Plan B

I am at point A. I want to go to point B. I don't have a plan or a map. There are many roads that lead from point A to point B, but right now, i can't see which. My only plan is to get to point B. I keep walking. On rare occasions while i walk, i can briefly see with absolute clarity, the reason why the road i am walking on couldn't possibly lead to point B. I stop, I have a cup of tea, I mark the road as "No Way!" and I change course. I keep walking. Hoping that someday, one by one, i will have eliminated all the roads that do not lead to point B. If i can still keep walking then, i will be on one of the roads that lead from point A to point B.

"Hydrogen is a light, odourless gas, which, given enough time,
turns into people."
~ Edward R. Harrison (1919-2007), Cosmologist.

Why Way8

~ The Cool Hunter

Catch 22

until the two become one
and the outside is as the inside
and the inside as outside

until what is above is below
and what is below above

until the eye is seen as the eye
the hand as the hand
the foot in place of the foot
and an image as an image

until the male
and the female become one
that the male not be male
and the female female

thou shall not enter
the kingdom of heaven


~ interpretation of saying attributed to Jesus/Yeshua.
22: The Gospel of Thomas; The Nag Hammadi Library.

They are so happy

SANDY: Not to this mechanist. The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern of organization - one that we haven't yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But i believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what's really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model. And it's there that all existent programs, including the best chess-playing ones, fall down.

CHRIS: Don't chess programs look ahead and say to themselves as they're figuring out their next move, "If you move here, then I'll go there, and then if you go this way, I could go that way ..."? Isn't that a sort of self-model?

SANDY: Not really. Or, if you want, it's an extremely limited one. It's an understanding of self only in the narrowest sense. For instance, a chess-playing program has no concept of why it is playing chess, or the fact that it is a program, or is in a computer, or has a human opponent. It has no ideas about what winning or losing are, or -

PAT: How do you know it has no such sense? How can you presume to say what a chess program feels or knows?

SANDY: Oh, come on! We all know that certain things don't feel anything or know anything. A thrown stone doesn't know anything about parabolas, and a whirling fan doesn't know anything about air. It's true I can't prove those statements, but here we are verging on questions of faith.

PAT: That reminds me of a Taoist story i read. It goes something like this. Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, "I wish i were a fish. They are so happy!" The second replied, "How do you know whether fish are happy or not? You're not a fish." The first said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether I know how fish feel?"

PARTICIPANTS: Chris, a physics student; Pat, a biology student; and Sandy, a philosophy student.

~ Selection from "Metamagical Themas: A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think." Scientific American, May 1981, pp. 15-36.

Anarchist Rat

A guide to cutting stencils:
The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.


Manifesto:
"Camp. I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Source: The Imperial War Museum.

~ Banksy

Avalon Landing

Click Image to Enlarge.
Original Photograph by Jeff Rich. jeffrichphoto.com

Drinking Sunlight