Dito isto, e mudando o rumo da prosa, inusitadamente, naquele momento de auto-organização e poiese advindos do caos quântico, deparei-me com o livro que dá nome ao textículo: The Experience Economy, traduzido para português como "espetáculo dos negócios". Traduções e economy critics à parte, o livro propõe uma forma de agregar valor ao produto (aqui como função matemática, servindo tanto para o produto tradicional quanto para o serviço) adicionando uma experiência de valor e símbolo cultural, além da utilidade da economia-economics. Aproximando-se de valores qualitativos e priorizando as sensações para além do valor de uso, novos horizontes para a diferenciação e atribuição de preço emergem, em um momento que as tecnologias conseguem, em sua maioria, ser revertidas e o hardware não é mais monopólio, salvo em raros casos.
Neste cenário, aspectos como simbolismo, cultura empresarial, projeto arquitetônico, design e publicidade, desde que o hardware não seja um empecilho notório, fornecem ao usuário a oportunidade de renovar sonhos, surpreender-se, emocionar-se, identificar-se, superar-se, transcendendo seu limite cultural com a absorção de experiências minuciosamente projetadas. Assemelha-se, sem a alienação proposta por Guy Debord, em uma sociedade do espetáculo, com centros culturais brotando como um rizoma, mantendo-me conceitualmente com os francos Pascal e Deleuze.
A comunicação de tais centros culturais de experiência quasi-mística e seu posicionamento geográfico é motivo para uma revolução na publicidade, integrando os diversos media sob pena de não construir um circuito de RNA's vigoroso e exclusivo, e assim cair no pesadelo do esquecimento ou do lugar comum, a commodity. Por outro lado, um projeto de comunicação cretina será incapaz de proporcionar a experiência prometida, também levando à extinção do "centro cultural de experiência".
Tendo em vista que o sistema cultural é dinâmico, uma comunicação que não prevê uma atualização dos estados de virtualização em um processo civilizatório, hoje descrito como um dos tripés da triple botton line, também tende a um processo sazonal como é no mercado do puro entretenimento pop.
Dito isto, e mudando o rumo da prosa, inusitadamente, naquele momento de auto-organização e poiese advindos do caos quântico, deparei-me com o livro que dá nome ao textículo: The Experience Economy, traduzido para português como "espetáculo dos negócios". Traduções e economy critics à parte, o livro propõe uma forma de agregar valor ao produto (aqui como função matemática, servindo tanto para o produto tradicional quanto para o serviço) adicionando uma experiência de valor e símbolo cultural, além da utilidade da economia-economics. Aproximando-se de valores qualitativos e priorizando as sensações para além do valor de uso, novos horizontes para a diferenciação e atribuição de preço emergem, em um momento que as tecnologias conseguem, em sua maioria, ser revertidas e o hardware não é mais monopólio, salvo em raros casos.
Neste cenário, aspectos como simbolismo, cultura empresarial, projeto arquitetônico, design e publicidade, desde que o hardware não seja um empecilho notório, fornecem ao usuário a oportunidade de renovar sonhos, surpreender-se, emocionar-se, identificar-se, superar-se, transcendendo seu limite cultural com a absorção de experiências minuciosamente projetadas. Assemelha-se, sem a alienação proposta por Guy Debord, em uma sociedade do espetáculo, com centros culturais brotando como um rizoma, mantendo-me conceitualmente com os francos Pascal e Deleuze.
A comunicação de tais centros culturais de experiência quasi-mística e seu posicionamento geográfico é motivo para uma revolução na publicidade, integrando os diversos media sob pena de não construir um circuito de RNA's vigoroso e exclusivo, e assim cair no pesadelo do esquecimento ou do lugar comum, a commodity. Por outro lado, um projeto de comunicação cretina será incapaz de proporcionar a experiência prometida, também levando à extinção do "centro cultural de experiência".
Tendo em vista que o sistema cultural é dinâmico, uma comunicação que não prevê uma atualização dos estados de virtualização em um processo civilizatório, hoje descrito como um dos tripés da triple botton line, também tende a um processo sazonal como é no mercado do puro entretenimento pop.
Abstrato n.0
Singelo abstrato de um possível artigo. Eu sei, soa ridículo, mas tem gente que acha que publicidade e propaganda não tem parte no processo de aculturação e civilização. Provo o contrário.
Este trabalho se propõe a analisar a gestão estratégica da comunicação como funcao institucional sine qua non para a construção de marcas duradouras, gestão de projetos e vivificação da cultura organizacional advinda da liderança criadora. Em uma sociedade cada vez mais interdependente e organizacional, a comunicação se constitui função primordial para a correta disseminação de conteúdos informacionais formadores de cultura, como propõem dentre muitos o biólogo Richard Dawkings e o historiador Jim Collings, o primeiro em memética e o segundo em construcao de organizações de excelência. A correta disseminação da cultura organizacional e, em última instância, da ideia de evolução civilizacional, é função, em sua concepção, da gestão estratégica da comunicação e função executiva fundamental para a gestão.
Este trabalho se propõe a analisar a gestão estratégica da comunicação como funcao institucional sine qua non para a construção de marcas duradouras, gestão de projetos e vivificação da cultura organizacional advinda da liderança criadora. Em uma sociedade cada vez mais interdependente e organizacional, a comunicação se constitui função primordial para a correta disseminação de conteúdos informacionais formadores de cultura, como propõem dentre muitos o biólogo Richard Dawkings e o historiador Jim Collings, o primeiro em memética e o segundo em construcao de organizações de excelência. A correta disseminação da cultura organizacional e, em última instância, da ideia de evolução civilizacional, é função, em sua concepção, da gestão estratégica da comunicação e função executiva fundamental para a gestão.
Funções Executivas
Função executiva é um conceito neuropsicológico que se aplica ao processo cognitivo responsável pelo planejamento e execução de atividades, incluindo iniciação de tarefas, memória de trabalho, atenção sustentada e inibição de impulsos, por exemplo.
O trabalho em habilidades executivas visa ajudar o ente à “regular seu comportamento”, através de organização, planejamento e assim favorecendo na sua tomada de decisões.
As maneiras necessárias para se “regular o comportamento” envolve o uso de habilidades que visam a criação de estratégias para a resolução de problemas e para atingir determinadas metas. Essas habilidades são:
Planejamento: Habilidade de criar um caminho para atingir uma meta ou completar uma tarefa.
Organização: Habilidade de se criar uma estratégia para facilitar na execução de uma atividade.
Manejo do tempo: Capacidade de estimar quanto tempo ainda tenho para a execução de um dever de casa, de uma prova de matemática ou de um trabalho para a escola, por exemplo.
Memória de trabalho: Habilidade de manter informações na mente, enquanto executa tarefas. Utilizar aprendizagens do passado para aplicar na situação atual ou criar estratégias de solução de problemas para o futuro. Por exemplo: Lembrar do conhecimento prévio de álgebra para solucionar o problema de matemática que estou realizando.
Metacognição: Habilidade de se observar, identificando como você resolve um problema. Exemplo, pergunto a mim mesmo: “Como estou indo?” ou “Como eu fiz esse exercício?”
Essas habilidades nos ajudam a criar uma meta, um objetivo. Num segundo momento, para se atingir efetivamente essa meta, precisamos de outras habilidades para guiar ou modificar nosso comportamento até se atingir o objetivo final. Isso inclue:
Resposta inibitória: Capacidade de pensar antes de agir. Essa habilidade de resistir em dizer ou fazer alguma coisa nos dá tempo para avaliar uma situação e decidir se algo deve ou não deve ser dito, por exemplo.
Auto-regulação do afeto: Habilidade de regular as emoções para completar tarefas, atingir objetivos e controlar o comportamento.
Iniciação de tarefas: Habilidade de começar uma tarefa, sem procratinar.
Flexibilidade: Habilidade de revisar os planos, na presença de obstáculos, erros ou novas informações. Trata-se da capacidade de adaptar-se a condições adversas.
Persistência ao alvo: Capacidade de seguir e executar um plano até completar a meta, sem desistir.
O trabalho em habilidades executivas visa ajudar o ente à “regular seu comportamento”, através de organização, planejamento e assim favorecendo na sua tomada de decisões.
As maneiras necessárias para se “regular o comportamento” envolve o uso de habilidades que visam a criação de estratégias para a resolução de problemas e para atingir determinadas metas. Essas habilidades são:
Planejamento: Habilidade de criar um caminho para atingir uma meta ou completar uma tarefa.
Organização: Habilidade de se criar uma estratégia para facilitar na execução de uma atividade.
Manejo do tempo: Capacidade de estimar quanto tempo ainda tenho para a execução de um dever de casa, de uma prova de matemática ou de um trabalho para a escola, por exemplo.
Memória de trabalho: Habilidade de manter informações na mente, enquanto executa tarefas. Utilizar aprendizagens do passado para aplicar na situação atual ou criar estratégias de solução de problemas para o futuro. Por exemplo: Lembrar do conhecimento prévio de álgebra para solucionar o problema de matemática que estou realizando.
Metacognição: Habilidade de se observar, identificando como você resolve um problema. Exemplo, pergunto a mim mesmo: “Como estou indo?” ou “Como eu fiz esse exercício?”
Essas habilidades nos ajudam a criar uma meta, um objetivo. Num segundo momento, para se atingir efetivamente essa meta, precisamos de outras habilidades para guiar ou modificar nosso comportamento até se atingir o objetivo final. Isso inclue:
Resposta inibitória: Capacidade de pensar antes de agir. Essa habilidade de resistir em dizer ou fazer alguma coisa nos dá tempo para avaliar uma situação e decidir se algo deve ou não deve ser dito, por exemplo.
Auto-regulação do afeto: Habilidade de regular as emoções para completar tarefas, atingir objetivos e controlar o comportamento.
Iniciação de tarefas: Habilidade de começar uma tarefa, sem procratinar.
Flexibilidade: Habilidade de revisar os planos, na presença de obstáculos, erros ou novas informações. Trata-se da capacidade de adaptar-se a condições adversas.
Persistência ao alvo: Capacidade de seguir e executar um plano até completar a meta, sem desistir.
A Escola Austríaca de Economia
Ubiratan Iorio, um liberal que ao completar o ciclo básico da pós-graduação na FGV-Rio conseguiu avanços interessantes na teoria do Estado Mínimo da Escola Austríaca de Von Mises, Hayek e cia, tem uma perspectiva derivada da economy Austríaca que causa boas impressões, por estar em voga com conceitos espaço-temporais mais contemporâneos do que a escolástica básica de Economia com que tive contato na UFRJ, de perspectiva desenvolvimentista.
Tal Escolástica leva o tempo em termos absolutos, com predicados de homogeneidade, continuidade matemática e inércia causal, como nos tempos newtonianos. Para isto, o espaço amostral supostamente seria a própria expressão do universo e teria em si a homogeniedade do espaço euclidiano, a continuidade de uma função linear e consequentemente todos os predicados causais na condição inicial. Tal concepção é errônea, visto que o sistema espaço-temporal é relativo a partir das concepções de Einstein, e por isto o sistema é muito dependente das condições iniciais, que mudam de forma dinâmica (não-linear). Para a realidade cosmológica contemporânea, predicados econômicos da escola austríaca como continuidade dinâmica, heterogeneidade e eficácia causal detem mais função utilitária do que mecânicas newtonianas para físicas de aspectos subjetivos quasi-quânticos como o valor.
Aliás, o valor é a base para a praxeologia dos economistes austríacos. Na teoria de Mises, um dos teóricos da escola, a ação é qualquer ato deliberado com o intuito de passar de um estado para outro mais satisfatório, aumentando o valor. Por isto atos econômicos estão seminalmente contidos na praxeologia austríaca, e o teoria econômica se constrói a partir do estudo da ação humana, que é a busca pelo valor.
Tal Escolástica leva o tempo em termos absolutos, com predicados de homogeneidade, continuidade matemática e inércia causal, como nos tempos newtonianos. Para isto, o espaço amostral supostamente seria a própria expressão do universo e teria em si a homogeniedade do espaço euclidiano, a continuidade de uma função linear e consequentemente todos os predicados causais na condição inicial. Tal concepção é errônea, visto que o sistema espaço-temporal é relativo a partir das concepções de Einstein, e por isto o sistema é muito dependente das condições iniciais, que mudam de forma dinâmica (não-linear). Para a realidade cosmológica contemporânea, predicados econômicos da escola austríaca como continuidade dinâmica, heterogeneidade e eficácia causal detem mais função utilitária do que mecânicas newtonianas para físicas de aspectos subjetivos quasi-quânticos como o valor.
Aliás, o valor é a base para a praxeologia dos economistes austríacos. Na teoria de Mises, um dos teóricos da escola, a ação é qualquer ato deliberado com o intuito de passar de um estado para outro mais satisfatório, aumentando o valor. Por isto atos econômicos estão seminalmente contidos na praxeologia austríaca, e o teoria econômica se constrói a partir do estudo da ação humana, que é a busca pelo valor.
Arquitetura, Comunicacao e Motivacao
A publicidade faz parte da construcao do ambiente linguistico por trabalhar tanto denotativamente quanto conotativamente o campo semiotico, nao restrita aa reproduzir os conceitos contemporaneos, mas como criadora de simbolos que atribuem peso semantico e influenciam escolhas e comportamentos.
Em psicologia experimental, Philip Zimbardo, um dos expoentes conhecido pelo experimento do aprisionamento de Stanford, universidade da qual e professor, trabalha com o problema da geracao do mal e e presidente da Heroic Imagination Project.
Zimbardo perscruta a atitude humana e a propensao para a pratica do mal (como polo negativo) estabelecendo uma dimensao arquitetonica-institucional como fundamento para a motivacao e poder. A partir da pergunta de como psicologos entendem a transformacao do carater humano, Philip Zimbardo classifica 2 correntes historicas:
- Disposicional - Propensao interna dos individuos
- Situacional - Externo
Alem destes 2, Zimbardo constitui na psicologia uma terceira dimensao, que e de suma importancia para a pratica da administracao (man-aging) e da comunicacao social como pratica indutiva de evolucao do campo cosmologico-semantico: A dimensado Sistemica, sendo esta a influencia que a arquitetura dos sistemas politicos, legais e economicos exerce sobre os individuos e grupos e seu devir. A partir da arquitetura institucional, grupos aumentam a propensao a determinados comportamentos, e tanto a aparicao do mal quanto a motivacao heroica podem ser influenciados por uma bem pensada arquitetura organizacional e da comunicacao social.
Tal e a importancia, agora em uma dimensao psicologica, da comunicacao social como pratica desenvolvimentista e atividade essencial em uma administracao competente que tenha em imanencia uma perspectiva temporal de longo prazo como pratica social nos ciclos economicos. Porque, segundo o publicitario David Ogilvy,
"O consumidor não e um pateta, ele e a sua esposa. Não minta para ela. Não deverias contar mentiras para sua esposa. Não as conte para a minha."
A construcao do complexo simbolo da marca e a anuencia do consumidor certamente sao mais perenes quando ha, no corpo social, a ideia que tal marca contribuiu para a evolucao da historia de maneira positiva, desenvolvendo a sociedade com simbolos que tenham contribuido para a arquitetura de determinada coletividade com, se nao heroismo, ao menos nao com fugacidade nem maldade.
Em psicologia experimental, Philip Zimbardo, um dos expoentes conhecido pelo experimento do aprisionamento de Stanford, universidade da qual e professor, trabalha com o problema da geracao do mal e e presidente da Heroic Imagination Project.
Zimbardo perscruta a atitude humana e a propensao para a pratica do mal (como polo negativo) estabelecendo uma dimensao arquitetonica-institucional como fundamento para a motivacao e poder. A partir da pergunta de como psicologos entendem a transformacao do carater humano, Philip Zimbardo classifica 2 correntes historicas:
- Disposicional - Propensao interna dos individuos
- Situacional - Externo
Alem destes 2, Zimbardo constitui na psicologia uma terceira dimensao, que e de suma importancia para a pratica da administracao (man-aging) e da comunicacao social como pratica indutiva de evolucao do campo cosmologico-semantico: A dimensado Sistemica, sendo esta a influencia que a arquitetura dos sistemas politicos, legais e economicos exerce sobre os individuos e grupos e seu devir. A partir da arquitetura institucional, grupos aumentam a propensao a determinados comportamentos, e tanto a aparicao do mal quanto a motivacao heroica podem ser influenciados por uma bem pensada arquitetura organizacional e da comunicacao social.
Tal e a importancia, agora em uma dimensao psicologica, da comunicacao social como pratica desenvolvimentista e atividade essencial em uma administracao competente que tenha em imanencia uma perspectiva temporal de longo prazo como pratica social nos ciclos economicos. Porque, segundo o publicitario David Ogilvy,
"O consumidor não e um pateta, ele e a sua esposa. Não minta para ela. Não deverias contar mentiras para sua esposa. Não as conte para a minha."
A construcao do complexo simbolo da marca e a anuencia do consumidor certamente sao mais perenes quando ha, no corpo social, a ideia que tal marca contribuiu para a evolucao da historia de maneira positiva, desenvolvendo a sociedade com simbolos que tenham contribuido para a arquitetura de determinada coletividade com, se nao heroismo, ao menos nao com fugacidade nem maldade.
Gestao Estrategica da Publicidade
A Publicidade, antes de ser uma atividade de comunicacao empresarial, era uma praxis a ser veiculada, como o radical alude, na res publica. A coisa publica, enquanto locus da coletividade, era debatida nas agoras, em sociedades com ideiais democraticos e totalitarizada em estados imperiais.
Atualmente a publicidade, aqui no Brasil, se confunde com propaganda, circunscrita aa esfera da comunicacao comercial e a servico do grande capital, sob pena de nao conseguir financiamento e faltar uma parte do tripe do triple botton line, o lucro.
Entretanto, uma comunicacao com intencao apenas de entretenimento, sem a geracao da motivacao pelo desenvolvimento da consciencia perceptiva e sem a criacao de mitos de honradez planetaria aliena o consumidor e gera a criacao de documentos como a Carta de Fortaleza, que a ABAP constituiu no ultimo encontro para debater as restricoes em propagandas infantis propostas pelo CONAR.
O Brasil, pela diversidade etnica, desigualdades sociais e singular matriz industrial e uma expressao quasi-planetaria para a expressao do codigo publicitario, e os premios internacionais conformam o fato.
A monografia analisara a publicidade sintaticamente, semanticamente e pragmaticamente, ou seja, forma, conteudo e contexto, utilizando como base teorica a filosofia da mente, analitica, linguagem e ciencia, a economia de caio prado jr e os fisiocratas, a inducao, crescimento e desenvolvimento, a emergencia do colarinho branco e David Ogilvy como expressao de uma mestria de uma epoca.
Atualmente a publicidade, aqui no Brasil, se confunde com propaganda, circunscrita aa esfera da comunicacao comercial e a servico do grande capital, sob pena de nao conseguir financiamento e faltar uma parte do tripe do triple botton line, o lucro.
Entretanto, uma comunicacao com intencao apenas de entretenimento, sem a geracao da motivacao pelo desenvolvimento da consciencia perceptiva e sem a criacao de mitos de honradez planetaria aliena o consumidor e gera a criacao de documentos como a Carta de Fortaleza, que a ABAP constituiu no ultimo encontro para debater as restricoes em propagandas infantis propostas pelo CONAR.
O Brasil, pela diversidade etnica, desigualdades sociais e singular matriz industrial e uma expressao quasi-planetaria para a expressao do codigo publicitario, e os premios internacionais conformam o fato.
A monografia analisara a publicidade sintaticamente, semanticamente e pragmaticamente, ou seja, forma, conteudo e contexto, utilizando como base teorica a filosofia da mente, analitica, linguagem e ciencia, a economia de caio prado jr e os fisiocratas, a inducao, crescimento e desenvolvimento, a emergencia do colarinho branco e David Ogilvy como expressao de uma mestria de uma epoca.
Francis Bacon e o Empirismo
A administracao e essencialmente uma arte ativa. Nao se gesta, no sentido latino original do termo, sem uma atitude indutiva, constituindo-se por pathos apos a deducao intuitiva ou cientifica cartesiana. O problema da inducao e basicamente o empirismo, e e liberalismo aas ultimas consequencias, para se chegar do particular ao universal, e nao partir do universal para o particular, o que gera no fim das contas uma excessiva estereotipizacao e iminencia conceitual. O empirista, ao contrario, parte do particular, da experiencia, e nao do raciocinio abstrato. Tal sao as diametralmente opostas teorias do conhecimento cientifico.
Francis Bacon, contemporaneo de Descartes, em seu Novum Organum, concebido como uma critica ao livro de Aristoteles Organum, sistematizou o metodo cientifico indutivo como esperiencia estruturada. Uma pequena sintese da classificacao e armadilhas estereotipas se segue:
No método indutivo, Bacon distingue a experiência vaga e a experiência escriturada. A primeira é a observação feita ao acaso. A segunda corresponde à observação metódica e aos experimentos. Ambas servem para o preparo das acima mencionadas "tábuas de investigação" que são três:
Presença. A tábua de presença registra o fenômeno em todas as circunstâncias em que ele se manifesta. O calor, por exemplo: deveriam ser anotados todos os casos em que ele se apresenta: luz do sol, labaredas do fogo, no sangue humano, etc.
Ausência. A tábua de ausência ou da negação, anota os fenômenos paralelos contrários: raios frios do luar, sangue frio de certos animais, etc.
Graduações. A tábua das graduações ou comparações anota possíveis correlações entre as modificações nos fenômenos em questão.
Os procedimentos experimentais de Bacon compreendiam: de variação, de prolongação, de transferência, de inversão, de compulsão, mudança de condições.
Variação. Consistia em fazer variar alguma das variáveis possíveis na experiência. Ex.: aumentar o peso do objeto que cai para verificar se influi na velocidade da queda.
Prolongação. O ímã atrai o ferro: pequenas partículas de ferro em mistura aquosa também seriam atraídas?
Transferência. A chuva faz as plantas crescerem: que influência teria o ato de regar que imitasse a chuva?
Inversão. Comprovando-se que o calor propaga-se por movimento ascendente, o frio propaga-se por movimento descendente?
Compulsão. Aumentando-se ou diminuindo-se as causas, os efeitos cessarão?
União. O gelo e o salitre, separadamente, resfriam os líquidos: que acontecerá se forem unidos? Mudança de condições. Uma combustão que ocorre em ambiente fechado, repetir-se-á da mesma forma se ocorrer ao ar livre?
Além dessas técnicas principais, Bacon mostra técnicas auxiliares na distinção de fenômenos ou prerrogativas:
Solitárias: prerrogativas em corpos iguais em tudo, diferindo com relação a somente uma característica.
Migrantes: casos em que uma qualidade manifesta-se repentinamente e desaparece: brancura da água espumosa, por exemplo.
Ostensivas: quando uma certa característica é particularmente evidente, como o peso do mercúrio.
Analógicas. Um fenômeno pode esclarecer outro.
Cruciais. Casos decisivos que obrigam o investigador a optar entre duas explicações diametralmente opostas, referentes ao mesmo fenômeno.
Sobre as fontes de erro, ainda quanto ao "Método", Bacon discute, no Livro I do Novo Organum, as causas do erro na busca do conhecimento. Ele aborda as falácias lógicas no raciocínio humano, de que fala Aristóteles, porém pelo aspecto psicológico de suas causas. Para se conseguir o conhecimento correto da natureza e descobrir os meios de torna-lo eficaz seria necessário ao investigador libertar-se daquilo que Bacon chama "Ídolos" ou engodos que levam a noções falsas, remetendo ao conhecimento positivista historico como uma falha ao estereotipar o conhecimento pelo mecanismo abstrato.
1. Ídolos da Tribo. São vícios inerentes à própria natureza humana, tal como o hábito de acreditar cegamente nos sentidos. As percepções obtidas mediante os sentidos são parciais. Elas levariam à percepção do universo de modo mais simples do que ele é na verdade. Também o vício de reduzir o complexo ao mais simples segundo uma visão que se restringe àquilo que é favorável, que é conveniente. Na Astrologia, por exemplo, ignora-se o que falha para ficar com as predições que resultaram conforme o esperado. Outro vício é a transposição. Na alquimia os alquimistas "humanizam" a atividade da natureza atribuindo-lhe antipatias e simpatias.
2. Ídolos da Caverna. São erros devidos à pessoa, não à natureza humana; trata-se de diferenças individuais de habilidade, capacidade. Alguns espíritos tem condições para assinalar as diferenças, outros, as semelhanças: outros indivíduos se detêm em detalhes, outros olham mais o conjunto, a totalidade; ambos tendem ao erro, embora de maneiras opostos .
3. Ídolos do Foro (ou do mercado). São erros implicados na ambigüidade das palavras; a linguagem é responsável. Uma mesma palavra tem sentidos diferentes para os interlocutores e isso pode levar a uma aparente concordância entre as pessoas . Esse pensamento de Bacon evoluiu até a filosofia da linguagem ou positivismo lógico do século XX.
4. Ídolos do Teatro. Tem suas causas nos sistemas filosóficos e em regras falseadas de demonstração. Esses sistemas são puras invenções, como peças de teatro. Ele fala, por exemplo, da vã afetação de certos filósofos.
O preceito da observância contra os ídolos é o início ou introdução ao método. É seu instrumento demolidor. Seu instrumento construtivo é a Indução: partindo-se dos fatos concretos, tais como se dão na experiência, ascende-se até as formas gerais, que constituem suas leis e causas.
Interessante notar que a guerra ideologica entre franceses e ingleses e talvez a mais fertil guerra de que tenho conhecimento ao longo dos seculos. Ja ha tempos os ingleses tem supremacia conceitual, e certamente seumetodo indutivo tem parte na gesta do povo anglo-saxao. Os Brasil, mais aquiescido com os franceses, tem muito a aprender, e tal metrologia empirica e a unica capaz de, a partir da miscigenacao antropofagica nacional, indutivamente construir heterodoxamente uma cosmologia moderna para a estrada do futuro de nossa civilizacao.
Francis Bacon, contemporaneo de Descartes, em seu Novum Organum, concebido como uma critica ao livro de Aristoteles Organum, sistematizou o metodo cientifico indutivo como esperiencia estruturada. Uma pequena sintese da classificacao e armadilhas estereotipas se segue:
No método indutivo, Bacon distingue a experiência vaga e a experiência escriturada. A primeira é a observação feita ao acaso. A segunda corresponde à observação metódica e aos experimentos. Ambas servem para o preparo das acima mencionadas "tábuas de investigação" que são três:
Presença. A tábua de presença registra o fenômeno em todas as circunstâncias em que ele se manifesta. O calor, por exemplo: deveriam ser anotados todos os casos em que ele se apresenta: luz do sol, labaredas do fogo, no sangue humano, etc.
Ausência. A tábua de ausência ou da negação, anota os fenômenos paralelos contrários: raios frios do luar, sangue frio de certos animais, etc.
Graduações. A tábua das graduações ou comparações anota possíveis correlações entre as modificações nos fenômenos em questão.
Os procedimentos experimentais de Bacon compreendiam: de variação, de prolongação, de transferência, de inversão, de compulsão, mudança de condições.
Variação. Consistia em fazer variar alguma das variáveis possíveis na experiência. Ex.: aumentar o peso do objeto que cai para verificar se influi na velocidade da queda.
Prolongação. O ímã atrai o ferro: pequenas partículas de ferro em mistura aquosa também seriam atraídas?
Transferência. A chuva faz as plantas crescerem: que influência teria o ato de regar que imitasse a chuva?
Inversão. Comprovando-se que o calor propaga-se por movimento ascendente, o frio propaga-se por movimento descendente?
Compulsão. Aumentando-se ou diminuindo-se as causas, os efeitos cessarão?
União. O gelo e o salitre, separadamente, resfriam os líquidos: que acontecerá se forem unidos? Mudança de condições. Uma combustão que ocorre em ambiente fechado, repetir-se-á da mesma forma se ocorrer ao ar livre?
Além dessas técnicas principais, Bacon mostra técnicas auxiliares na distinção de fenômenos ou prerrogativas:
Solitárias: prerrogativas em corpos iguais em tudo, diferindo com relação a somente uma característica.
Migrantes: casos em que uma qualidade manifesta-se repentinamente e desaparece: brancura da água espumosa, por exemplo.
Ostensivas: quando uma certa característica é particularmente evidente, como o peso do mercúrio.
Analógicas. Um fenômeno pode esclarecer outro.
Cruciais. Casos decisivos que obrigam o investigador a optar entre duas explicações diametralmente opostas, referentes ao mesmo fenômeno.
Sobre as fontes de erro, ainda quanto ao "Método", Bacon discute, no Livro I do Novo Organum, as causas do erro na busca do conhecimento. Ele aborda as falácias lógicas no raciocínio humano, de que fala Aristóteles, porém pelo aspecto psicológico de suas causas. Para se conseguir o conhecimento correto da natureza e descobrir os meios de torna-lo eficaz seria necessário ao investigador libertar-se daquilo que Bacon chama "Ídolos" ou engodos que levam a noções falsas, remetendo ao conhecimento positivista historico como uma falha ao estereotipar o conhecimento pelo mecanismo abstrato.
1. Ídolos da Tribo. São vícios inerentes à própria natureza humana, tal como o hábito de acreditar cegamente nos sentidos. As percepções obtidas mediante os sentidos são parciais. Elas levariam à percepção do universo de modo mais simples do que ele é na verdade. Também o vício de reduzir o complexo ao mais simples segundo uma visão que se restringe àquilo que é favorável, que é conveniente. Na Astrologia, por exemplo, ignora-se o que falha para ficar com as predições que resultaram conforme o esperado. Outro vício é a transposição. Na alquimia os alquimistas "humanizam" a atividade da natureza atribuindo-lhe antipatias e simpatias.
2. Ídolos da Caverna. São erros devidos à pessoa, não à natureza humana; trata-se de diferenças individuais de habilidade, capacidade. Alguns espíritos tem condições para assinalar as diferenças, outros, as semelhanças: outros indivíduos se detêm em detalhes, outros olham mais o conjunto, a totalidade; ambos tendem ao erro, embora de maneiras opostos .
3. Ídolos do Foro (ou do mercado). São erros implicados na ambigüidade das palavras; a linguagem é responsável. Uma mesma palavra tem sentidos diferentes para os interlocutores e isso pode levar a uma aparente concordância entre as pessoas . Esse pensamento de Bacon evoluiu até a filosofia da linguagem ou positivismo lógico do século XX.
4. Ídolos do Teatro. Tem suas causas nos sistemas filosóficos e em regras falseadas de demonstração. Esses sistemas são puras invenções, como peças de teatro. Ele fala, por exemplo, da vã afetação de certos filósofos.
O preceito da observância contra os ídolos é o início ou introdução ao método. É seu instrumento demolidor. Seu instrumento construtivo é a Indução: partindo-se dos fatos concretos, tais como se dão na experiência, ascende-se até as formas gerais, que constituem suas leis e causas.
Interessante notar que a guerra ideologica entre franceses e ingleses e talvez a mais fertil guerra de que tenho conhecimento ao longo dos seculos. Ja ha tempos os ingleses tem supremacia conceitual, e certamente seumetodo indutivo tem parte na gesta do povo anglo-saxao. Os Brasil, mais aquiescido com os franceses, tem muito a aprender, e tal metrologia empirica e a unica capaz de, a partir da miscigenacao antropofagica nacional, indutivamente construir heterodoxamente uma cosmologia moderna para a estrada do futuro de nossa civilizacao.
A luta contra o enfeiticamento da linguagem
Wittgenstein
"Um nome representa uma coisa, outra coisa, e estao ligados entre si de tal modo que o todo, como quadro vivo, representa o estado de coisas."
Em outros termos, haveria um paralelismo completo entre o mundo dos fatos reais e as estruturas de linguagem. Nesse sentido, ou seja, na medida em que uma proposicao e uma figuracao da realidade, deve haver nela tantos elementos a serem distinguidos quantos os que existem no estado de coisas afigurado; deve haver uma mesma multiplicidade logica ou matematica entre a figuracao e o que e afigurado. Dessa fora, define-se como forma de representacao aquilo que existe de comum entre a figuracao e o afigurado, e a possibilidade de que as coisas no mundo estejam relacionadas, como o estao os elementos da figuracao, e denominada forma da realidade. Desse modo, uma vez que sao figuracoes, as sentencas possuem a mesma forma da realidade que afiguram.
Mas, embora uma sentenca possa afigurar a realidade, ela nao e capaz, no entanto, de faze-lo no que respeita aa sua propria forma de representacao. Se deve haver algo de identico na figuracao e no afigurado a fim de que uma possa ser a figuracao do outro, entao a forma logica (ao mesmo tempo formada realidade) que todas as figuracoes devem possuir, nao pode ser afigurada por nenhuma figuracao. Caso contrario, cair-se-ia em uma regressao ao infinito, ou seja, seria necessario supor uma segunda linguagem que representaria a primeira, e assim sucessivamente. Por essa razao, Wittgenstein conclui que todo o problema da filosofia reduz-se apenas aa distincao entre o que pode ser dito por meio de proposicoes, isto e, mediante a unica linguagem que existe, e o que nao pode ser dito, apenas mostrado.
A linguagem funciona em seus usos, nao cabendo, portanto, indagar sobre os significados das palavras, mas sobre suas funcoes praticas. Estas sao multiplas e variadas, constituindo multiplas linguagens que sao verdadeiramente formas de vida. Em outros termos, poder-se-ia dizer que o correntemente chamado linguagem e, na verdade, um conjunto de "jogos de linguagem", entre os quais poderiam ser citados seus empregos para indagar, consolar, indignar-se, ou descrever. Wittgenstein compara os jogos delinguagem a ferramentas utilizadas pelo operario, que isa o martelo para martelar, o serrote para serrar, e assim por diante. Da mesma forma, nao ha, para Wittgenstein, uma unica funcao comum das expressoes da linguagem. O que se pode dizer que existe sao certas semelhancas, ou, nas palavra sdo proprio Wirrgenstein, certo "ar de familia", certos parentescos que se combinam, se entrecruzam, se permutam. Nao se pode definir eatamente o que seja um "jogo de linguagem", a nao ser atraves da comparacao entre os tracos semelhantes e definitivos de uma serie de jogos. Com essa colocacao do problema, Wittgenstein aproxima-se muito do estruturalismo desenvolvido por Saussure (1857-1913).
A filosofia deve ensinar ao homem apenas como "ver" as questoes; somente "por aa vista" as perplexidades resultantes do esquecimento das razoes pelas quais se utilizam certos conceitos. Em suma, a filosofia e uma permanente "luta contra o enfeiticamento da linguagem".
"Um nome representa uma coisa, outra coisa, e estao ligados entre si de tal modo que o todo, como quadro vivo, representa o estado de coisas."
Em outros termos, haveria um paralelismo completo entre o mundo dos fatos reais e as estruturas de linguagem. Nesse sentido, ou seja, na medida em que uma proposicao e uma figuracao da realidade, deve haver nela tantos elementos a serem distinguidos quantos os que existem no estado de coisas afigurado; deve haver uma mesma multiplicidade logica ou matematica entre a figuracao e o que e afigurado. Dessa fora, define-se como forma de representacao aquilo que existe de comum entre a figuracao e o afigurado, e a possibilidade de que as coisas no mundo estejam relacionadas, como o estao os elementos da figuracao, e denominada forma da realidade. Desse modo, uma vez que sao figuracoes, as sentencas possuem a mesma forma da realidade que afiguram.
Mas, embora uma sentenca possa afigurar a realidade, ela nao e capaz, no entanto, de faze-lo no que respeita aa sua propria forma de representacao. Se deve haver algo de identico na figuracao e no afigurado a fim de que uma possa ser a figuracao do outro, entao a forma logica (ao mesmo tempo formada realidade) que todas as figuracoes devem possuir, nao pode ser afigurada por nenhuma figuracao. Caso contrario, cair-se-ia em uma regressao ao infinito, ou seja, seria necessario supor uma segunda linguagem que representaria a primeira, e assim sucessivamente. Por essa razao, Wittgenstein conclui que todo o problema da filosofia reduz-se apenas aa distincao entre o que pode ser dito por meio de proposicoes, isto e, mediante a unica linguagem que existe, e o que nao pode ser dito, apenas mostrado.
A linguagem funciona em seus usos, nao cabendo, portanto, indagar sobre os significados das palavras, mas sobre suas funcoes praticas. Estas sao multiplas e variadas, constituindo multiplas linguagens que sao verdadeiramente formas de vida. Em outros termos, poder-se-ia dizer que o correntemente chamado linguagem e, na verdade, um conjunto de "jogos de linguagem", entre os quais poderiam ser citados seus empregos para indagar, consolar, indignar-se, ou descrever. Wittgenstein compara os jogos delinguagem a ferramentas utilizadas pelo operario, que isa o martelo para martelar, o serrote para serrar, e assim por diante. Da mesma forma, nao ha, para Wittgenstein, uma unica funcao comum das expressoes da linguagem. O que se pode dizer que existe sao certas semelhancas, ou, nas palavra sdo proprio Wirrgenstein, certo "ar de familia", certos parentescos que se combinam, se entrecruzam, se permutam. Nao se pode definir eatamente o que seja um "jogo de linguagem", a nao ser atraves da comparacao entre os tracos semelhantes e definitivos de uma serie de jogos. Com essa colocacao do problema, Wittgenstein aproxima-se muito do estruturalismo desenvolvido por Saussure (1857-1913).
A filosofia deve ensinar ao homem apenas como "ver" as questoes; somente "por aa vista" as perplexidades resultantes do esquecimento das razoes pelas quais se utilizam certos conceitos. Em suma, a filosofia e uma permanente "luta contra o enfeiticamento da linguagem".
Popper e a Sociedade Aberta
Sir Popper tem um vasto livro, dividido em 2 volumes na edição brasileira, chamado A Sociedade Aberta e seus Inimigos, nome de um artigo do livro. Tais escritos são uma compilação de idéias sobre Platão, Hegel e Marx criticando sublimemente a idéia de uma sociedade fechada, que afinal tende ao moderno totalitarismo, recém destituído da Alemanha à época em que foi escrito.
O primeiro volume é sobre Platão, basicamente. Faz uma exegese da obra do filósofo pontuando suas estéticas totalitárias que, embora criticadas nos termos da tirania, não o foram em seu projeto prático-político. Vários de seus discípulos se tornaram déspotas, assim como o filósofo, que defendia o ideal tribal de retorno da sociedade ao paraíso perdido da aristocracia virtuosa e a escravidão dos ditos bárbaros não educados conforme a ideologia helênica.
Heráclito também é alvo de críticas; salvam-se Demócrito e Sócrates que, reinterpretado por Platão, dá a entender que o maiêuta tinha simpatia pelo estado totalitário, embora esta não tenha sido a prática socrática, que morreu pelos seus ideais democráticos.
Popper, como um luminar destoando na sociedade moderna, alude a uma sociedade aberta onde a tecnologia e humanidade são motivo de ode social, o conhecimento é dialético e compartilhado, e a humanidade anda a passos largos sem a apreensão do conhecimento pelo Estado, impedindo e favorecendo classes dominantes com consequencia de atraso para a evolução do conhecimento global da espécie.
A noção de Estado totalitário, estabilidade do campo semiótico, discursividade de âmbito estatizante são tão comuns ainda hoje, e o foram durante a fase tribalista da sociedade, que a tekhné de Sir Popper é opus digno de ser continuado, ainda mais em sintonia com a área de Filosofia da Ciência, de Alberto Oliva, e da Hélice Tríplice, da Sociologia e tão em voga na Engenharia de Produção. A Administração, como prática atual de cunho estatizante, se transforma por métodos contingentes em uma filosofia aberta e globalizante, de expansão do campo semiótico e com alto grau de P&D, a única forma de fato capaz de manter a oxigenação da prática sem externalidades negativas para a democratização do conhecimento do sapiens. Outrossim, perece em falsidades ideológicas e corrupções para a manutenção do mercado por influência do Estado ou, na falta deste, perece.
A teoria do Open Innovation, de Henry Chesbrough, é ainda uma grande oportunidade de desenvolvimento para a prática ecológica de tais idéias, assim como o uso da Publicidade em sua dimensão de civilização da res publica, como o é etimologicamente.
Uma nova ética se faz necessária no âmbito do fato administrativo, e tal catalização só pode ser veiculada pela forma da publicidade, ipso facto.
O primeiro volume é sobre Platão, basicamente. Faz uma exegese da obra do filósofo pontuando suas estéticas totalitárias que, embora criticadas nos termos da tirania, não o foram em seu projeto prático-político. Vários de seus discípulos se tornaram déspotas, assim como o filósofo, que defendia o ideal tribal de retorno da sociedade ao paraíso perdido da aristocracia virtuosa e a escravidão dos ditos bárbaros não educados conforme a ideologia helênica.
Heráclito também é alvo de críticas; salvam-se Demócrito e Sócrates que, reinterpretado por Platão, dá a entender que o maiêuta tinha simpatia pelo estado totalitário, embora esta não tenha sido a prática socrática, que morreu pelos seus ideais democráticos.
Popper, como um luminar destoando na sociedade moderna, alude a uma sociedade aberta onde a tecnologia e humanidade são motivo de ode social, o conhecimento é dialético e compartilhado, e a humanidade anda a passos largos sem a apreensão do conhecimento pelo Estado, impedindo e favorecendo classes dominantes com consequencia de atraso para a evolução do conhecimento global da espécie.
A noção de Estado totalitário, estabilidade do campo semiótico, discursividade de âmbito estatizante são tão comuns ainda hoje, e o foram durante a fase tribalista da sociedade, que a tekhné de Sir Popper é opus digno de ser continuado, ainda mais em sintonia com a área de Filosofia da Ciência, de Alberto Oliva, e da Hélice Tríplice, da Sociologia e tão em voga na Engenharia de Produção. A Administração, como prática atual de cunho estatizante, se transforma por métodos contingentes em uma filosofia aberta e globalizante, de expansão do campo semiótico e com alto grau de P&D, a única forma de fato capaz de manter a oxigenação da prática sem externalidades negativas para a democratização do conhecimento do sapiens. Outrossim, perece em falsidades ideológicas e corrupções para a manutenção do mercado por influência do Estado ou, na falta deste, perece.
A teoria do Open Innovation, de Henry Chesbrough, é ainda uma grande oportunidade de desenvolvimento para a prática ecológica de tais idéias, assim como o uso da Publicidade em sua dimensão de civilização da res publica, como o é etimologicamente.
Uma nova ética se faz necessária no âmbito do fato administrativo, e tal catalização só pode ser veiculada pela forma da publicidade, ipso facto.
segunda-feira, 18 de outubro de 2010
Sobre filmes e legendas
Sem muita filosofia neste artigo.
É vergonhoso para quem legenda os filmes e os batiza em português a qualidade do trabalho que fazem, criando um circo que impede, na dinâmica temporal, a própria sobrevivência destes devassos -aqui insinuando a não-idiotice dos técnicos responsáveis. A revolta tem explicação, e pano para uma coleção inteira de frankesteins moldados para o puro prazer destituído de racionalidade ou, melhor dizendo, de denominadores infantis.
A de hoje foi pelo filme de nome "Lonely Hearts".
Este filme, inspirado em uns assassinos em série e adicionados de outras faces de corações solitários em todos os personagens que constituem esta cinegrafia, foi traduzida para o português com o nome "Os fugitivos".
A pergunta que não quer calar: Se nem todos no filme eram fugitivos, como as viúvas que tinham coração só e eram as vítimas do casal perverso, e havia até nos fugitivos a corrida para a felicidade ou a saciedade, simbolizando muito mais o coração vazio do que uma fuga em si - penso isto com ainda algum tipo de inteligência no batismo da película, já que um coração só tem relação com algum tipo de fuga- porque um novo batismo com o apelo mais circense do que meditativo, como o filme foi originalmente batizado?
É grotesco e um trabalho de muito mal gosto. Quando eu tinha estômago mais fraco sentia náuseas de tal conjuração. Ou idiotice. Mas não entendo quem entende o mundo sem inteligência.
É vergonhoso para quem legenda os filmes e os batiza em português a qualidade do trabalho que fazem, criando um circo que impede, na dinâmica temporal, a própria sobrevivência destes devassos -aqui insinuando a não-idiotice dos técnicos responsáveis. A revolta tem explicação, e pano para uma coleção inteira de frankesteins moldados para o puro prazer destituído de racionalidade ou, melhor dizendo, de denominadores infantis.
A de hoje foi pelo filme de nome "Lonely Hearts".
Este filme, inspirado em uns assassinos em série e adicionados de outras faces de corações solitários em todos os personagens que constituem esta cinegrafia, foi traduzida para o português com o nome "Os fugitivos".
A pergunta que não quer calar: Se nem todos no filme eram fugitivos, como as viúvas que tinham coração só e eram as vítimas do casal perverso, e havia até nos fugitivos a corrida para a felicidade ou a saciedade, simbolizando muito mais o coração vazio do que uma fuga em si - penso isto com ainda algum tipo de inteligência no batismo da película, já que um coração só tem relação com algum tipo de fuga- porque um novo batismo com o apelo mais circense do que meditativo, como o filme foi originalmente batizado?
É grotesco e um trabalho de muito mal gosto. Quando eu tinha estômago mais fraco sentia náuseas de tal conjuração. Ou idiotice. Mas não entendo quem entende o mundo sem inteligência.
Energia sustentável com Arte
Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics
The proposed design calls for 1,203 “stalks,” each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge.
By Alyssa Danigelis
Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi. Atelier DNA’s “Windstalk” project came in second in the Land Art Generator competition a contest sponsored by Madsar to identify the best work of art that generates renewable energy from a pool of international submissions.The proposed design calls for 1,203 “stalks,” each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge.
“The idea came from trying to find kinetic models in nature that could be tapped to produce energy,” explained Atelier DNA founding partner Darío Núñez-Ameni.
In the proposal for Masdar, the Windstalk wind farm spans 280,000 square feet. Based on rough estimates, said Núñez-Ameni the output would be comparable to that of a conventional wind farm covering the same area.
“Our system is very efficient in that there is no friction loss associated with more mechanical systems such as conventional wind turbines,” he said.
Each base is slightly different, and is sloped so that rain will funnel into the areas between the concrete to help plants grow wild. These bases form a sort of public park space and serve a technological purpose. Each one contains a torque generator that converts the kinetic energy from the stalk into energy using shock absorber cylinders similar to the kind being developed by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Levant Power .
Wind isn’t constant, though, so Núñez-Ameni says two large chambers below the whole site will work like a battery to store energy. The idea is based on existing hydroelectric pumped storage systems. Water in the upper chamber will flow through turbines to the lower chamber, releasing stored energy until the wind starts up again.
The top of each tall stalk has an LED lamp that glows when the wind is blowing -- more intensely during strong winds and not all when the air is still. The firm anticipates that the stalks will behave naturally, vibrating and fluttering in the air.
“Windstalk is completely silent, and the image associated with them is something we're already used to seeing in a field of wheat or reeds in a marsh. Our hope is that people living close to them will like to walk through the field -- especially at night -- under their own, private sky of swarming stars,” said Núñez-Ameni.
After completion, a Windstalk should be able to produce as much electricity as a single wind turbine, with the advantage that output could be increased with a denser array of stalks. Density is not possible with conventional turbines, which need to be spaced about three times the rotor's diameter in order to avoid air turbulence. But Windstalks work on chaos and turbulence so they can be installed much closer together, said Núñez-Ameni.
Núñez-Ameni also reports that the firm is currently working on taking the Windstalk idea underwater. Called Wavestalk, the whole system would be inverted to harness energy from the flow of ocean currents and waves. The firm’s long-term goal is to build a large system in the United States, either on land or in the water.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/wind-power-without-the-blades.html
Copiado-colado de um grande grupo de nome AcephalicSwines, frequentado por uma galera da pesada.
Copiado-colado de um grande grupo de nome AcephalicSwines, frequentado por uma galera da pesada.
domingo, 17 de outubro de 2010
Em memória de Benoit Mandelbrot
"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles,
and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."
BENOIT MANDELBROT
1924 — 2010
Para o grande metereologista pioneiro nos estudos dos sistemas complexos adaptativos. Mandelbrot morreu dia 14 de outubro de 2010, deixando aos 90 anos o mundo um pouco menos sábio. Olha a cara de sapeca do velhinho em abril!
Torrents de Outubro
Wall Street
Tom waits
The Corporation
The Quick and the Dead
Terra Em Transe
Seguranca Nacional
Red
Planet Earth Episode 4 - Caves
Mahabharata
Mongol
Lamarca
Ip Man The Legend Is Born
Ingmar Bergman - Fanny och Alexander
IMAX Journey Into Amazing Caves 2001
Guerra do Brasil - Toda Verdade Sobre a Guerra do Paraguai
Documentary ~ The Alchemists of Wall Street
deus e o diabo na terra do sol
Brazil
An Officer and A Gentleman
Alexis Zorbas
Vidas Secas - Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Tom waits
The Corporation
The Quick and the Dead
Terra Em Transe
Seguranca Nacional
Red
Planet Earth Episode 4 - Caves
Mahabharata
Mongol
Lamarca
Ip Man The Legend Is Born
Ingmar Bergman - Fanny och Alexander
IMAX Journey Into Amazing Caves 2001
Guerra do Brasil - Toda Verdade Sobre a Guerra do Paraguai
Documentary ~ The Alchemists of Wall Street
deus e o diabo na terra do sol
Brazil
An Officer and A Gentleman
Alexis Zorbas
Vidas Secas - Nelson Pereira dos Santos
sexta-feira, 15 de outubro de 2010
Ilya Prigogine
Ilya, Visconde Prigogine, ganhou um Nobel de química em 1977 por seus trabalhos em estruturas dissipativas. Com suas idéias, o tempo retorna como dimensão fundamental na ciência, trazendo conceitos cruciais como irreversibilidade e instabilidade para as ciências naturais e, lógico, sociais. Suas idéias em sistemas complexos adaptativos o tornaram um mentor da ciência contemporânea, algo como uma nova virada em uma ciência já estranha, a ciência de Einstein e Schrödinger. Ilya, com boa ventura, discursou pelo mundo falando de uma nova aliança -nome de um livro seu- e da emergência do paradigma científico com o tempo retomando o lugar fundamental em uma consciência cada vez mais holística. Benvindos ao mundo de marlboro dos sistemas complexos.
Aos vídeos:
Compilação de Ilya Prigogine em inglês, sem legenda, sotaque carregadamente francófono
Entrevista com Ilya Prigogine, em francês, com legendas em espanhol, em 4 partes
Aos vídeos:
Compilação de Ilya Prigogine em inglês, sem legenda, sotaque carregadamente francófono
Entrevista com Ilya Prigogine, em francês, com legendas em espanhol, em 4 partes
Moonlighting as Alchemy - Isaac Newton e a Alquimia
Moonlighting as a Conjurer of Chemicals
By NATALIE ANGIER
Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. He dismissed poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonsense,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.”
No, it wasn’t easy being Newton. Not only did he hammer out the universal laws of motion and gravitational attraction, formulating equations that are still used today to plot the trajectories of space rovers bound for Mars; and not only did he discover the spectral properties of light and invent calculus. Sir Isaac had a whole other full-time career, a parallel intellectual passion that he kept largely hidden from view but that rivaled and sometimes surpassed in intensity his devotion to celestial mechanics. Newton was a serious alchemist, who spent night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another.
Newton’s interest in alchemy has long been known in broad outline, but the scope and details of that moonlighting enterprise are only now becoming clear, as science historians gradually analyze and publish Newton’s extensive writings on alchemy — a million-plus words from the Newtonian archives that had previously been largely ignored.
Speaking last week at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, described his studies of Newton’s alchemical oeuvre, and offered insight into the central mystery that often baffles contemporary Newton fans. How could the man who vies in surveys with Albert Einstein for the title of “greatest physicist ever,” the man whom James Gleick has aptly designated “chief architect of the modern world,” have been so swept up in what looks to modern eyes like a medieval delusion? How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold? Was Newton mad — perhaps made mad by exposure to mercury, as some have proposed? Was he greedy, or gullible, or stubbornly blind to the truth?
In Dr. Newman’s view, none of the above. Sir Isaac the Alchemist, he said, was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.
Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.
Pools found around other mines seemed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. “It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy,” said Dr. Newman. “Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did.”
Moreover, while the alchemists of the day may not have mastered the art of transmuting one element into another — an ordeal that we have since learned requires serious equipment like a particle accelerator, or the belly of a star — their work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. “Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,” said Dr. Newman, “and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.”
For Newton, alchemy may also have proved bigger than chemistry. Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac’s alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays, and that a sunbeam prismatically fractured into the familiar rainbow suite called Roy G. Biv can with a lens be resolved to tidy white sunbeam once again. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” said Dr. Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.” Consider this a case of “technology transfer,” said Dr. Newman, “from chemistry to physics.”
The conceptual underpinning to the era’s alchemical fixation was the idea of matter as hierarchical and particulate — that tiny, indivisible and semipermanent particles come together to form ever more complex and increasingly porous substances, a notion not so different from the reality revealed by 20th-century molecular biology and quantum physics.
With the right solvents and the perfect reactions, the researchers thought, it should be possible to reduce a substance to its core constituents — its corpuscles, as Newton called them — and then prompt the corpuscles to adopt new configurations and programs. Newton and his peers believed it was possible to prompt metals to grow, or “vegetate,” in a flask. After all, many chemical reactions were known to leave lovely dendritic residues in their wake. Dissolve a pinch of silver and mercury in a solution of nitric acid, drop in a lump of metal amalgam, and soon a spidery, glittering “Tree of Diana” will form on the glass. Or add iron to hydrochloric acid and boil the solution to dryness. Then prepare a powdery silicate mix of sand and potassium carbonate. Put the two together, and you will have a silica garden, in which the ruddy ferric chloride rises and bifurcates, rises and bifurcates, as though it were reaching toward sunlight and bursting into bloom.
Add to this the miners’ finds of tree- and rootlike veins of metals and alchemists understandably concluded that metals must be not only growing underground, but ripening. Hadn’t twined ores of silver and lead been found? Might not the lead be halfway to a mature state of silverdom? Surely there was a way to keep the disinterred metal root balls sprouting in the lab, coaxing their fruit to full succulent ripeness as the noblest of metals — lead into silver, copper to gold?
Well, no. If mineral veins sometimes resemble botanical illustrations, blame it on Earth’s molten nature and fluid mechanics: when seen from above, a branching river also looks like a tree.
Yet the alchemists had their triumphs, inventing brilliant new pigments, perfecting the old — red lead oxide, yellow arsenic sulfide, a little copper and vinegar and you’ve got bright green verdigris. Artists were advised, forget about mixing your own colors: you can get the best from an alchemist. The chemistry lab replaced the monastery garden as a source of new medicines. “If you go to the U.K. today and use the word ‘chemist,’ the assumption is that you’re talking about the pharmacist,” said Dr. Newman. “That tradition goes back to the 17th century.”
Alchemists also became expert at spotting cases of fraud. It was a renowned alchemist who proved that the “miraculous” properties of vitriol springs had nothing to do with true transmutation. Instead, the water’s vitriol, or copper sulfate, would cause iron atoms on the surface of a submerged iron rod to leach into the water, leaving pores that were quickly occupied by copper atoms from the spring.
“There were a lot of charlatans, especially in the noble courts of Europe,” said Dr. Newman. Should an alchemist be found guilty of attempting to deceive the king, the penalty was execution, and in high gilded style. The alchemist would be dressed in a tinsel suit and hanged from a gallows covered in gold-colored foil.
Newton proved himself equally intolerant of chicanery, when, in his waning years, he took a position as Master of the Mint. “In pursuing clippers and counterfeiters, he called on long-nurtured reserves of Puritan anger and righteousness,” writes James Gleick in his biography of Newton.
“He was brutal,” said Mark Ratner, a materials chemist at Northwestern University. “He sentenced people to death for trying to scrape the gold off of coins.” Newton may have been a Merlin, a Zeus, the finest scientist of all time. But make no mistake about it, said Dr. Ratner. “He was not a nice guy.”
Newton, Moonlighting as an Alchemist
The scope and details of Sir Isaac Newton’s interest in alchemy are only now becoming clear.
— NY Times
By NATALIE ANGIER
Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. He dismissed poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonsense,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.”
No, it wasn’t easy being Newton. Not only did he hammer out the universal laws of motion and gravitational attraction, formulating equations that are still used today to plot the trajectories of space rovers bound for Mars; and not only did he discover the spectral properties of light and invent calculus. Sir Isaac had a whole other full-time career, a parallel intellectual passion that he kept largely hidden from view but that rivaled and sometimes surpassed in intensity his devotion to celestial mechanics. Newton was a serious alchemist, who spent night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another.
Newton’s interest in alchemy has long been known in broad outline, but the scope and details of that moonlighting enterprise are only now becoming clear, as science historians gradually analyze and publish Newton’s extensive writings on alchemy — a million-plus words from the Newtonian archives that had previously been largely ignored.
Speaking last week at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, described his studies of Newton’s alchemical oeuvre, and offered insight into the central mystery that often baffles contemporary Newton fans. How could the man who vies in surveys with Albert Einstein for the title of “greatest physicist ever,” the man whom James Gleick has aptly designated “chief architect of the modern world,” have been so swept up in what looks to modern eyes like a medieval delusion? How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold? Was Newton mad — perhaps made mad by exposure to mercury, as some have proposed? Was he greedy, or gullible, or stubbornly blind to the truth?
In Dr. Newman’s view, none of the above. Sir Isaac the Alchemist, he said, was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.
Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.
Pools found around other mines seemed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. “It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy,” said Dr. Newman. “Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did.”
Moreover, while the alchemists of the day may not have mastered the art of transmuting one element into another — an ordeal that we have since learned requires serious equipment like a particle accelerator, or the belly of a star — their work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. “Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,” said Dr. Newman, “and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.”
For Newton, alchemy may also have proved bigger than chemistry. Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac’s alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays, and that a sunbeam prismatically fractured into the familiar rainbow suite called Roy G. Biv can with a lens be resolved to tidy white sunbeam once again. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” said Dr. Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.” Consider this a case of “technology transfer,” said Dr. Newman, “from chemistry to physics.”
The conceptual underpinning to the era’s alchemical fixation was the idea of matter as hierarchical and particulate — that tiny, indivisible and semipermanent particles come together to form ever more complex and increasingly porous substances, a notion not so different from the reality revealed by 20th-century molecular biology and quantum physics.
With the right solvents and the perfect reactions, the researchers thought, it should be possible to reduce a substance to its core constituents — its corpuscles, as Newton called them — and then prompt the corpuscles to adopt new configurations and programs. Newton and his peers believed it was possible to prompt metals to grow, or “vegetate,” in a flask. After all, many chemical reactions were known to leave lovely dendritic residues in their wake. Dissolve a pinch of silver and mercury in a solution of nitric acid, drop in a lump of metal amalgam, and soon a spidery, glittering “Tree of Diana” will form on the glass. Or add iron to hydrochloric acid and boil the solution to dryness. Then prepare a powdery silicate mix of sand and potassium carbonate. Put the two together, and you will have a silica garden, in which the ruddy ferric chloride rises and bifurcates, rises and bifurcates, as though it were reaching toward sunlight and bursting into bloom.
Add to this the miners’ finds of tree- and rootlike veins of metals and alchemists understandably concluded that metals must be not only growing underground, but ripening. Hadn’t twined ores of silver and lead been found? Might not the lead be halfway to a mature state of silverdom? Surely there was a way to keep the disinterred metal root balls sprouting in the lab, coaxing their fruit to full succulent ripeness as the noblest of metals — lead into silver, copper to gold?
Well, no. If mineral veins sometimes resemble botanical illustrations, blame it on Earth’s molten nature and fluid mechanics: when seen from above, a branching river also looks like a tree.
Yet the alchemists had their triumphs, inventing brilliant new pigments, perfecting the old — red lead oxide, yellow arsenic sulfide, a little copper and vinegar and you’ve got bright green verdigris. Artists were advised, forget about mixing your own colors: you can get the best from an alchemist. The chemistry lab replaced the monastery garden as a source of new medicines. “If you go to the U.K. today and use the word ‘chemist,’ the assumption is that you’re talking about the pharmacist,” said Dr. Newman. “That tradition goes back to the 17th century.”
Alchemists also became expert at spotting cases of fraud. It was a renowned alchemist who proved that the “miraculous” properties of vitriol springs had nothing to do with true transmutation. Instead, the water’s vitriol, or copper sulfate, would cause iron atoms on the surface of a submerged iron rod to leach into the water, leaving pores that were quickly occupied by copper atoms from the spring.
“There were a lot of charlatans, especially in the noble courts of Europe,” said Dr. Newman. Should an alchemist be found guilty of attempting to deceive the king, the penalty was execution, and in high gilded style. The alchemist would be dressed in a tinsel suit and hanged from a gallows covered in gold-colored foil.
Newton proved himself equally intolerant of chicanery, when, in his waning years, he took a position as Master of the Mint. “In pursuing clippers and counterfeiters, he called on long-nurtured reserves of Puritan anger and righteousness,” writes James Gleick in his biography of Newton.
“He was brutal,” said Mark Ratner, a materials chemist at Northwestern University. “He sentenced people to death for trying to scrape the gold off of coins.” Newton may have been a Merlin, a Zeus, the finest scientist of all time. But make no mistake about it, said Dr. Ratner. “He was not a nice guy.”
Newton, Moonlighting as an Alchemist
The scope and details of Sir Isaac Newton’s interest in alchemy are only now becoming clear.
— NY Times
Sobre a vida e a dança I
O vídeo abaixo é uma demonstração de padrões formados a partir de autômatos celulares, um ramo fabuloso que demonstra que complexidade e caos (não nestes casos específicos) podem ser formados a partir de regras simples. Sobre caos em autômatos, ver "New Kind of Science", de Stephen Wolfram, aqui.
As regras para a dança no vídeo são simples:
1. Qualquer célula com menos que dois vizinhos morre de solidão.
2. Qualquer célula com mais do que 3 vizinhos morre de sufoco.
3. Qualquer célula com 2 ou 3 vizinhos vive no próximo tick.
4. Qualquer célula (viva ou morta) com exactamente 3 vizinhos vive no próximo tick.
Frua. E pra quem quiser análise, eis o jogo aqui.
As regras para a dança no vídeo são simples:
1. Qualquer célula com menos que dois vizinhos morre de solidão.
2. Qualquer célula com mais do que 3 vizinhos morre de sufoco.
3. Qualquer célula com 2 ou 3 vizinhos vive no próximo tick.
4. Qualquer célula (viva ou morta) com exactamente 3 vizinhos vive no próximo tick.
Frua. E pra quem quiser análise, eis o jogo aqui.
Somewhere between sacred silence and sleep
Regra é da vida que podemos, e devemos aprender com toda a gente. Há coisas da seriedade da vida que podemos aprender com charlatães e bandidos, há filosofias que nos ministram os estúpidos, há lições de firmeza e de lei que vêm no acaso e nos que são do acaso. Tudo está em tudo. Em certos momentos muito claros de meditação, como aqueles em que, pelo princípio da tarde, vagueio observando pelas ruas, cada pessoa me traz uma notícia, cada casa me dá uma novidade, cada cartaz tem um aviso para mim. Meu passeio é calado é uma conversa contínua, e todos nós, homens, asas, pedras, cartazes e céu, somos uma grande multidão amiga, acotovelando-se de palavras na grande procissão do Destino.
Quintessência do Desassossego - Fernando Pessoa
Quintessência do Desassossego - Fernando Pessoa
Assinar:
Comentários (Atom)