Some more random as* quotes from Haruki Murakami, to show where I get validation for my weird ideas...

On free will, and irony (my favorite thing):

"For the sake of argument, let's say all your choices and all your effort are destined to be a waste. You're still very much yourself and nobody else. And you're forging ahead, as yourself, so relax."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because there's irony involved...What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic world view of the Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy -comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results. Irony deepens a person, helps them to mature. It's the entrance to salvation on a higher plane, to a place where you can find a more universal kind of hope. That's why people enjoy reading Greek tragedies...everything in life is a metaphor...we accept irony through metaphor."

On why humans are beautiful:

"Playing Shubert's piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Most of all this Sonata in D major...there's never one where you can say, Yes! He's got it! Do you know why?...Because the sonata itself is imperfect."

"If the composition's imperfect, why would so many pianists try to master it?"

"...works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason...there's something in it that draws you in...you discover something about that work that tugs at your heart -or maybe we should say that the work discovers you...listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of -that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."


~from Kafka on the Shore

Some summer reading on race...

Cause now I'm going to document everything I read so I stop spouting off like a crazy lady:

• Jonathan Franzen's essay, "Correction Unit" in his book How to Be Alone (one of the many depressing articles about the prison system)
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/study-ties-black-white-wealth-gap-to-stubborn-disparities-in-real-estate/2013/02/26/8b4b3f50-8035-11e2-b99e-6baf4ebe42df_story.html?wpmk=MK0000200 
• Anything by Patricia Hill Collins- she's known for her book Black Feminist Thought (suggestion from friend)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• A Theology of Liberation
• Critical Race Theory

Wish me luck!!

Dreams

You know, they say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life? See, there's a lot of us that are out there that are mapping the mind-body relationship, of dreams. We're called the oneironauts. We're the explorers of the dream-world. Really, it's just about the two opposing states of consciousness which don't really oppose, at all. See, in the waking world, the neural system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. And this makes evolutionary sense. See you'd be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator to be mistaken for the memory of one, and vice-versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we would be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So you have these serotonic neurons that inhibit hallucinations that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep. See this allows dreams to appear real, while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action.

Telepathy!

Again, from Waking Life:

It's like there's this whole telepathic thing going on that we're all a part of, whether we're conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these, you know, seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts. You know, like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles, right, in relation to the general population. And they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people, right. And their scores went up dramatically, like 20 percent. So it's like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on 'em. It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

The New Evolution

There is one point in Waking Life where I have never been able to get past, because it is so dense. Finally, reading the transcript online, I might be able to progress past where I ended all those years ago.

Here is the sticking point:

Eamonn Healy, Chemistry professor at University of Texas at Austin

If we're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological -- development of the cities -- and cultural, which is human expression.

Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here -- two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it -- you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. Uou're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation.

The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external.

And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human? human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space.

And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations of those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. And that is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice.

And if you want to read lots of playful philosophy, http://wakinglifemovie.net/.

Types of Communication

I barely ever know what I'm talking about, so I doubt any of you do, when I reference my goals of conflict resolution. I used to talk about it in terms of communication, thus my undergrad philosophy senior thesis "On the Essentiality of Communicating with Each Other -How to Communicate with Terrorists" (which, unfortunately, was a bunch of idealistic gobbledegook, for which I am profoundly confused how I got the departmental award for it). But here is a bit of a hint. Reading an article on communication for my online Externship course, these are types of communication ferreted out by a study:

1. Rational persuasion
2. Inspirational appeal
3. Consultation
4. Ingratiation
5. Exchange
6. Personal Appeal
7. Coalition building
8. Legitimating
9. Pressure

So, choose carefully my friends. : )

One explanation on love, sexuality, gender, yin and yang, the nature of the universe, and the universal soul

From Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people ... In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around around trying to locate their missing other half.

Teamwork!

http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

We work in two rooms of 5 interns each. Apparently our room is the more socially conducive one. My coworker thinks this is because we have all the windows open and the lights off. =officeworkisnotnatural

See! The world...

My new project. Apparently somewhere like 26. Why is there not more on this?

HOW MANY WAYS TO SAY LOVE IN ARABIC

say love in English and you get this LOVE

SAY love in Arabic and you get several words because ARABIC means to make CRYSTAL CLEAR so here is a list of just how deep the word Love can go

bismillah,

In Arabic there are many words that describe love for example:

hob the love between everyone you can love your relatives friends family and your boy/girlfriend husband/wife and so on... so it is general word.

Garam it is the beginning of love or love from first sight.

Walah: it is the love with hard and great missing of the partner.

Hiyam: it is the last level of love that you are not able forget or leave your lover.

wid: it is general meaning of liking someone you can not say you love him/her but you like him/her.

The followings are the most Arabic words are using to describe love:

"AlMahaba,AlHawa,AlSababa,AlSabwa,AlShaghaf, AlWajed, AlIshiq, AlTataium, AlJawa, AlKalaf, Alsadam, Altabarieh, AlKhalaba, Alshoiq, AlShajo, AlWasab, AlSuhd, AlHarq, AlLa'ej, AlShajan, AlHaneen, AlLahaf, AlAraq, AlLathaa', AlKamad, AlKhibl,AlJinon, AlFitoon, AlLau'a, AlTAdlieh, AlKhilla."

Thank you http://arabicclassesonline.blogspot.nl/2010/01/how-many-ways-to-say-love-in-arabic.html

The Cloud Series 1: Endangered species