“Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon; it is what consciousness is about that is complex. It is presumably this fact that is the reason many scientists over the decades have tended to perceive information as something involving order and organization. Because consciousness is about an experience of order and organization. Because consciousness is a state that does not process much information – consciously. Consciousness consists of information no more than a person who consumes large amounts of food can be said to consist of food. Consciousness is nourished by information the same way the body is nourished by food. But human beings do not consist of hot dogs; they consist of hot dogs that have been eaten. Consciousness does not consist of hots dogs but consists of hot dogs that have been apprehended. That is far less complex.”

-Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

– Max Ehrmann, Desiderata – Words for Life

“Learning not to cause harm to ourselves or others is a basic Buddhist teaching. Nonaggression has the power to heal. Not harming ourselves or others is the basis of enlightened society. This is how there could be a sane world.. It starts with sane citizens, and that is us. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

The ground of not causing harm is mindfulness, a sense of clear seeing with respect and compassion for what it is we see. This is what basic practice shows us. But mindfulness doesn’t stop with formal meditation. It helps us relate with all the details of our lives. It helps us see and hear and smell without closing our eyes or our ear or our noses. It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. As we become more wholehearted in this journey of gentle honesty, it comes as a shock to realize how much we’ve blinded ourselves to some of the ways in which we cause harm.

It’s painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while. It’s a journey that happens because of our commitment to gentleness and honesty, our commitment to staying awake, to being mindful. Because of mindfulness, we see our desires and our aggression, our jealousy, and our ignorance. We don’t act on them; we just see them. Without mindfulness, we don’t see them and they proliferate.”

– Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Köhler found that a chimpanzee can imitate only those intelligent acts of other apes that it could have performed on its own. Persistent training, it is true, can induce it to perform much more complicated actions, but these are carried out mechanically and have all the earmarks of meaningless habits rather than of insightful solutions. The cleverest animal is incapable of intellectual development through imitation. It can be drilled to perform specific acts, but the new habits do not result in new general abilities.

Comparative psychology has identified a number of symptoms that may help to distinguish intelligent, conscious imitation from automatic copying. In the first case, the solution comes instantly in the form of insight not requiring repetition. Such a solution pertains to all characteristics of intellectual action. It involves understanding the field structure and relations between objects. On the contrary, drill imitation is carried out through repeating trail-and-error series, which show no sign of conscious comprehension and do not include understanding the field structure. In this sense, it can be said that animals are unteachable.

In the child’s development, on the contrary, imitation and instruction play a major role. They bring out the specifically human qualities of the mind and lead the child to new developmental levels. In learning to speak, as in learning school subjects, imitation is indispensable. What the child can do in cooperation today he can do alone tomorrow. Therefore the only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development and leads it; it must be aimed not so much at the ripe as at the ripening functions.

– Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language

When there is light on our planet, it comes from the sky, not from earth.  Our vision knows this perfectly  even though it was not until a few years ago that the psychologist Vilyanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, came up with these splendid examples.  The actual effect of the direction of the light determining whether we see shapes as concave or convex was described by David Brewster in the 1800s.

We can thank the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin for the figure above, or more correctly, the American photographer Zeke Berman’s elaboration of Rubin’s vase, a double image initially conceived by Rubin in 1915.  You can choose to see black vases-with the white faces as background.  Or you can see the faces-and then the black cases become background.  You can choose to see one as the shape, the other as the background.  But you cannot choose both of them simultaneously   You distinguish between signal and noise. Again it is not the raw data that you see; you see an interpretation  and only one interpretation at a time.  Berman’s version of the Rubin vases is not a drawing. He used silhouettes of real faces.  The figure above is a drawing inspired by Berman.

– Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion

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