the road to nowhere

"Although awareness is an achievement of individuals, it is not a subjective process, and it tends to be guided by others as well as oneself...western thought has always had difficulty accounting for this human ability to share awareness"

i-We.
In the world, therefore i am.
i am, therefore i think (sometimes).

blogland:

Like the no-places that are airports, shopping malls, service stations, there's something insipidly vacuous about blogland. As if a place for raw emotions ceases to be a place, a world. The paradox that an excess in the possibilities of communication actually means that real communication becomes less possible. Could it be that instead of opening us up to one another and to the world (and one assumes that these go hand in hand) that the information superhighways are not leading anywhere but back to the self-the self, mind you, not the person who acts and thinks and lives in the world? We're all connected now, or so they claim. Has that led to a decrease in selfishness and self-centredness?

Perhaps this passiveness, inward-ness has a history, in which case the de-materialization of the world is itself part of the world (in the same sense it might be argued that de-politicization is a political strategy).

Stop, look, listen.

In our workplaces, schools, and leisure/entertainment environments this seems every less likely. Go with the flow. Time-work discipline (E.P.)

Our intellectual trends have exalted specialization and abstractness over common sense and hands-on know-how. common sense. Hannah...

"[n]one have been able to break out of the solipsistic circle so as to test experience against anything other than their internal feelings"

Here's where the economists come in:

"What motivates us is a subjective state that causes positive feelings; what turns us off is a subjective state that causes negative feelings"

Pushpin is as good as poetry. What is right, true, or beautiful is a matter of matter acting on matter. You listen to some music on an LP. There is no experience. It can be replicated mechanically by something else since it can, ultimately, be reduced to "primary qualities". Values are lyingly added. The experience machine (Nozick)..a brain in a vat, a spark in the grey cosmos.

The Palestinians blah blah blah...

What you've noticed is the brothers' heightened sensitivity when it comes to this issue-and this one issue alone. And what's more remarkable is that this victim mentality is adopted by Pakistanis, Indians, and other bleeding hearts in the face of utter silence to the very real injustices perpetrated by Muslims on other people!

Slackness, disconnectedness, scatteredness of attention.

"A society in which fewer and fewer people have control over their experience and fewer and fewer people learn how to take pleasure in expanding their horizons is ripe for nihilism"

(citations, Bentham and E.S.Reed, The Necessity of Experience)