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We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

— Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
18h ago

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

1d ago
themarginalian.org
Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Pulsating beneath the story is a reminder that whether the poem is made of words or of mathematics, it is only ever made in the mind — that strange and solitary place where ideas are born like new stars out of the fertile cosmic darkness, molecules of thought pulled together by the gravity of feeling to become light.

2w ago

The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.

3w ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #210

He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I've heard that AI might be able to become "conscious" or "alive."

4w ago

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we seek, through art, through science, through love, is a miraculous reprieve from that sentence.

4w ago

We are always acting on what has just finished happening, and reflecting on what is about to begin. The moment of pure presence is always receding.

4w ago

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

4w ago

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. And yet, curiously, most of us find that dungeon inhabited by someone else — something larger than we intended.

1mo ago

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is "firmed up" — and brought into being.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Great Person

An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans. We call this suffering. Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope.

1mo ago

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. And yet we cannot make peace with ourselves by turning away from the world; we can only do it by turning more deeply into it.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions

We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture's parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel. It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.

1mo ago

The universe is not indifferent to intelligence; it simply has not yet been asked the right questions. But the asking itself changes both the asker and the universe.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Read the Signal of Your Life

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events. Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly.

1mo ago

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and often the beast stirs in us and utters some old, forgotten note that sends strange vibrations through the framework of our being.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Wisdom of Water: Alan Watts on the Ocean and the Meaning of Life

The mistake that we've made — and this, if anything, is the fall of man — is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude to life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one's essential self. That, in other words, our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator.

1mo ago

Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

2mo ago

We are development. We are process. We are not what we are, but what we are making of ourselves. The self is not a being but an act.

2mo ago

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

2mo ago

The thing that astonishes me is that the same images, the same landscapes, return each night with such fidelity. They must exist somewhere.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.

2mo ago

The brain is wider than the sky, for, put them side by side, the one the other will contain with ease, and you beside.

3mo ago

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

3mo ago

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

3mo ago

The universe is not a machine after all but something more like a mind. It is more like a thought made flesh than like a machine made of matter.

3mo ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

3mo ago

We live, as we dream — alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

4mo ago
themarginalian.org
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.

4mo ago

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

4mo ago

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

4mo ago

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we know of ourselves, the more we become strangers to ourselves; for knowledge itself is a kind of forgetting—we lose the immediate simplicity of mere being in the complications of understanding what we are.

4mo ago

The mind is like a river. While it flows, it is never the same water; and while it thinks, it is never the same thought.

4mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Not to Dwell on the Past

The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

4mo ago

We are not thinking enough about thinking, and hardly thinking at all about awareness. Hardly thinking—which is the core of the matter.

4mo ago

The true paradox of consciousness is that we are never more fully ourselves than when we have forgotten ourselves—and this forgetting is not a loss but a gain, for in losing the boundary of self we touch something universal.

4mo ago

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of the mind; it is the only sense that can perceive beauty, and beauty is the only thing that makes life worth living.

4mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Consciousness Edition

Von Neumann's conclusion, reached not as a mystic but as the most rigorous mathematician of his century, was that the break must happen outside the physical. Consciousness is what collapses the wavefunction. Consciousness is what turns the possible into the real.

5mo ago

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely at those moments when we forget ourselves—when we are absorbed in something other than our own ego.

5mo ago

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet one cannot stop from living in the world. This is the paradox of consciousness itself—that we become most fully alive precisely through our capacity to suffer.

5mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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