The appearance of the Computational Universe at a moment in human history when computers have achieved unparalleled scope and importance is obviously not coincidental. We might draw an analogy with eighteenth-century commentators who, impressed by the reductive power of Newton’s laws of motion and the increasing sophistication of time-keeping mechanisms, proclaimed that the universe was a clockwork.
— Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
I like to think of materiality as the constructions of matter that matter for human meaning. This view of materiality goes hand in hand with what I call the Computational Universe, that is, the claim that the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality. For scientists making the strong claim for computation as ontology, computation is the means by which reality is continually produced and reproduced on atomic, molecular, and macro levels.
— Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Religion is parasitic on spirituality (and not, as some religionists would have it, the other way round).
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Bertrand Russell, as he entered old age, wrote: “The best way to overcome [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
The evidence is all around that people will attempt to pack in as much experience as they can before they go, precisely so as to cheat death of its victory. And the kind of experience they look for in these circumstances does seem to be overwhelmingly sensory, rather than, say, intellectual or cultural.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
I will review—or at any rate visit—three strategies of restoring meaning to life that are widely on display as human responses to anxiety about death.
- Discount the future—and live for the present.
- Disindividuate—and identify yourself with cultural entities that will survive you.
- Deny the finality of bodily death—and believe the individual self to be immortal.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
(…) living and dying have different tenses: the first requires continuing imperfect investment, the second only a perfect single act.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
January 23, 2012 at 3:00pm
1 note
(…) your fear of losing the core self will in some circumstances motivate you to go that extra mile to save your own life.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
The acquisition by a child of what scientists call a theory of mind, which can be applied to other people, comes slowly through social interaction, exploration, and experiment. It dawns gradually on the child, even hesitantly, that he can attribute phenomenal consciousness to others. But once it comes, his outlook on life, the universe and everything has to undergo a radical adjustment. For he has stumbled upon a truth second only in importance to the truth of being conscious in himself: “It’s not just me.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
In which case the question becomes: what brings about the unification that will, by the age of three years or so, become the child’s normal state. Presumably it is not imposed from outside (although, as Sherrington suggests, other people’s expectations may well play an important part). Instead, the infant has somehow to learn to be a single Ego. He has—literally—to self-organize the parts of his mind into a single whole.
How is this is done? There are not many answers out there, so I dare mention my own. I believe it is a matter of the components of the mind, which are initially relatively independent, being dynamically linked as participants in a common enterprise. Rather in the same the way that the divisions in a factory become part of the same business because they are jointly contributing to manufacturing the final product that will go on sale, rather as members of a band come to be bound together as an artistic unit because they are jointly creating one work of music, so the components of your mind become united as your Ego because they are involved in the common project of creating your singular life: steering you—body and soul—through the physical and social world.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
1.
