Why Low-tech is High-tech

Look around: what do you see? An arrogance bordering on contempt that we humans clearly don't share with animals. 

It's what motivates many of us to stop walking once we learn to drive. It allows us to pay scant heed to mysteries no one has yet figured out.

How else can we sit for hours or days or even lifetimes at a desk; or embed ourselves in networks that fade when we enter a forest or travel along an unpaved road?

A day-in and out array of happenings and interruptions.

Not all deductive

Is it just me who thinks many things in this world have no name? (especially not the ones most people use).

I once read that the unnamable is the eternally real.

But does anybody know? Or are we just buffoons fallen for our own bluffs, oblivious to concerns of greater calling?

When I was a kid, I wondered why Albert Einstein would so often get lost at sea in his beloved sailboat.

Something about the sea, our senses, the wind and fire, that connect beyond binary figurations to a finer (and cruder) core. 

I speak of voices heard when you least expect them. The movements of a cat while stalking her prey. Or the will to truly engage our own senses (marvels that no tech can match) only now transfigured, no longer truly animal.

Maybe this is the borderline between health and dysfunction, a place where our best answers are often no better than a pill.

Or many pills... and alcohol, smoke and sugar, or whatever else it takes to comprehend.

For mystery and manifestation arise from the same source, beyond evolution and god (if you forgive the term) or any other legend we haven't yet surpassed. 

Darkness within darkness - a figment of the intellectual mind; what happens to people who forget about low-tech.

Filed under  //   culture   philosophy   society   technology  

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Critical Mass: A Wake Up Call

It's a shame that most people will not read the book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball. In essence it's an antidote to media hype and academic air-spinning, a physics-based approach to social science capable of emancipating the individual and seeing with our eyes wide open.

The desire to simplify for the sake of analysis - to categorize, if you will - explains to a large extent why the human race has survived. Yet too often, our categorization contradicts the essence of how things are.

For example, our binary approach to science (empirical or rational); our metaphysical dichotomies (Darwinism or God); and friction-less utopian assumptions (economics), still bitterly divide us.

In truth, we are both made and simultaneously make ourselves. We are free to be who we are while, at the same time, are subject to inexorable laws.

Choice and certainty are both part of the same package.

Even if things are going to end up in a foreseen manner (e.g., death, taxes), we can't be sure just where along the path we are at any given moment. Just as snowflakes conform to mathematical laws, so too humans, each unique as individuals but, as a general population, often predictable.

In this way, even the logic of game theory becomes no more than an expendable tool in the shadow of ideology. Why? Because people turn things and ideas to their advantage. Isn't that part of our nature? 

As Napoleon Bonaparte once said: "all great captains have performed vast achievements by conforming to the rules of nature -- by adjusting efforts to obstacles". In the same way, all great thinkers must test their ideas by adjusting to how things really are. 

But they often don't. As Mr. Ball puts it: "Once we acknowledge the universality displayed in the physical world, it should come as no surprise that the world of human social affairs is not necessarily a tabula rasa open to all options"

In sum, this book may help liberate readers from "the propensity for linear thinking and to encourage a greater sophistication in their perception of cause and effect".

Which is exactly what we need, now more than ever.
Filed under  //   economics   philosophy   physics   social science  

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About

Mine was a clamorous New York childhood spent on boardwalks and in delis between the south shore and the teeming Metropolis. Since childhood, I've strolled with Sicilians and strutted with Latins. Which explains nothing about life in a big Latin American metropolis. Cheers to a big world!