Slavoj Žižek on Ecology as a Religion

As provoking and radical as ever: Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on Ecology in an excerpt from the pop-philosophical documentary Examined Life (2008). Following the movie's subtitle "philosophy is in the streets", Žižek's agitation takes place in the midst of a North American dump.

Highlights:

There is no nature: Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb - nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes [and] we profit from that. (3:45)

...

Ecology will slowly turn into the new opium of the masses [...] Ecology is more and more taking over this role of a conservative ideology. (5:11)

...

We need more alienation from our life world [...] we should become more artificial. (8:57)

...

To recreate--if not build--an aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself - that's the true love of the world.
Because what is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows that: If you really love a woman or a man, that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points and nonetheless the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living [...] You see perfection in imperfection itself - and that's how we should learn to love the world. True ecologists love all this [points to the pile of trash]. (9:37)

Phenomenology and Neurophenomenology Resources Online

For the eleventh anniversary of Francisco Varela's untimely death, I compiled a couple of online resources about phenomenology and neurophenomenology (to be continued).

Audio and Video:

• Youtube playlist of the videos of the 2011 conference "Embodiment of Life" - mainly on the legacy of Francisco Varela (see also the upcoming 2012 version)
• Youtube playlist of ~70 videos on Phenomenology: mainly about or with Heidegger but also including Husserl, Jaspers, Dreyfus as well as Nietzsche
• Audio files of Hubert Dreyfus' 2011 lecture on Heidegger's Being and Time (Phil 185) at Berkeley
• Video of the panel discussion "The Reflective Self" at Columbia in 2008 with Dan Zahavi, Evan Thompson and others
• Audio and video files (plus transcripts) of the 2006 symposium "Mind and Reality" at Columbia

Blogs:

• "Neurophenomenology" maintained by Owen McNally, PhD - includes a nice historic overview(part 1, part 2, part 3)
• "Learning Philosophy of Change" by Giorgio Bertini, particularly the posts tagged "Varela"

Texts:

• 2004 special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on "Naturalizing Phenomenology" (edited by Antoine Lutz)
• Thomas Nagel (1974) What is it like to be a bat? (pdf)
• David Chalmers' collection of online texts on Phenomenology and Consciousness and the same topics at PhilPapers

The Best of Both Worlds

Peter Baumann, former core member of progressive rock band Tangerine Dream, talks about the interplay of conceptual thinking and embodied experience.

Similarly, the Mind & Life Institute seems to combine the best of both (or rather "all") worlds, bringing spirituality, art and science together - for example in an interesting one-day conference called Being Human 2012 on March 24 in San Francisco.

BBC Documentary: Kenneth Clark - Civilisation (1969/2011)

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (1969) -this landmark BBC documentary on history itself became historic earlier this year by being aired again in a remastered version on BBC.

This great documentary in 13 parts deals with the question how Western civilisation is defined and how it emerged or was created since the decline of the Roman Empire.

Religion vs. Secular Science

all sloppy scientists who forget a dot when wanting to access pubmed dot com (the central search engine for medical publications), thus typing http://wwwpubmed.com/ into their browser windows, are referred to bible studies dot org ("the mega site of bible, church, christian & religious info & studies").
bible studies dot org is "easy to navigate" and can prove that the bible is true on only "app. 6000 pages"
great website

2012 on Information is Beautiful (thanks, Francois)

There is a nice wrap-up of the whole 2012 New Age hype on Information is Beautiful

Väterchen Timofej, Munich's Hermit

Born on the same day as me but almost a hundred years earlier, Timofei Wassilijeitsch Prochorow, called Väterchen Timofei, emigrated to Munich in the 1950s in order to build his home in what was later to become the territory of the Olympic Games of 1972. After the "Olympic Hermit" did not agree on moving his garden, house and church and with the public behind him, he forced the organizers to change their plans.

I remember having visited him at least once in the 1990s and I completely forgot about this "Methusalem of Munich". I am sad to read that he died in 2004 (allegedly) at the age of 110.

Zeitgeist - The Movie (part 1 and 2)

Zeitgeist refers to "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age and its society".

I recently watched the Zeitgeist movie series (thanks, Eugenio), a three times two hours audiovisual epos about -say- the institutional control of the modern individual.
In fact, I have the same comment as on Das Netz - The Net two years ago (btw - here's the working link): "Leaving aside the fact that it's sometimes a little bit too close to conspiracy theories and its being too deep and too shallow at the same time, it's an interesting documentary."

Part 1 (Zeitgeist: The Movie)


Part 2 (Zeitgeist: Addendum)

Thinking Machine's Li'l Brova: thehumansarecoming

So here's Warren's announcement shifted out of the comments section:
Thinking Machine has a little brother called http://thehumansare.com/ing/
Haven't properly checked it out but you should!!

Douglas Adams RIP - H2G2's 30th Birthday

One day after what would've been his 56th birthday, we'll go to the Douglas Adams Memorial lecture in the Royal Geographical Society London. It's organized by the Savetherhino Foundation and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. The lecture itself will be given by Steven Pinker and because it's the 30th birthday of "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" it'll be followed by a special performance of some of the original cast. Ahh-- really looking forward to this.

--Also check this previous post on Douglas Adams and this cool BBC production in which he describes his view on how technology changes our lives, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future.

Queen's Christmas Broadcast 1957

Just the thing I've been waiting for: The Royal Family set up
a youtube account, called The Royal Channel.
On this link one can access this year's Christmas message by the Queen in a couple of days. Also very interesting is her majesty's Christmas broadcast from the early days of television 50 years ago, from 1957. Embedding has been disabled, so you have to click on the link to watch the contemplative 7min30 with which I want to wish you all a very merry ...or rather: Happy Christmas.

Important Book Charts - Number 3

After the Bible/Koran and the recently claimed second most important religious oeuvre, the Pope's Jesus book, I just discovered number 3, entitled A Million Random Digits, available as paperback on amazon for 28.5$. Furthermore, they offer a 'Search Inside' function, and you should definitely check out the helpful user commentaries.
My favorite ones
Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it's a shame they didn't sort them, to make it easier to find the one you're looking for.
and
Valuable, but a flawed translation...

Douglas Adams' God Reflection (link by Steven)

As probably the last post from Paris, I would like to forward you the nice 4min23sec reflection on the origin of the God idea by ingenious Douglas Adams. The two are probably playing cards together at the moment, giggling over the universe.

Kepos/Polis - The De-Cosumption Diaries

In the 'whereabouts of mankind' series, I stumbled over a nice fresh blog called Kepos/Polis - The De-Consumption Diaries.
It's about a self experiment in which the author's aim is to "use easily accessible information to help [...] decide what to buy/support and what not, as well as how to change [...] behaviour for the good of de-consumption."
He or she is gonna do so with one constraint that's as plausible as necessary: No ideologies!
I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes and grows.

Part 2: Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools and the Wholearth Catalog

...so in Das Netz (see below) there is a part on Stewart Brand, his Wholeearth Catalog, and his grasp on the determination of technological development.
Steven sent me this more recent video URL which includes Stewart Brand and a presentation of how the Wholeearth Catalog is a forefather of Wired magazine, one of the print media heavily related to the rise of the internet.
Involved in both magazines was a guy named Kevin Kelly who also appears in the video.
So one of the purposes of the Wholeearth Catalog was to facilitate "access to tools" in order to allow the individuum to easily express itself. The exact meaning of this principle might have changed over time but it aimed at individual freedom which is closely related to individual responsibility-- and that's where this post approaches last week's religion post and the current debate on man's negative impact on planet earth.

The website I originally wanted to present is Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools section, supposedly a modern, internet-compatible version of the Wholeearth Catalog. It reminds me a little bit of manufactum minus most of the nostalgic component.

There's lots of useful tools to discover--
So stay, be or get responsible!

The Religion Debate and the Camping Trinity

The discussion on the alleged clash of civilizations after 9/11 triggered the inter-denominational part of the debate, while maybe the German origin of the current pope added the intra-denominational dimension. In any case, at least in the German media a big debate on religion has been going on for a while, which for example treats the role of religion nowadays, the outfit of modern christianity, the relation of religion and science etc.
See for example

• last week's interview in 'Die Zeit' with Kardinal Walter Kasper and Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (German)
• The Spiegel Special The Power of Faith (international edition)
• But also biologist Richard Dawkins's BBC documentary on what he calls the God Delusion

However, my favorite contribution to the debate comes from a website I recently discovered through the well-formed-data.net blog: The indexed blog, a wonderfully creative capture of life, ingeniously depicts the problem of the holy trinity.