Tractatus Analogico-Mythologicus
Thoran is a type of stir-fried vegetable dish common in Kerala. Similar dishes are found all over South India. You basically stir fry the vegetables in oil seasoned with mustard seeds, onions, curry leaves, and other spices, and add some grated coconut toward the end. I normally eyeball the proportions, so this is an approximate recipe.
The image below is from a paper uploaded to the virtual “reading room” of a certain well-known intelligence agency.
I came across this paper on the “psychotronic universe” as the indirect result of googling for the phrase “a reconciliation of opposites” along with “consciousness”. The first result was something from the agency.
Implants + Internet = ImplanTelepathy™!
This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones.
Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone thinks that mind emerged from matter in the first place. Dualists think mind is a separate substance from matter. Idealists think matter is a subset of mind, rather than the other way round. And panpsychists think that mind is an intrinsic property of all forms of matter, so it didn’t really emerge at all.
Terrence W. Deacon’s 2012 book Incomplete Nature is a bold attempt to conceptualize the emergence of life and mind using a consistent ‘physicalist’ framework. I put the term ‘physicalist’ in scare-quotes because one of the appealing quirks of the book — and perhaps one that isn’t given enough attention despite a length of 500+ pages — is that Deacon wants us to add something to the list of physical things, which typically only includes matter and energy. This something is… nothing. The incompleteness in the title seems to refer to this idea: a qualified nothing or absence is central to emergence.