Confounded yet awed

[alienthropolgy]

Nourishment awaits upon yonder stove, another day boils itself down into digestible chunks. Today I ran an improv workshop for kids ages 4-20, with a 50something thrown in. We played. And that reminds of a paper I wrote on improv and personality theory...goes a little something like this:

In my second reaction paper I expressed a preference for

Comments

[americanwizard]

Fantastic... Absolutely fantastic.

And not just because you mentioned me/my term "American wizard" :)

The hive bit reminded me of something I had written that was since relegated to a file folder full of other jotted ideas & scenes yet (if ever) to be developed:

"Screw that!" he shouted. "Screw your job security. Specialization is for termites and crocodiles! You know what happens when an organism specializes, when it becomes perfect for a specific niche so that it can just keep doing that? It stops evolving. Nothing evolves if it's perfect. Stop being perfect, Stop all this specialization, Stop going to classes to learn to do one job so you can make as perfect a cog as possible for the goddamn corporate machine -- Why? 'Cause that's a dead-end road, man! That's all going nowhere, that's all going down. At this rate, the human race will be surpassed by the insects in NO TIME, and you'll be a contributor!" He stopped and hmphed a bit. "And you can have that engraved on your fuckin' headstone, because if you keep up with that

Poor Old Leary

[alienthropolgy]

I never mean to take tech analogies that far, but then, tech has never gone so far.

Because we don't understand the brain very well we're constantly tempted to
use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my
childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone
switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that
Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain
worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic
and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now,
obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. -John R. Searle,
philosophy professor (1932- )

Old Leary and RAW are infinitely fond of the computer analogy, but they both cut down on production after the internet. One died and the other, well, I haven't heard much from him on the subject.

[americanwizard]

I'm drawing a blank on "RAW." Help me out here.

RAW

[alienthropolgy]

None other than Robert Anton Wilson, author of such mind-expanding works as the Schrodinger's and Illuminatus Trilogies (with Rober Shea), Prometheus Rising (A Primer in American Wizardry if there ever was one), Cosmic Trigger series, etc.

Definitely a prophet of the end of science, philosphy, and religion as separate disciplines.

"We know the heart of distant galaxies but not our own. We have mastered atoms but not ourselves. We have choreographed much of the cast onstage, but have forgotten play." - Me