About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full
Incoming links
from Future Fossils/Weird Studies
    • Ep is from 2019
    • SFI has a critique of materialist science, but Garfield still feels drawn to the fringe (OK that I can buy into).
    • "No man is an island, but some are very long peninsulas"
    • Etymology of weird ≡ wyrd ≡ twisted ≡ fractal
    • "It's all fun and games until someone loses an I" (Zen dad joke)
    • Fractalnoia – name for the condition induced by crazy internet media
    • Crowley should be up with Pound, Einstein, Picasso as modernist figure
      • Hrm rm, here's where I kind of part with the WS guys. They want Crowley and the weird to be outsiders but also recognized as insiders. I sense a contradiction. To be fair it's probably one they are well aware of, they talk about things like this sometimes, and it's not like I'm some outlaw purist.
    • Grammar of Process, myth shows the shape of things (OK, thats on my wavelength). Ontological morphology
    • Dōgen episode of WS: singularity of the moment. Should listen to that one.
    • The creepy avidity of life...finding an opening and seething through. Your geraniums look beautiful and homey but it's the same thing. A loathsome profigacy (From Lovecraft). Source of all beauty?
    • Talk by John Pepper at National Cancer Institute. About nutrition and cancer as a metabolic thing. Sugar and petroleum have tumorized us.
    • Some pseudoscience UFO thing...oy.
    • Disruption as weirding capitalism. Cash in and be Weird Consultants, get spots on CNN explaining the Weird Times too the masses
    • WS will die if there is ever a WS department...WS is what escapes the episteme. Compared later to TAZ theory of Hakim Bey – as soon as utopia is identified it becomes distopia.
    • Fundamental problem of academia: Originality vs. Evaluation. Things need to be replicable and that is counter to personal vision. Just how things work. WS is always about things that elude categorization, replication, standardization.
    • David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos
Page Tree

Future Fossils

06 May 2022 - 14 Jun 2024
Open in Logseq
    • A podcast from Michael Garfield, who has some connection to the Santa Fe Institute and covers somewhat woo-ish science. Interestingly, I have a lot more trouble digesting this than I do Weird Studies, although they are close in the podcast-space. I think it's because WS is art+woo, which makes sense to me, art is kind of woo anyway, and to the extent I have opinions about it, they are similar to those of the hosts. it challenges. Whereas science+woo produces a mental dissonance for me, and I have problems resolving it, I always want to start an argument.
    • Nonetheless there's a lot of interesting stuff here. I'm not going to give it a page per episode though.

    • 182 - Siv Watkins on Microanimism: Living with The Smalls

      • Siv Watkins is a microbiologist and "ritualist". This had something to say about attributing agency to microorganisms and relating to them as agents, but it was frustratingly confused from my perspective. A lot of talk about how we shouldn't think of (eg) a rabies virus as evil, its just doing its thing. That is the opposite of an agentive approach! Is it just a machine just doing its thing, or an enemy? They cited a lot of science fiction that involved the dissolution of boundaries or building collective hybrid organisms (Octavia Butler, Greg Bear). A notable omission: Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels.
      • Anyway, her theory of microanimism is obviously in my wheelhouse and glad to have been exposed to it. It's a whole schtick
        • Microanimism is a platform for examining and developing how human beings can consciously relate to and engage with microbial organisms.
        • Microanimism I: Thinking Like a Plague examines what we know we know about the microbial universe, and introduces a ritual approach to developing a different type of connection to the smalls.
        • Microanimism II: Microbiological Dark Matter begins to probe what we know we don’t know about the microbial domain, expanding the ritual practice embarked upon during TLAP.
        • Microanimism III: And So, Ad Infinitum - an investigation of what we don’t know we don’t know about the microbial plane

    • 186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science

      • Riffing against Dawkins, a popular target, he symbolizes everything scientistic.
      • Our Lady of Fatima – it is interesting as a phenomenon, to dismiss it as "mass hallucination" is to miss the interestingness.
      • Oy vey leaning heavily into astrology, that's a bit too much for me
      • Wants a rigorous quantified science of the weird – but I thought the WS guys, at least, think the paranormal is inherently outside of the quantifying grasp of science, which certainly is convenient.