| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
Photographs that degrade over time...
Audio that distorts through exposure...
Media that slowly drowns in an ocean of noise
Through copying and re-copying
Filtering and re-filtering...
Bemes of blissfulness
And recordings of subjectivity
Distorting, degrading...distant happiness through a sea
Of warm noise, upon playback.
Visual warmth, aural warmth, subjective warmth
Infinite bliss, infinite melancholy and infinite nostalgia...
---------------
Bonus thought: Just imagine feeling crackling warmth and gentle distortions in emotion, perception and thought extracted from potential bemes and recordings of subjective experiences that have aged in the future, a la old sepia photographs, tapes and vinyls...
This is a compilation of micro-writings of mine which I have employed as Facebook statuses recently. Facebook: Adam James Davis
---------------
To be involved in a movement that advocates the use of technology for increased bliss itself induces bliss...
~
Equilibrioception! Balance, a harmony. To run, walk and stand still without falling over is music!
~
Infinite tones across an infinite spectrum of frequencies, across an infinite spectrum of volumes would be more of a harmony than just a few tones across a few octaves with frequencies that are proportional to one another, for there is no discrimination and absolute unity!
~
Self-Similarity + Nihilism: Everything is a metaphor for everything and everything else. Everything is everything and everything else. All is infinitely self-similar. Thus, everything is neither superior nor inferior to everything else; everyth...ing is neither more beautiful nor more ugly than everything else...
~
To eliminate suffering may induce suffering on suffering itself.
~
The concept of infinite possibilities is self-referential because by the nature of infinity and absolute non-discrimination, it must include the possibility of their -not- being infinite possibilities.
~
Contemplate the idea of happiness, bliss and elevation through nihilism/epistemological nihilism rather than as something gloomy and dark. Nihilism as a reason to continue life rather than to end it!
~
The free will to decide whether to -ever- have free will or not, and, if so, when to instigate it. To instigate one's own existence and consciousness out of nothing...out of a vacuum of sentience.
~
Bonus quotes:
- Infinite bliss, infinite nostalgia, infinite melancholy.
- Bliss through nostalgia, bliss through melancholy.
- Infinitely ultrawhite noise! Infinite, ultrawhite noise!
This is a follow up to Pleasure Domes and Orgasmatrons.
While writing this article, I was trying very hard to dig up information on Roger Dean's retreat pods. I couldn't find any, so I published it as is. Roger Dean, for those of you who don't know, did a lot of album cover art for groups like Yes, and Asia. I love his art, and I bought one of his books back in the 80's filled with his work, architecture and zanny inventions. One of these was his retreat pod pictured above. The idea is to have one of these to escape into, kind of like a floatation tank, but with room for two, and filled with all sorts of stimulating devices.
Here is the full-text article from the Daily Telegraph Magazine in the early 1970's.
[Thanks to Paul Sanderson for the images and info].
From the same people who brought us the mini Jawa Crawler, NAO Design has lots of other goodies, many of which have been inspired and created for the Playa. Below are some of my favorites. They remind me of something I might see in Barbarella or in Spock's quarters. Most of these are reproductions can purchased from NAO's online store.
Vertebrate Lamp
A columnar lamp comprised of a white lycra sleeve stretched over circular fiberglass ribs. The Vertebrate is adaptable to be stretched and anchored floor-to-ceiling, or made to be free-standing with an internal frame of up to 8 feet in height. The lamp is illuminated internally with either standard halogen or fluorescent blacklight, or a combination of the two. Dimmer switch included.
Eliptolux Lamp
A steep cut across a tube of high impact plastic exposes the elliptical cross-section of the Eliptolux table lamp. A halogen bulb sits in the base, weighted for stability, and the white interior projects light up and out, providing a warm glow without direct glare.
Tower Lamp
Three stainless steel slides, each perforated with hundreds of holes and lined on the interior with hanji paper, come together to form the triangular hanging Tower Lamp. Can also be converted to a standing desk lamp. Uses a standard halogen bulb and measures 24 inches high.
Holey Glow
Three thousand, six hundred holes perforate the plastic cylinder of each Holey Glow lamp. The interior is illuminated with a halogen bulb and lined with dyed hanji paper of a variety of colors. Measures forty inches by six inches wide.
Nellophone
Musical organs operate on the principle that reverberating the air within a pipe of given length will produce a note an octave above a tube that is twice its length, and it is this effect that the Nellophone utilizes to sound its thirty different note from A an octave below middle C to D and octave above middle C. With the musician standing at the instrument's axis, a slap of the special paddles across the padded mouth of each tube produces a hauntingly electronic sound. The tubes range in length from 6 to 30 feet, and the entire device spans 12 feet wide by 15 feet high.
Cauldone
9 triangular plates of welded steel comprise the hexagonal basin and feet of the Cauldrone fire pit. Measuring 35 inches across and standing 16 inches tall, the conically-shaped basin accommodates a large volume of ashes to minimize the need for emptying, while the pointed feet minimize heat transfer to the surface below. The mood, however, is maximized when the dark, angled form of the pit frames bright curls of flame.
Antler Fire
In the cold of winter of the dark night, this odd headpiece actually does serve to provide both heat and light, though it is usually worn just for looks. The helmet itself is made of leather and steel to protect the wearer's head. A portable 1-lb. propane cylinder is worn on the belt and connects via a small hose to the back of the helmet. Six shape-able copper tubes protrude from the helmet and are specially tipped to prevent blowout of the flames. Runs for 1 hour on a single tank, and includes a manual valve on the helmet.
KinetAural Suit
Pressure, light, and flex sensors embedded in the neck, elbows, wrists, knees, and feet sense and transmit bodily movements to a PC where they are synthesized into sounds that move with the user. Various sound templates allow modulation of seven variables including pitch, volume, phase and waveform.
Floating Speakers
Acoustic speakers are comprised, in essence of a thin diaphragm to couple sound to the air, and a driver to resonate the diaphragm. In these speakers, the driver is optimized for lightweight, and the diaphragm is a special Mylar balloon which enables sound of surprisingly high fidelity to emanate from the silvery orb floating overhead. It is anchored by a stylized base which contains a miniature amplifier, 9-volt battery, and plug for connecting to standard headphone jacks.
TeleFloatation
The core of this craft, which houses a color video camera, 2.4 Ghz video transmitter, and radio control receiver, mounts onto an 8-foot balloon and propeller assembly for flight, or onto a 7-inch car chassis for terrestrial use.
The camera's video signal is received by a wearable module that displays the onboard view to the remote pilot via a custom heads-up display helmet, which itself senses lateral and vertical head movement and translates that motion into equivalent panning of the camera. The result is a surreal experience that immerses the user in a disembodied form and allows a dream-like exploration and interaction.
Rolling along the cracked white playa at night is a phenomenal experience. There's the crackle of alkali crust as the hardened surface breaks under the weight of my tires, kicking up little powdery puffs of dust in my wake. Then there are the random little bits of artworks that suddenly appear, like a field of green LED's sticking through the playa mirroring the myriad of stars above. And the moonlight dancing through the Black Rock desert, setting it aglow beneath its reddened ochre cat eye.
But the most stunning moment is upon turning back to take in the sudden ephemeral majesty of the pulsing, throbbing, shining, flashing, thumping, burning wonder of creative freedom that is the psychedelic Vegas of Black Rock City.
I marvel every time I see it.
My first trip to Burning Man we arrived at night. You have to crawl through 70 miles or so of thick inky darkness to to get to Gerlach. Aside from this small outpost there is nothing but black mountains and salt flats extending off into infinity. But out past Gerlach the night was broken by an unbelievable city of lights strobing against the interminable emptiness of the desert. I was thunderstruck at just how large the festival was... and how electric. In spite of the intense hostility of the land to life and limb, these technopagan freaks had wired the playa and flipped the switch.
A few hours later I was in a strobe-lit booth coming on to a tab, watching a friend in a reclined dentist chair get playfully beat with styrofoam pool toys by three random burners. I never looked back.
The most overt element of Burning Man is the sheer degree of pure, unfettered human creativity that transpires. The 2.5 miles of silt filling the ancient lack bed of Black Rock becomes a blank canvas, a tabula rasa upon which to paint the kaleidoscope of imagination convening between its rocky hills. My impression to this day is total awe at the ludicrously psychedelic playground that manifests in that shining eternal moment. Works of art stand by themselves, unattended, as offerings to the spirit of the event. They are there simply to be, and be enjoyed. In most cases here is no ownership, no one charging admission or even standing by looking for adoration or gratification.
Ranging from minute to monumental, covering every sense, the art of Black Rock stands as a testament to the devotion of its acolytes. Some spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create something spectacular that will last 5 or 6 days, then be destroyed. Witness the temples of David Best: vastly detailed and intricate buildings ornately buttressed and festooned with spires and symbols all uniquely reminiscent of some sci-fi Indian or Thai holy shrine. His temples are places of worship, explicitly constructed to honor those lost to death's bittersweet embrace. By Saturday it is covered in scrawled and shaky messages to the departed. I love you dad. Mom, I miss you. On Sunday night, the last night of Burning Man, the temple is set ablaze, and through the flaming vortices tearing out of its incinerating husk, you can just make out the faint wisps of Spirit...
This year the temple will span over 3/4 of a mile. It's conflagration will no doubt set the blackness of the Black Rock mountains on fire themselves under the stellar firmament above.
Each year there is a theme that sets the tone for the whole event. One year was Hell. Another, The Body. The Floating World was the year my wife and I were married at the Temple of Joy. This year the theme is The Vault of Heaven. Accordingly, costumes and art will will tend to highlight this theme. One piece is a playa-wide night kite flying. The organizers are hoping to get at least ten thousand lighted kites flying Thursday night, bringing the body of Nuit a bit closer to earth.
Less tangible than the art and general costumery and freakishness is the community of Burning Man. There's a general feeling in the air of coming together - of communing. Everyone comes for their own reason but everyone's there to participate in something powerfully unique and meaningful, something that humanity desperately needs: a grand party with a big heart and an incredible wardrobe.
But beyond the conviviality and celebration lies a deeper tone of release and transformation. Burning man is, at its core, about the cycle of creation - birth, life, death, and rebirth. This theme is enacted on the desert floor as life rises from its empty wasteland and gathers tens of thousands of digital apes with all of the tools and technologies, dreams and visions, tears and laughter they bring with them. The vast chaotic jubilee accretes around the central figure - the Burning Man - swirling out to the event horizon at the edge of Black Rock City. At the apex of the festival the masses gather around The Man and set him to flame. This is the central moment of Burning Man. This is the ultimate reason people come to the playa. To Burn The Man. It is the mythic transformation ritualized in a great pagan celebration of fire.
Properly phoenixed the burners march inward towards the flaming, smoldering pile of debris, drums pounding, chants and calls resonating through the thick, churning crowd. For whatever reason, whatever innate impulse or orchestrated symbol, we always move counter-clockwise around the fire, perhaps hoping to turn back the hands of time and relive this wondrous week under the desert sun...
Afterwards the night becomes a thunderous din of sound and fury, wailing against the emptiness of mechanized life, commodified nature, and co-opted meaning, branded, packaged, and sold back to us. At Burning Man there is no vending allowed. Large corporate logos - like the ones on the sides of rental trucks - are requested to be covered up. Video cameras must be registered and visiting press is highly regulated. Ice and coffee at Center Camp are the only products available for purchase. Everything else is based upon a gift economy. Give what you can. everything comes back around. One year there was a bar around the corner from our camp. 3 guys spent $1500 on liquor, built a bar, and poured drinks for anyoone. They ran out by Thursday, but the patrons kept bringing over more alcohol from their camps to keep the bar stocked. Gift economy.
It is this freedom from commercialization, this brief moment of living the ideal and casting off the shackles of capitalism that make Burning Man such an oasis. Indeed, much of Silicon Valley leaves their cubes and offices for the playa, finding release, escape, and inspiration to bring back home. For now, the ideal can only exist if we work the rest of the year. But for one week we can drop our guard a little, fly our freak flag higher, talk to strangers and invite them into our temporary homes, embrace the land and the beautiful fury of nature, and walk amongst the human imagination as it manifests its vast mysteries into the arms of creation, unfettered and ever on the wing.
Below is Robert Anton Wilson's description of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness. One of the most common criticisims leveled at this model is that evolution if left to itself does not necessarily lead to greater intelligence... so talking about future circuits as if they are inevitable might be a bit overstated. On the other hand if we stick with the only empirical example we have - the earth, the history of life and intelligence on this planet has been an inexorable drive from lesser complexity towards greater complexity and intelligence... from entropy towards extropy. Stuart Kaufmann, a complexity theorist at the Sante Fe Institute, has written some compelling academic papers on auto-catalytic sets which demonstrate that life, given the right initial conditions will inevitably lead to greater and greater complexity over time. This trend is continuing to play itself out now in rapid fashion, as technological progress is accelerating even faster.
From Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Tunnel-Realities and Imprints
Let's try Dr. Leary's perspective on these mysteries.
To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or "gears," or mini-brains. Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the "silent" or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.
"The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."
"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."
"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.... It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."
"The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted."
"Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own."
To read the rest of this manifesto by David Pearce please visit The Hedonistic Imperative.
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
One of the primary inspirations behind this new site is that turning on higher intelligence is not only fun and joyous, it is absolutely necessary if we and our intelligent civilization are to survive the coming decades and expand out into the comsos. By higher intelligence I mean the whole enchilada, whatever that is - not just greater intellect, but greater everything, greater emotional sanity, more love, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and most especially the transcendent experience itself and it's infinite expanse so raved about by psychonauts, shamans and eastern/yogic practioners. As Dr John Lilly once said, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". The question then is this:
Is this higher intelligence (i.e. enlightement, satori, samadhi, zen) a product of our evolving brain opening new experiential neurological circuits, OR is there some kind of "objective" higher intelligence in the universe who we are starting to tune into, or both?
For the purposes of this site, it doesn't matter what the answer is. What matters is that these transcendent states are valid in themselves and what we do with them. Who cares whether such sublime experiences are arbitrary brain states produced by a flood of seratonin and endorphins or something else? As Hans Moravec has repeated often, simulated experience is for all philosophical purposes as real as non-simulated experience. And besides, how could we tell the difference? How do we know we are currently not in some kind of hyper-advanced "matrix" simulation or in the mind of a much greater entity?
My opinion is that the computational-nanotechnological metaphor presents us with a potentially huge increase in intelligence over the coming decades. It is becoming clear in the scientific community that the computational metaphor is the next big thing in science - a paradigm shift as Kuhn describes - a move from a strictly materialist point of view to a more computationalist perspective. Stephen Wolfram, a respected physicist and author of the program Mathematica and the new book A New Kind of Science is one of the spearheaders of this paradign shift. But it is still only a paradigm, a metaphor, the next metaphor, but certainly not the last. Science is slowly getting one step closer to hyper-intelligence, but hyper-intelligence as I have experienced it, transcensd this merely computational perspective, as it still does not acknowledge the transcendent experience itself. That's ok, as I think it's only a matter of time. Strict empiricists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have both written books (I Robot: Mere Machine to Trancendent Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) that have clearly taken the computatational metaphor to its logical extremes, ending their books with hints of a trancendent "spiritual" reality. You could consider it enlightenment unplugged from dogma and religion. But they stop just short of clearly acknowledging that. What I am talking about has nothing to do with whether you are an atheist, agnostic or theist, since it's pure experience itself, whose ultimate reality continues to remain a mystery. Like Godel's Incompleteness Theorm, we may never know. It's possible we may discover these "spiritual" realities to be nothing more than brain chemistry. Even if that's the case, it does not make these expereinces any less valid. In the scheme of our evolution, of our planet, and our long-term survival, making such distinctions is irrelevant. The future of intelligence is an expansion into all of these states and beyond them. The future of intelligence is infinite.
Part of the purpose of this site is to bridge these gaps of understanding. That has been my underlying motivator behind my book, if I can get the damn thing finished. I'm not worried about the Leary-Wilson-Lilly visionary mysticals, they essentially get it, if lacking in sufficient scientific-computational rigor. No, the challenge is transmitting these hyper-dimensional "groove-love" spaces communicated to the hyper-computational transhumanists who haven't experience such things yet. I think communicating this message is paramount, because it is these hyper-computationalist’s who are taking over the reigns of science and technological progress as we approach greater-than-human intelligence and decentralizing bio/nanotechnology. Higher intelligence by definition expands the number of alternative pathways available to us in which to apply solutions to pressing problems, which are only going to get worse unless we wake up and embrace more positive contexts. The sooner this “higher intelligence” is grokked the better our chances of us reaching utopia over oblivion.