Oh yes! Forever Jung (Young) as the name says by itself!

A great article here about a man who stays standing still all through the generations. ❤

via https://www.vision.org/themes/custom/sophia/img/vision-logo.png

by Gina Stepp

FALL 2011Society and CultureBIOGRAPHY

Carl Gustav Jung is best known as one of the fathers of modern psychotherapy alongside his erstwhile associates Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. He introduced such terms as introversion and extraversion, the collective unconscious, archetypes and synchronicity into the popular vocabulary. But beyond that, most people today probably know little about the man. Understanding something of his profound influence, however, is critical for anyone who wants to better understand the current state of Western culture.

After his departure from Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, Jung founded an approach he named Analytical Psychology, many tenets of which have not only led some to refer to him as a “founding father of the New Age” but also prevented much of the scientific community from taking him seriously.

Stung by his lack of acceptance as a scientist, Jung hated being called a mystic, a label which nevertheless clung to him throughout his life and beyond. Even his secretary, Aniela Jaffé, acknowledged that “the clear analogies that exist between mysticism and Jungian psychology cannot be overlooked,” although she insisted that “this fact in no way denies its scientific basis.”

Likewise Gary Lachman notes in his 2010 biography that despite Jung’s assertion to the contrary, “he would, by his own definition, be a mystic.” He openly admitted to having paranormal experiences and participating in séances. Lachman also attributes the psychologist’s reputation as a mystic to the fact that he claimed special, secret knowledge or gnosis “not obtained through the normal methods of cognition.” In fact, “Jung’s link to Gnosticism was so significant,” observes Lachman, “that one of the Gnostic scrolls making up the [Nag Hammadi] library was purchased by the Jung Foundation in 1952 and named the ‘Jung Codex’ in honor of the man many saw as a modern Gnostic.”

“Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory.” C.G. JUNG, MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS (1961)

Jung’s use of religious terms has sometimes encouraged the misconception that his idea of spirituality is somehow compatible with a biblical view; but in Jung’s writings, the subjects of God, Christ and religion in general were invariably presented as mythology.

So who was this ambitious loner? Most biographies focus on the relational history of their subjects—the families into which they are born and the later encounters that influenced their development, but a sketch of Carl Gustav Jung’s life, by necessity, is bound to have a slightly different focus. The experiences that had the most profound effect on him were, by his own account, those that occurred within himself; people and the physical trappings of everyday life were relatively uninteresting to him.

“The very things that make up a sensible biography,” said Jung in the autobiography he dictated to Jaffé, had become for him mere “phantasms” compared to one’s inner developments. These consisted of his experiences in the form of dreams, visions (some might characterize them as hallucinations), interplay between his two inner “selves” (one of which, dubbed “No. 2,” he described as an authoritative 18th-century character with a white wig, who traveled in a coach and wore buckled shoes), and other active imaginings that formed inner pathways to what he would later term “individuation,” or the process of becoming who we are by integrating the conscious with the unconscious.

Nevertheless some aspects of a sensible biography of Jung can be collected and narrated. His birth on July 26, 1875, for instance, was certainly no phantasm, at least so far as his mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, must have been concerned. Carl was her fourth child, but two daughters had been stillborn and another son had died soon after birth. The children’s father, Paul, was a Protestant minister, but he was unhappy both in his profession and in his marriage, which could not have been pleasant for his wife either. Described as depressed, and more interested in the occult than in showing any affection to her son, Emilie had to be hospitalized for a period after suffering a breakdown when Carl was about three, an event that made a lasting impression on him. Jung records that he was never able to trust women again.

He grew up essentially an only child, and the arrival of his sister Gertrude when he was 9 changed little. Jung says, “I played alone, and in my own way. Unfortunately I cannot remember what I played; I recall only that I did not want to be disturbed.” Lachman observes that this preference for isolation “stayed with Jung throughout his life.” Albert Oeri, a lifelong friend, remarked retrospectively that he and Jung were initially brought together to play because their fathers were “old school friends” and both men hoped their sons would also form a close relationship. This hope was at first dashed, however; Carl continued to concentrate on his solitary pursuit, refusing to notice Albert. “How is it that after some fifty-five years I remember this meeting at all?” Oeri mused. “Probably because I had never come across such an asocial monster before.”

Even after his marriage to Emma Rauschenbach and his ensuing fatherhood, Jung retained his general disinterest in others. In A Life of Jung, Ronald Hayman notes that while Jung sometimes went sailing with his son Franz (perhaps more out of a love of sailing than out of any particular interest in his son), he generally kept his daughters at arm’s length. On one rare occasion when he included them on a boat trip, he bought them a treat. “Look,” exclaimed eight-year-old Marianne to her mother, “Franz’s father bought me a little cake!” Emma took advantage of the occasion to explain to her daughter that Jung was her father too.

Jung’s wife and five children learned to accustom themselves to the wide range of his eccentricities. In addition to being required to accept one of his mistresses as a member of the household, they also lived with the paranormal phenomena which seemed to increase in the household when Jung would shut himself away in privacy to practice “active imagination”—inducing a state somewhere between waking and sleeping (hypnagogia), in which he would commune with his inner voices in order to resolve any conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious. Jung’s autobiographical descriptions of the visions he experienced in this state might come across as somewhat bizarre to many readers, particularly considering the fact that his ambition was to be seen as a man of science.

“It seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.” C.G. JUNG, MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS (1961)

However, his apparent affinity with the spirit world had a long and even familial history. His mother was the daughter of a Hebrew scholar who maintained a chair in his study for the convenience of his dead first wife’s ghost. He was visited by other figures as well, and it was Emilie’s job to shoo them away so he could work on his sermons. Eventually Emilie herself developed “mediumistic powers,” including a second personality who was observed regularly by young Carl in the years leading up to the apparent emergence of his own “No. 2.” Jung records that between his eighth and eleventh year, “the nocturnal atmosphere” at home “had begun to thicken.” Describing the events as “incomprehensible and alarming,” Jung says: “From the door to my mother’s room came frightening influences. At night Mother was strange and mysterious. One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon. Immediately another head was produced and again detached itself. This process was repeated six or seven times.”

Considering such experiences together with Jung’s subsequent interests and practices throughout his life—including his clearly Gnostic late-life work, Answer to Job (1952)—one assertion Lachman records him as having made in a 1957 interview seems extraordinary. On that occasion Jung declared, “Everyone who says that I am a mystic is just an idiot.”

But then, by his own estimation, Jung was not the best one to summarize his life. “I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness,” his autobiography records; “I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along.” Despite his uncertainty on this issue, Jung nevertheless expressed his conviction of some kind of continuity of being, whether through reincarnation or something else. Many of the concepts he coined for his particular philosophy, at any rate, do seem destined to remain a part of the popular vocabulary.

SELECTED REFERENCES

1. Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung (1999).
2. Aniela Jaffé, Was C.G. Jung a Mystic?and Other Essays (1989).
3. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, (1961, 1995).
4. Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings (2010).
5. AlbertOeri, “Some Youthful Memories,” in C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull (1977).

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You know what?: I have enough of the Fu,,,ng stuff called; trademark!

As I remember, in the end of the 60’s I was about 17th years old and was one a few western companion of the “Hippy-time in that period, in which the Shah’s regime tried to keep the relationship to the west but in a controlled way.

in this situation, I got the moving in the west; Love. Peace, Freedom.

I had a hard way to look after it and also to fight against the mute people around. we were a few in those days but very powerful!

Anyway, I know this song by the C. S. N&Y and I get to know that it is written by another one. I really don’t care though, I am happy it is written by a woman ❤

So, in my opinion there is not the matter of who take the winner card. It is a wonderful song which described us all:

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Via ; http://www.openculture.com/

http://www.openculture.com/2019/08/how-joni-mitchell-wrote-woodstock.html

Among the slew of iconic late-60s acts who played Woodstock 50 years ago, one name stands out conspicuously for her absence: Joni Mitchell. Was she not invited? Did she decline? Was she double-booked? Mitchell was, of course, invited, and eagerly wanted to be there. The story of her non-appearance involves alarming headlines in The New York Times and an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show the day after the festival that her manager, Elliot Roberts and label head David Geffen, decided she simply couldn’t miss.

Her significant other at the time, Graham Nash, reached the upstate New York festival with CSNY, “by helicopter and a stolen truck hot-wired by Neil Young,” reports the site Nightflight. But Geffen and Mitchell, seeing the headline “400,000 People Sitting in Mud,” and a description of the roads as “so clogged with cars that concertgoers were abandoning them and walking,” decided they shouldn’t take the risk. (She described the scene as a “national disaster area.”) Instead, they watched news about the mud-splattered event from Geffen’s New York City apartment (other accounts say they holed up in the Plaza Hotel).

So how is it Mitchell came to write the definitive Woodstock anthem, with its era-defining lyric “we’ve got to get ourselves back the garden”? In the way of all artists—she watched, listened, and used her imagination to conjure a scene she only knew of secondhand. CSNY’s version of “Woodstock” (live, below, at Madison Square Garden in 2009) is the one we tend to hear most and remember, but Mitchell’s—her voice soaring high above her piano—best conveys the song’s sense of youthful hippie idealism, mystical wonder, and just a touch of desperation. (At the top, she plays the song live in Big Sur in 1969.) David Yaffe, author of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell describes the song as “purgation. It is an omen that something very, very bad will happen with the mud dries and the hippies go home.”

Mitchell did make the Cavett Show gig, alongside Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Jefferson Airplane, all just returning from the festival. But she didn’t have much to say. Instead, the gregarious Crosby does most of the talking, describing Woodstock as “incredible, probably the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the world.” Surveying the scene from a helicopter, he says, was like seeing “an encampment of a Macedonian army on a Greek hill crossed with the biggest batch of gypsies you ever saw.” Later on the show, Mitchell played “Chelsea Morning” and other songs, after performances by Jefferson Airplane.

“The deprivation of not being able to go,” she remembered, “provided me with an intense angle” on the festival. “Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and there was tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song ‘Woodstock’ out of these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public, I burst into tears, because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was so moving.”

She did finally get the chance to play “Woodstock” at Woodstock, in 1998 (above, on electric guitar), for an appreciative long-haired, tie-dyed audience—many of them nostalgic for a moment they missed or were too young to have experienced. The performance highlights the “sense of longing that became essential to the song’s impact,” as Leah Rosenzweig writes at Vinyl Me, Please. “Sure, it was the irony of the century”: the song that best captured Woodstock for the people who weren’t there was written by someone who wasn’t there. “But it was also a perfect recipe for Mitchell to do what she did best: draw humans together while remaining completely on the sidelines.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him 

Hi dear friends, it is again weekend and I can try to continue telling about my holidays trip to beautiful Greece.

Of course, I must tell you about my shocking moment yesterday, as I finished my work happily to begin my lovely work on my PC but couldn’t believe the screen on the monitor before my eyes show a blue shit and telling me that the Windows couldn’t get opened and it needs a repair! 😲

I just optimistically clicked on the repair button but after a few minutes got the info; Windows can’t be repaired! I tried many times with no positive result. 😒

I tell you how I missed my brother in this terrible minutes more than ever because he was a genius also in what so ever mattering on PC.

Anyway, I dared to try by myself (whom else!) and finally got the way to restore it again 🙂 😜

So! Now to the story; to put it bluntly, I am not a man of much activity 😏 I mean a little bit lazy 😎 but my wife is a kind of action; she can’t stay inactive just maybe for getting rest! Therefore, when we get together on a vacation, she plans all the “Activities” on the journey and I confess that I’m happy about that; it brings me to move. (look! She is eight years younger than me.) 😁😂

The first few days we have stayed in our place to get the common view around us then she put the first activity; On the search of the Old Wall of the Town, which was intact long time ago and now was apart and one must track down this at the edge of the city; Regina, my wife has always a relevant book about our aiming place in which we want to spend our vacation and there was a mini scribble about the old wall and where it begins and get forwards.

On this small map it looked so easy and also the beginning with the God & the Goddess of all Gods; Zeus & Hera it looked all so fine. But I tell you after that the way didn’t get so easily straight ahead, it got straight upwards!!

But I tell you, as It went higher and higher, I found it more enjoyable. It was really a wonderful adventure as we must try to find the next step to go further; it was not marked or no shields to show the right way, and after we went downwards on the other side of the height, we’ve found out that there is the comfortable, touristic shown way to climb! But I’m happy that we didn’t know it and we began from the unknown side 😉 though, we’ve got it happily and successfully. 🙂

Now there are some pics about this adventure, hopping you’d enjoy 🙂 ❤

Thank You ❤

Hi lovely friend, I’m back now from my holidays trip and want to share some of the events and pics about this vacation.

Though, to put it bluntly, I’ve got such a day in which have not so much energy! I don’t know if you might experience such days; I feel arrrggg…brrrgh!! not the lust of doing something

Anyway, at least I begin with some nice pictures of the arrival and the first days. That’s why I named this Nr; 1 😀

Have a wonderful Weekend everyone ❤ ❤

Finally, I dare to write about my parents’ love story, as I once announced my intention to do so. I said “to dare” because I never could be fully aware of it; I was a little kid those days, and in those seven years of my beginning to know my environment, I experienced my Dad, and there are vague remembrances in my memories.

As I’m digging in my dusty uncertainty, I can see some pictures of my Dad and Mam in some romantic ways; I was just in my 5th year, told them they should lie down on the ground beside each other, and I pushed their faces towards one another so that their lips met… (what a child!!) And, of course, I can still hear his steps, walking to and fro, up there on the second floor; in these moments, we are commanded to keep silent because he is writing. He had his territory on the second floor, a big office room with books all around on the shelves on the walls, and when he got there, we couldn’t have any claim on our father; our mother was rigorous there about. I understood it after my brother and I had lived alone. He was often portrayed as a father, although he had never agreed with this.

Also, I recall how Dad came downstairs with his belt when we, as children, were not quiet enough, and there was my brother Al, who received the most beatings. But also, I remember when he came down as I was sick, and my mother called the doctor to come and give me an injection, and you can swear that I called all gods to help me keep this unfortunate doctor away from me. And yes, there was no chance for my Dad to come downstairs and look for these yellings and chase the doctor out of the house; in this very moment, his heart was more full of love towards me than for my health, or he just wanted to finish this tumult! In any case, he almost threw the doctor out of the house and kissed me in protection; I will never forget his wonderful smiling face as I lay in fever in bed, and his beautiful face came towards mine.

And just a little more: I see him (Dad) sitting on the sofa, wearing his socks in an agitated and furious way, shouting to Mother, who was in the kitchen, “So, then I get outdoors.” I hear Mother shouting back, “GO!” I’m sitting in front of him on the carpet, asking, Where are you going, Father? Nowhere, he backed!

So, having talked enough, let’s get to the love story. Although I don’t know all about it, I’ve heard and read about it. My mother had to get married at a very young age, as it was customary in the 1930s. But her husband was a general and, as it meant to be, a man of brutality. He loved our mother, but in his way, he kissed and beat her! They were no longer than three or four years together and had offspring, Soroosh, till my mother got enough and decided to escape.

She was surely not able to do it as easily as possible today. Therefore, she established a connection with her sister, Rakhshandeh (also known as Khalle Rakhshy). Of course, she was one of, let me count, the eighth of her sisters, but she was also one of the pioneers of fighting for women’s rights in those days.

Although this picture is later from that time, I had seen a pic of her in those days; the picture showed a laughing girl dressed in white, and I tell you, dressed very generously in comparison to that time, she was working as a nurse in one of the vast and famous hospitals in the big town: Mashhad, a city in far eastern Iran, and as my Mom told us once; she had a life like the girls in the Woodstock time! She was a woman of life; nobody could get near her. She was married then, and her husband was a wonderful man who had no objections.

Anyway, in this picture, as you can see, she looks in another way; that is because, as I heard, she had visions and a meeting with the prophets! And I tell you, I believed her because she always knew something happened before it happened! She had the might of a foreseer.

Anyway, she had rescued our mother and got her into her big old house. As I once heard, a snake lived in the attic for many years, protecting the house. To put it bluntly, I was often there, every summer, but never met this snake, though; I had heard some creeping noise on the roof now and then when I stayed there.

So, my aunt got a divorce for Mom, as she knew how to do it back then. Now, she had noticed how sensitive her sister was and found out why: her love for one of the most famous writers of that time, my Dad.

Also, she was clever enough to arrange to let them meet each other, and she was sure it’d work out; my father was a famous writer at that time and almost in her forties, and my mother was just about twenty. In any case, she planned a meeting; she’d heard that my father was just for a short stay in the town and lured him into the house. As he belted the ring, my aunt pushed my mother to open the door, and there it happened. Mother was in love with my father through his books, and my father was amazed at my mom’s beauty when she opened the door. Then they got married.

Of course, it’s begun a challenge of love and hate! I think it’s a well-known story in the life of every artist throughout world history. But stunningly, my mother took the patience; I believe she merely contended that her husband is a cherished, renowned writer, and many women admired him, as my mother did. Therefore, everybody must endure the pain!

There, the story of unforgiven love began. My Dad was famous enough to be invited to travel not only around Persian cities but also to foreign countries. It wasn’t enough for my Mom; there was another problem as well. Dad was against the dictatorship. He was against the Shah’s regime and the Mullahs’ existence. He was a Muslim believer, but in a mystical sense. He had even been hated by the Muslim clergy.

Let politics be on the side. Many young girls have adored him, and their affection has inspired him. However, over time, this affection faded somewhat, and his inspiration diminished as well. Thus, my mother, in her genuine love, chose to write him anonymous love letters, encouraging his creativity to produce more stories.

I must mention that my father had to supply all of us, but he could only write, and nothing else. He was, as some artists might be, a man of art and not of money! That was not an easy life, I promise, as in the end, I might say the lasted ten-year love story got its end, as our parents came home after a marriage party and in the middle of the night my father got a brain attack and left us little kids and a young inexperienced beloved wife with owing much!

Wow! I didn’t think that it would get so long! Anyhow, thank you for your patience, and I think you will need it more if you like because, after this, I have much to tell about our life; it goes more dramatically 🙂 Have a wonderful weekend 💖

A very interesting question. Do they have some? Or are we aware of our own? I don’t know if I have some 😀 but surely I would wish to have a “Consciousness-Ometer”!

here is an amazing research about that; Take a look, be honest, and be aware of your good “conscience” on your “consciousness” 😉

via https://theconversation.com/uk

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Consciousness
• Neuroimaging
• Human consciousness
• Cognitive neuroscience

Researchers have ideas how to probe consciousness in another. agsandrew/Shutterstock.com

Author: Tam Hunt Affiliate Guest in Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara

How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness? After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything else is inference. The nature of consciousness makes it by necessity a wholly private affair.

These questions are more than philosophical. As intelligent digital assistants, self-driving cars and other robots start to proliferate, are these AIs actually conscious or just seem like it? Or what about patients in comas – how can doctors know with any certainty what kind of consciousness is or is not present, and prescribe treatment accordingly?

In my work, often with with psychologist Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, we’re developing a framework for thinking about the many different ways to possibly test for the presence of consciousness.

There is a small but growing field looking at how to assess the presence and even quantity of consciousness in various entities. I’ve divided possible tests into three broad categories that I call the measurable correlates of consciousness.

You can look for brain activity that occurs at the same time as reported subjective states. Or you can look for physical actions that seem to be accompanied by subjective states. Finally, you can look for the products of consciousness, like artwork or music, or this article I’ve written, that can be separated from the entity that created them to infer the presence – or not – of consciousness.

Neural correlates of consciousness

Over the last two decades, scientists have proposed various ways to probe cognition and consciousness in unresponsive patients. In such cases, there aren’t any behaviors to observe or any creative products to assess.

You can check for the neural correlates of consciousness, though. What’s physically going on in the brain? Neuroimaging tools such as EEG, MEG, fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), are able to provide information on activity happening within the brain even in coma and vegetative patients.

Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has identified what he calls four signatures of consciousness – specific aspects of brain activity he deems necessary for normal consciousness. He focuses on what’s known as the “P3 wave” in the dorsolateral cortex – the part of the brain behind the top of your forehead – because it seems to correlate most reliably with normal conscious states. He also focuses on long-range synchronized electric fields between different parts of the brain as another key signature of consciousness.

In tests which look for these signals in vegetative and minimally conscious patients, Dehaene and his colleagues have successfully predicted which patients are most likely to regain more normal states of consciousness.

Sid Kouider, another cognitive neuroscientist, has examined infants in order to assess the likelihood that very young babies are conscious. He and his team looked for specific neural signatures that go along with subjective experience in adults. They looked specifically for a certain type of brain waves, similar to the P3 wave Dehaene focuses on, that are reliable indicators of consciousness in adults. They found clear analogs of the P3 wave in the brains of babies as young as five months old. Kouider concludes – unsurprisingly – that even young babies are very likely conscious in various complex ways, such as recognizing faces.

Behavioral correlates of consciousness

When considering potentially conscious entities that can’t communicate directly, and that won’t allow neuroscientific measurement tools on their head (if they even have heads), it’s possible to consider physical behaviors as clues for the presence and type of consciousness.

You know that a massive range of human behaviors are accompanied by conscious experience. So when you see similar behaviors in other animals or even non-animals, can you reasonably infer the presence of consciousness?

For example, are cats conscious? Their brain architecture is a little different than humans’. They have very minimal prefrontal cortex, which some scientists think is the center of many higher-order activities of the human brain. But is a prefrontal cortex necessary for consciousness?

Cat behavior is complex and pretty easy to map onto human behavior in many ways. Cats purr, flex their toes and snuggle when petted, in similar ways to people demonstrating pleasure when physically stimulated – minus the purrs, of course. They meow loudly for food when hungry and stop meowing when fed. They demonstrate curiosity or fear about other cats or humans with various types of body language.

These and many other easily observable behaviors add up to convincing evidence for most people that cats are indeed conscious and have rich emotional lives. You can imagine looking for other familiar behaviors in a rat, or an ant or a plant – if you see things close enough to what you’d expect in conscious humans, you may credit the observed creature with a certain type of consciousness.

Creative correlates of consciousness

If, for whatever reason, you can’t examine neural or behavioral correlates of consciousness, maybe you can look to creative outputs for clues that would indicate consciousness.

For example, when examining ancient megalithic structures such as Stonehenge, or cave paintings created as far back as 65,000 years ago, is it reasonable to assume that their creators were conscious in ways similar to us? Most people would likely say yes. You know from experience that it would take high intelligence and consciousness to produce such items today, so reasonably conclude that our ancient ancestors had similar levels of consciousness.

What if explorers find obviously unnatural artifacts on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system? It will depend on the artifacts in question, but if astronauts were to find anything remotely similar to human dwellings or machinery that was clearly not human in origin, it would be reasonable to infer that the creators of these artifacts were also conscious.

Closer to home, artificial intelligence has produced some pretty impressive art – impressive enough to fetch over US$400,000 in a recent art auction. At what point do reasonable people conclude that creating art requires consciousness?

Researchers could conduct a kind of “artistic Turing Test”: ask study participants to consider various artworks and say which ones they conclude were probably created by a human. If AI artwork consistently fools people into thinking it was made by a person, is that good evidence to conclude that the AI is at least in some ways conscious? So far AI aren’t convincing most observers, but it’s reasonable to expect that they will be able to in the future.

Where’s my ‘consciousness-ometer’?

Can anyone get a definitive answer about the presence of consciousness, and how much? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is no. There is not yet a “consciousness-ometer,” but various researchers, including Dehaene, have some ideas.

Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his colleagues like Christof Koch focus on what they call “integrated information” as a measure of consciousness. This theory suggests that anything that integrates at least one bit of information has at least a tiny amount of consciousness. A light diode, for example, contains just one bit of information and thus has a very limited type of consciousness. With just two possible states, on or off, however, it’s a rather uninteresting kind of consciousness.

In my work, my collaborators and I share this “panpsychist” foundation. We accept as a working hypothesis that any physical system has some associated consciousness, however small it may be in the vast majority of cases.

Rather than integrated information as the key measure of consciousness, however, we focus on resonance and synchronization and the degree to which parts of a whole resonate at the same or similar frequencies. Resonance in the case of the human brain generally means shared electric field oscillation rates, such as gamma band synchrony (40-120 Hertz).

Our consciousness-ometer would then look at the degree of shared resonance and resulting information flows as the measure of consciousness. Humans and other mammals enjoy a particularly rich kind of consciousness, because there are many levels of pervasive shared synchronization throughout the brain, nervous system and body.

Tests for consciousness are still in their infancy. But this field of study is undergoing a renaissance because the study of consciousness more generally has finally become a respectable scientific pursuit. Before too long it may be possible to measure just how much consciousness is present in various entities – including in you and me.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

#Grief #Memories #Love #Writing

This is for the first time that I write a tribute about my brother on this site, who “changed the level” as he wrote in his last novel as picturing the death.

He left on this day in 2007 because of a fiendish brain tumour and I reminded this day always on FB but now I feel much cosier to share it here with you.

Of course, in my opinion, to lose a beloved one lingers all the time in the heart and mind. But to mention the very day; Birthday or dying day, is normally the highest point of this memory, as one is much closer than ever.

Yes, we were an unusual pair; when I was born he was just 20 months old and after a year of my residence on this earth, one day when my mother was outdoor, he suggested Dad that they should take the chance to make an end on this cranky kinky and whimsical trouble and threw him out!!

But I survived by the help of Dad and despite all our differences, became fine to each other. Especially, when our father died by a brain stroke, I was just seven years old and Al, my brother, almost a year older was nevertheless much wiser and his brain further than mine, therefore, he took the place of the protectionist.

And as father was just a writer with no idea about making money, he left us with a huge depth and Mom, although, as a young widow, had to find ways to pay all them off. Therefore, we were mostly alone in our big house. But with all exciting moments, we got through these all troubles and it brought us much nearer and closer together.

Anyway, He was a very happy freethinker and sometimes very hard; an honest critical genius with a generous heart.

I don’t believe in ghosts as some might do but in a might behind this earthly life and I feel it beside me, as my brother or Mom or Dad. With always love and gratitude ❤ ❤

Hey Friends! There I get another version of this issue as I give it the No; 2, because I’ve written once about this effect in my life but now I get another point, and this is the Burnout at work!

But the case is; as you might mention; I am writing a post on Tuesday on which I must normally be at work, but I’m at home 😉

I just wanna say the case; Burning Out is very serious and we might take care of it.

It is because I’ve got really a burnout last week. Let me tell you the story as short as I can; it’s may be repeated to tell that I’m working as a taxi driver in Germany and it might be right when one of my regular guest; a retired pastor and a wonderful man, once on the way, when we were talking about literature and I quote something from Shakespeare, he told me; “oh my God! you know Shakespeare? then you are downcasted!!”

You know, when I must do something, I’ll try to do it perfectly. And when I stayed here in Germany, the only chance for me to earn my own money was to do this job. Therefore, I tried to do it as a good driver, maybe the best 😉 then I became a very famous and beloved one in this small town. But unfortunately, it got a lot; I get sometimes in minutes’ beat phone calls one after another and you might imagine how hard is that when I’m driving the car in the streets 😛

Anyway, Yesterday I’ve got to my doctor and told the story and asked him if I needed a neurologist. You are not mad Mr Fazel! he said; only exhausted.

And now I have to take a rest and reading and writing and enjoying the good life, then gathering power to back to another one; wildlife!!!

May the force be with you all and have a nice week ahead ❤ ❤

A journey through 500 years of rural life in Westphalia. https://www.lwl.org/LWL/Kultur/LWL-Freilichtmuseum-Detmold/?lang=en

Last weekend, as some friends might know, I shared my busy weekend because of getting guests. My dear and adorable friend Deborah Gregory http://www.theliberatedsheep.com/ Had kindly suggested me to tell about my experiences on this.

I don’t want to write about the common and frequent events like sitting, talking about this and that or barbeque in the backyards garden, which are happening as usual 😉 I wanna just tell about our visit in the Open Air Museum near Detmold, a small but very beautiful city in the OWL (Eastern Westphalia, Germany)

A wonderful and wide landscape in which one must have much time and of course, being young enough to reach all the places in that area.

Yes we haven’t got much 😀 only could visit the part of Paderborns village. but what we’ve got I’d tried to document by my Smartphone to share with you here. I hope you’ll enjoy 🙂 ❤

To put it bluntly, I have not a tiny problem if any hit song sounds like any other song!! If you might heard about; Beatles Yesterday sounds like a piece of whom or,,, I know an example: the famous song; Hotel California seems being a sincerely copy of Jethro Tull’s “We used to know” but Ian Anderson the head of Jethro Tull after hearing this annonce, shrugged the shoulders and answered: what a… it is a wonderful song isn’t?

Anyway, I am since a long time a musician and I have some experiences about composing musics (I was not a lucky one 😀 ) and I know how it is a wonderful feeling when you get an idea from your most favourite song from your beloved musician.

anyhow, the music world is unlimited, and also the sonority is floating all in the air, we only must keep silence a listen to them; it is just wonderful.

via: http://www.openculture.com/

You might wonder what would I mean, yes, sure it looks a little weird but I can explain it; I have many experiences about finding out how many masterpieces in the music world, might be stolen or pilfered by any other song in the past. That is actually bullshits!” because, as I once was a musician and I had got also many themes from the older music hits and combine a new one, it was a great enjoyment for me as I’d believe that it would be surely a great enjoyment for the compositor for seeing how could be music unlimited.

Wayne’s World kind of ruined “Stairway to Heaven” for me. Yes, it’s been 27 years, but I still can’t help but think of Wayne turning to the camera with his stoner grin, saying “Denied!” when the guitar store clerk points out a “No Stairway to Heaven” sign. It was not a song I took particularly seriously, but I respected the fact that it took itself so seriously… and threaded my way out of the room if someone picked up a guitar, earnestly cocked an ear, and played those gentle opening notes.

Now I giggle even when I hear the magisterial original intro. This is not the fault of Zeppelin but of the many who approach the Zeppelin temple of rock grandiosity unprepared, attempting riffs that only Jimmy Page could pull off with authority. At least the joke gave us a way to talk about the phenomenon: in lesser hands than Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” can sound… well, a bit ridiculous (with apologies to Dolly Parton.) Although accused (and acquitted) of ripping off the opening notes to Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus,” the song is all Zeppelin in every possible way.

“Stairway” is a representative sampler pack of the band’s signature moves: mixing folk rock and heavy metal with a Delta blues heart; exploding in thunderheads of John Bonham drum fills and a world-famous Page solo; Plant screaming cryptic lyrics that vaguely reference Tarot, Tolkien, English folk traditions and “a bustle in your hedgerow”; John Paul Jones’ wildly underrated multi-instrumental genius; bizarre charges of Satanic messages encoded backwards in the record…. (bringing to mind another Wayne’s World actor’s character.)

“Stairway… crystallized the essence of the band,” said Page later. “It had everything there and showed us at our best. It was a milestone.” It set a very high bar for big, emotional rock songs. “All epic anthems must measure themselves against ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” writes Rolling Stone. It is “epic in every sense of the word,” says the Polyphonic video at the top, including the literary sense. It can “make you feel like you’re part of a different time, part of a different world. It can make you feel like you’re part of a story.”

That story? “One of the greatest narrative structures in human history,” the Hero’s Journey, as so famously elaborated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces—an archetypal mythological arc that has “permeated stories for as long as humans have told them.” Not only do Robert Plant’s mystical lyrics reflect this ancient narrative, but the song’s composition also enacts it, building stage by stage, from questioning to questing to battling to returning with the wisdom of how “to be a rock and not to roll.”

The song’s almost classical structure is, of course, no accident, but it is also no individual achievement. Hear the story of its composition, and why it has been so influential, despite the jokes at the expense of those it influenced, in the Polyphonic video at the top and straight from Jimmy Page himself in the interview above.

Out of all of Zeppelin’s many epic journeys, “Stairway” best represents “the reason,” as cultural critic Steven Hyden writes, “why that band endures… the mythology, that Joseph Campbell idea of an epic journey into the wild that Zeppelin’s music represents, the sense that when you listen to this band, you feel like you’re plugging into something bigger and more profound than a band.” Or that the band is opening a doorway to something bigger and more profound than themselves.