Oblique Strategies

Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975. Physically, it takes the form of a deck 7-by-9-centimetre (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black box. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

In 1970, Peter Schmidt created "The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts", a box containing 55 sentences letterpress printed onto disused prints that accumulated in his studio, which is still in the possession of Eno. Eno, who had known Schmidt since the late 1960s, had been pursuing a similar project himself (which he had handwritten onto a number of bamboo cards and given the name "Oblique Strategies" in 1974). There was a significant overlap between the two projects, and so, in late 1974, Schmidt and Eno combined them into a single pack of cards and offered them for general sale. The set went through three limited edition printings before Schmidt suddenly died in early 1980, after which the card decks became rather rare and expensive.

Miyamoto Musashi: Philosophy of The Book of Five Rings & Dokkodo

Miyamoto Musashi (1584 – June 13, 1645), was a Japanese swordsman, philosopher, strategist, writer, artisan and rōnin. Musashi, as he was often simply known, became renowned through stories of his unique double-blade swordsmanship and undefeated record in his 61 duels (next is 33 by Itō Ittōsai). He is considered the Kensei, sword-saint of Japan. He was the founder of the Niten-Ichi-Ryū-School or Nito-Ichi-ryū style of swordsmanship, and in his final years authored The Book of Five Rings, and Dokkōdō (The Path of Aloneness). Both documents were given to Terao Magonojō, the most important of Musashi's students, seven days before Musashi's death. The Book of Five Rings deals primarily with the character of his Niten-Ichi-Ryū-School in a concrete sense e.g. his own practical martial art and its generic significance; The Path of Aloneness on the other hand, deals with the ideas that lie behind it, as well as his life's philosophy in just a few short aphoristic sentences.

Ignaz Semmelweis: The Saviour of Mothers

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician of ethnic-German ancestry, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers", Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, Semmelweis suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success.

Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and Boole’s Laws of Thought: The Birth of Information Age

Symbolic logic

In 1847 George Boole published the pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic. He later regarded it as a flawed exposition of his logical system, and wanted An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities to be seen as the mature statement of his views. This second book of Boole's contained Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age. Boole maintained that:

"No general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form."

Boole was working on the main principles of Aristotle's logic and contrary to widespread belief, Boole never intended to criticise or disagree with Aristotle's logic. Rather he intended to systematise it, to provide it with a foundation, and to extend its range of applicability.

Boltzmann Brain

In physics thought experiments, a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. For example, in a homogeneous Newtonian soup, theoretically by sheer chance all the atoms could bounce off and stick to one another in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain (though this would, on average, take vastly longer than the current lifetime of the universe).

The idea is indirectly named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when such states randomly occur can brains exist to be aware of the Universe. One criticism of Boltzmann's "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, human brains in a Boltzmann universe with myriad neighboring stars would be vastly outnumbered by "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe.

Greek: Hack into English

On Wikipedia's start page, five of nine words are Greek.

• biography-βιογραφία • geography-γεωγραφία • history-ιστορία • mathematics-μαθηματικά • technology-τεχνολογία

Most common words in the English language

Of the 500 most common words in English, 18 are of Greek origin:

place-πλατεία (rank 115), problem-πρόβλημα (121), school-σχολείο (147), system-σύστημα (180), program-πρόγραμμα (241), idea-ιδέα (252), story-ιστορία (307), base-βάση (328), center-κέντρο (335), period-περί+οδός (383), history-ιστορία (386), type-τύπος (390), music-μουσική (393), political-πολιτική (395), policy-πόλις/πολίτης (400), paper-πάπυρος (426), phone-φωνή (480), economic-οικονομία (494).

Clash of Civilizations / The End of History and the Last Man

The clash of civilizations according to Huntington (1996), as presented in the book

The Clash of Civilizations is a hypothesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Number 137

Paul Dirac on Dimensionless Physical Constants and "Large Number Hypothesis"

Is there a number at the root of the universe? Is there a primal number? Is there a number that everything in the universe hinges on, that explains everything? Many of the major discoveries in science have emerged out of mathematics—Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes, parallel universes, string theory, and complexity theory are only a few of many examples. All of these can be expressed in equations; yet they also depict concrete aspects of the physical universe.

Predatory Coevolution

The Mountain's Goat climbing ability

This animal is a sure-footed climber commonly seen on cliffs and ice.

Daily movement patterns reflect an individual's needs for foraging, resting, thermoregulation and security from predators or disturbance.

Aldous Huxley: The Art of Seeing

Basic Principle Underlying the Practice of Every Art

Whatever the art you may wish to learn, whether it be acrobatics or violin playing, mental prayer or golf, acting, singing, dancing or what you will-there is one thing that every good teacher will always say: Learn to combine relaxation with activity; learn to do what you have to do without strain; work hard, but never under tension.

Language Is A Virus From Outer Space

Extract from The Electronic Revolution. By William S. Burroughs:

In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh... human flesh... In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future generations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING.

Doubling Time Theory

"The theory of the Doubling of Time has begun to be known within the scientific community. But few are those who look how this can help humanity. I live in many simultaneous time lines. A time line we know, and another time line which we do not know but which we use continuously. That means the perception of time changes. The Doubling of Time is actually the doubling of the perception of time. That means we benefit all the time from two different perceptions of time, which allows us to do things in a very fast manner in a time line which does not exist for me. That means we do a slow analysis within another time line and within our time line we only receive the synthesis. This allows us to have intuition and instinct which help us to live well or better. Above all we must use this while we are sleeping, because sleeping exists for this reason. And we do not know this. The first text I have found on how we should sleep is from VII b.c., beyond any religious or philosophical principle, as it is a text from Pythagoras. So this was taught seven centuries before Christ, but now nobody knows about it."

Superintelligence [Technological Singularity]

Collapse model: Triangle (3-Dimensional Space)

– Imaginative illustration from Wave Process

The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.

Intention

"I'll tell you very plainly how i see the relationship between an artist and his audience by telling you a little story that i heard many years ago and that made quite an impression on me. You see, during the Middle Ages, a certain wood-carver in China was given the task of crafting a stand for the temple bells. It was a very honorable assignment for this Chinese wood-carver, and he set about his work. While he carved he started thinking about all the money he'd earn for this bell stand, and as it happened the carving turned out quite poorly. But since he was an ambitious Chinese craftsman, he started all over again. But this time too, as he carved, he started thinking about how he would win everyone's love with this incredible beautiful stand, and this attempt was a failure as well. So he destroyed that stand and started a third time. But this time it occurred to him that he would gain immortality with this bell stand, and his third attempt was a failure too. With that, our Chinese wood-carver grew as furious as only a Chinese wood-carver can be, and he decided to try a fourth time. This time he had just one thought in his head: to create a bell stand. This time he succeeded and in so doing gained love, money, and immortality."

— Interview with Ingmar Bergman, speaking about the relationship between an artist and his audience (The Magician, 1958)

The Library of Babel

"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories (The Garden of Forking Paths).

The story repeats the theme of Borges' 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La Biblioteca total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library". Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramón Llull's thinking machine. The elements of his game are the universal orthographic symbols, not the words of a language.

Definition of meme

~ 48:20

"A word has been invented, "meme" – a meme is not the smallest unit of heredity. A meme is the smallest unit of meaning, of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think the art community might function with more efficiency, in a production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs, if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after the natural environment, where we as artists are tempting to create memes which enter an environment of other memes that are in competition with each other, and out of this competition of memes ever more appropriate, adaptive and suitable ideas can gather and link themselves together into higher and higher organisms."

— Terence McKenna, Opening the Doors of Creativity (1990)

Love your slavery

~ 10:10

"I think this kind of dictatorship of the future, I think will be very unlike the dictatorships which we've been familiar with in the immediate past. I mean, take another book prophesying the future, which was a very remarkable book, George Orwell's "1984." Well, this book was written at the height of the Stalinist regime, and just after the Hitler regime, and there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence. Now, I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! But, if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy. "

— The Mike Wallace Interview: Aldous Huxley (1958)

The final call is aesthetic

~ 38:40

"The final call is aesthetic. That, because we are monkeys, because we are so far from God, we cannot set knowing the truth as the standard, for choosing among the models we can produce. We must set our aesthetic compass towards the more true. What Wittgenstein called it, the 'True enough.' And then the question is, Well, this is a rich field of human study, called Philosophy of Science or Epistemology and Ontology, Plato, who all the rest of philosophy is a footnote upon, said that the 'key' laid in the concepts: The 'Good,' the 'True' and the 'Beautiful.' The 'Good' ...what is it? Tricky, tricky... The 'True' ...what is it? Trickier, even trickier... The 'Beautiful' ...what is it? Easy to discern. The 'Beautiful' is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned, to live out the consequences of your taste... And if you have no taste, you know... God help you."

– Terence McKenna talk at San Francisco (13.Dec.1998)

Apollonian and Dionysian

– Scene from Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)

Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysian element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysian revelry. Basically, the Apollonian spirit was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

Before the tragedy, there was an era of static, idealized plastic art in the form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of the world. The Dionysian element was to be found in the wild revelry of festivals and drunkenness, but, most importantly, in music. The combination of these elements in one art form gave birth to tragedy. He theorizes that the chorus was originally always satyrs, goat-men. (This is speculative, although the word “tragedy” τραγωδία is contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = "goat song" from tragos = "goat" and aeidein = "to sing".) Thus, he argues, “the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man” for the audience; they participated with and as the chorus empathetically, “so that they imagined themselves as restored natural geniuses, as satyrs.” But in this state, they have an Apollonian dream vision of themselves, of the energy they're embodying. It's a vision of the god, of Dionysus, who appears before the chorus on the stage. And the actors and the plot are the development of that dream vision, the essence of which is the ecstatic dismembering of the god and of the Bacchantes' rituals, of the inseparable ecstasy and suffering of human existence.

After the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where tragedy died. Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers like Euripides and the coming of rationality, represented by Socrates. Euripides reduced the use of the chorus and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more reflective of the realities of daily life. Socrates emphasized reason to such a degree that he diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. For Nietzsche, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to participate in forms of art, because they saw things too soberly and rationally. The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it, much of man's ability to live creatively in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life. Nietzsche concludes that it may be possible to reattain the balance of Dionysian and Apollonian in modern art through the operas of Richard Wagner, in a rebirth of tragedy.

By 1886, Nietzsche himself had reservations about the work, and he published a preface in the 1886 edition where he re-evaluated some of his main concerns and ideas in the text. In this post-script, Nietzsche referred to The Birth of Tragedy as "an impossible book... badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness." Still, he defended the "arrogant and rhapsodic book" for inspiring "fellow-rhapsodizers" and for luring them on to "new secret paths and dancing places."

In 1888, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche was back on the attack. He defends The Birth of Tragedy by stating: "...It is indifferent toward politics,—'un-German,' to use the language of the present time—it smells offensively Hegelian, and the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few formulas. An 'idea'—the antithesis of the Dionysian and the Apollonian—translated into the metaphysical; history itself as the development of this 'idea'; in tragedy this antithesis is sublimated into a unity; under this perspective things that had never before faced each other are suddenly juxtaposed, used to illuminate each other, and comprehended... Opera, for example, and the revolution.—The two decisive innovations of the book are, first, its understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is offered, and it is considered as one root of the whole of Greek art. The other is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical décadent. 'Rationality' against instinct. 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life!— Profound, hostile silence about Christianity throughout the book. That is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it negates all aesthetic values—the only values that the 'Birth of Tragedy' recognizes: it is nihilistic in the most profound sense, while in the Dionysian symbol the ultimate limit of affirmation is attained. There is one allusion [The Birth of Tragedy, 24] to Christian priests as a 'vicious kind of dwarfs' who are 'subterranean' ..."

— The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music is an 1872 work of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy