DESMA 9:Art, Science and Technology

Consciousness / Memory

"The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciouness are one and the same."

"The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" ) C.G Jung

con·scious·ness (kŏn'shəs-nĭs) n.

The state or condition of being conscious.A sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group: Love of freedom runs deep in the national consciousness.

Special awareness or sensitivity: class consciousness; race consciousness.Alertness to or concern for a particular issue or situation: a movement aimed at raising the general public's consciousness of social injustice.

In psychoanalysis, the conscious.

Camillo’s memory theater

Miss Atomic Bomb, 1957

Roy LichtensteinAtom Burst, 1966Acrylic on masonite24 x 24 inches (60.9 x 60.9 cm)

DAVID BOHM

Thought as a System

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, 'felts' and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure....

Quantum Mechanics or Theory:

Coined by Max Bohr in 1924

is a physical science dealing with the behaviour of matter and energy on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles / waves. QM also forms the basis for the contemporary understanding of how very large objects such as Stars and galaxies, and cosmological events such as the Big Bang, can be analyzed and explained.

Gregory Bateson

"I have taught various branches of behavioral biology and cultural anthropology to American students ranging from college freshmen to psychiatric residents, in various schools and teaching hospitals, and I have encountered a very strange gap in their thinking that springs from a lack of certain tools of thought. This lack is rather equally distributed at all levels of education, among students of both sexes and among humanists as well as scientists. Specifically, it is a lack of knowledge of the presuppositions not only of science but of everyday life." (Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature, p. 23)

MEME

Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins, a "unit of cultural information" which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes (i.e., the units of genetic information). 1976

Cover painting byDesmond Morris, zoologist &Surrealist painter

ResearchDreams, art, mythology,World religion, philosophy,Alchemy, astrology

Psychology archetypes,Collective unconscious,Theory of synchronicity

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (Prologue from "Memories, Dreams, Reflections")

RHIZOME

In botany, a rhizome is a usually underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes, though a number of species of plants have above ground rhizomes or rhizomes that sit at the soil surface including some Iris species. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks.

rhizome has been used by Carl Jung as a metaphor, and by Gilles Deleuze as a concept

Francisco Varela

Philosopher trained as biologist.

Proponent of the embodied philosophy which argues that human cognition and consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, namely the body and the physical world with which the body interacts.

Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)-creation" (from the Greek: auto - αυτό for self- and poiesis - ποίησις for creation or production) and expresses a fundamental dialect between structure and function. The term was originally introduced by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1973

NOOSPHERE

The noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek νους ("nous") meaning "mind" in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere(inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere.

The word is also sometimes used to refer to a transhuman consciousnessemerging from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who added that the noosphere is evolving towards an ever greater integration, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the ultimate goal of history.

MEMORY

Fragility of memory: distortions & illusions

Multiple forms & types

Dr. Schacter, Harvard University