Tag: mind
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.
Source: A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
“The consistency condition which demands that new hypotheses agree with accepted theories is unreasonable because it preserves the older theory, and not the better theory. Hypotheses contradicting well-confirmed theories give us evidence that cannot be obtained in any other way. Proliferation of theories is beneficial for science, while uniformity impairs its critical power. Uniformity also endangers the free development of the individual.”
“There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory. Nor is political interference rejected. It may be needed to overcome the chauvinism of science that resists alternatives to the status quo.”
“No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempts to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.”
Terence McKenna was a fan.
Source: Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method
His “conceptual paintings” offered new possibilities for what abstraction could be.
“Ethereal and oftentimes mystical, Whitten’s paintings came out of inquiries into philosophical, scientific, and mathematical concepts. The chipped-paint technique in the “E Stamps” works, for example, often makes his work shine, and it sprang from reading up on the physical properties of light. “We know now that light occurs in extremely small particles,” he once told ARTnews. “That’s what allows us to see—those little fucking photons bouncing around your retina, and blam-o, I can see!””
Source: Jack Whitten, Beloved Painter of Abstract Cosmologies, Dies at 78 -ARTnews
Vito Acconci, as one might expect, did not rely on any such traditional system for organizing his library. He instead arranged his books based on an idiosyncratic, all-encompassing classification system very much of his own devising. Acconci’s system begins with general ontological categories – such as ‘Time’, ‘Space’, ‘Matter’, ‘Body’, ‘Life,’ ‘Mind’ and ‘Signs’ (there are 12 such categories in all) – which then proceed to sub-divide into more particular divisions and sections. By giving primacy to the ontological over the bibliographic, Acconci’s system does away with many library classification conventions. For instance, fiction and poetry are not treated as related genres of writing and thus placed within range of each other. Instead, novels are placed in a subset of ‘Time’ (‘fiction is about turning pages, it’s about time,’ according to Acconci) while poetry is classified as a subset of ‘Body,’ along with books on dance, music and clothing – perhaps reflecting Acconci’s own early evolution from poet to performance artist. Art and architecture books are also not assumed to share a common heritage and therefore assigned proximate shelf space. Instead, architecture books belong to a subset of ‘Space,’ while art books are classified as a subset of ‘Matter.’
Source: Vito Acconci’s Library
“The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.”
Mark Rothko Art Center https://www.rothkocenter.com/en/about-rothko/statement-about-art
