for erik, re: angles of approach, aka the bigger-than-burningman convo i wasn’t sure how to begin as we walked home across the UCSD campus with much in our arms and minds and hearts
because perhaps an online record should begin, no? considering we both aspire to full disclosure? ;)
other folks, please feel free to toss in any change your pockets care to share.
an excerpt from prometheus rising, by robert anton wilson, which i finally finished this morning after a multi-month hiatus:
Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode, and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.
If intelligence could be increased, obviously solutions could be found more quickly to the various Doomsday scenarios threatening us.
If each scientist working on the energy-resources problem could double or triple his or her intelligence, work that would require 20 years might be done in six.
If human stupidity in general decreased, there would be less opposition to original thinking and new approaches to our old problems, less censorship and less bigotry.
If stupidity decreased, less money would be wasted on vast organized imbecilities such as the Arms Race, and more would be available for life enhancing projects.
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, but we must consider the corollary:
Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
Maurice Nicholl, physician, psychiatrist, student of Jung, Gurdjieff and Esoteric Christianity, wrote that “the only purpose in work on consciousness is to decrease the amount of violence in the world.” This is Public Health Problem Number One in the nuclear age, the age of overkill.
We are not talking about mere increase in linear IQ – third-circuit semantic cleverness. We are talking of also the kinds of right-brain intelligence that Nicholl acquired from Jungian neurogenetic research and Gurdjieff’s meta-programming techniques. We are talking of, say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionata (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head, and we mustn’t pat them on the head, we must hit them on the head, hit them hard, and make them obey.” More of Beethoven’s intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads.
October 1st, 2007 at 12:21 am
Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode, and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point.
All adaptation is intelligence. reception, decoding, transmission, and efficiency are only sometimes adaptive.
If stupidity decreased, less money would be wasted on vast organized imbecilities
According to whom? Does he have any clue why these imbecilities happen in the first place? The military-industrial complex is highly adaptive, and therefore highly intelligent. It’s smart enough to last for centuries. It’s probably not smart enough to last millenia, but then neither is Wilson.
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases.
What evidence do we have that rationality is somehow the key to all problems?
Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
Or maybe it’s a distraction from them.
“the only purpose in work on consciousness is to decrease the amount of violence in the world.”
Tell that to Dan Dennett.
We are talking of, say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionata (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head.
Is Lenin really a typical case? We are meant to believe that a lack of intelligent art is the reason why high school educated carpenter Joe Blow in western Massachussettes beats his wife?