5. Project 2. Quotes mix
Some thoughts from readings that I came across when working on Part 1 of the project (and some from my own interests that seemed to fit). I thought they could be a good starting point for the Part 2.
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In Part 1 I was exploring the concept of speculative realities, which over time brought my interest to theories about our own world, and they seem to be a special kind – still speculative but aspiring to be true.
When thinking about the topic after the first tutorial, I was drawn to reflections about human mind being so apt to perceive concepts and stories as true, valid, almost tangible.
One side of this tendency surfaces in Kuleshov effect and Gestalt principles of perception – when our mind without consideration discerns assumptions about separate pieces of information as true.
Another aspect, touching more on psychology, is what James Hollis said in a series of lectures ‘A Life of Meaning’ – that ‘we story our lives’ (story as a verb). We shape and define with narratives not just the world around us, but also ourselves or rather who we think we are, which proves to be very limiting. One of the main tasks of psychotherapy is to overcome those scripts and internal ‘personal narratives’.
Following that thread, I found very interesting investigating the need we have to create narratives about our reality – what is it, where does it come from, how does it affect our everyday life.
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1. Vital role of myths, symbols and stories
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Basis of our perception
Not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilisations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers.
With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life (…) requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm.
Lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few.
Myths to Live By, J. Campbell
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Intention vs form
What the gods were, were energies inhabiting for the moment a certain concept, a certain belief, a certain structure. (…) A ‘god’ is encountered whenever one is engaged by the holy other. The other which is transcendent to our ego complex sense of reality. That’s the primary phenomenon. The ego attaches to (…) the secondary image, which arises out of such encounters with the holy other, rather than the energy which gave rise that image in the first place.
A Life of Meaning, J. Hollis
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Traditionally (…), in the orthodoxies of popular faiths mythic beings and events are generally regarded and taught as facts; and this particularly in the Jewish and Christian spheres. There was an Exodus from Egypt; there was a Resurrection of Christ. Historically, however, such facts are now in question; hence, the moral orders, too, that they support.
When these stories are interpreted (…) as merely imagined episodes projected onto history, (…) although false and to be rejected as accounts of physical history, such universally cherished figures of the mythic imagination must represent facts of the mind: ‘facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,’ as my friend the late Maya Deren once phrased the mystery.
Myths to Live By, J. Campbell
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When we talk about myth, we think of myth as other people’s religion, not mine, which is the truth, of course. One of our clause of beliefs is that our complex driven rationality is capable of discernment, the grasping of truth, deny the others. Therefore in our primitivity we are shielded from the irony that our historic condescension will some day be seen a condescension of those who replace us.
A Life of Meaning, J. Hollis
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Symbols and meaning
To Freud, a symbol for a figurative representation of an unconscious idea, conflict or wish. It was a substitute formation, which effectively disguised the true meaning of the idea it represented. For his part, Jung did not consider the freudian symbol to be a symbol at all. For Freud, it was a sign, for it regularly referred to something already known or knowable, and embodied a meaning that was fixed.
Jung’s understanding of symbols was quite different. To him, symbols were living entities, striving to express something previously unknown. They were intuitive ideas that at the moment of their creation could not be formulated in any better way. Thus symbols, he said, mean more than they say. And remain a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings.
Jung: A Very Short Introduction, A. Stevens
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Sense of purpose lost with symbols
To what did [Jung] attribute ‘the general neurosis of our age’? To a collective loss of soul, to a loss of contact with the great mythic and religious symbols of our culture. To the emergence of social institutions which alienate us from our archetypal nature.
This is an extension of the view advanced by philosophers such as Diderot and Nietzsche, and later developed by Freud in ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, that the benefits of the civilisation are bought at the cost of natural happiness. Jung believed that the more secular, materialistic and compulsively extroverted our civilisation became, the greater the unhappiness, senselessness and aimlessness of our lives.
Jung: A Very Short Introduction, A. Stevens
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We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods.
We are still as much possessed by autonomous as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.
C. Jung, Cw 13, par. 54
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Freud about myths
Myths, according to Freud’s view, are of the psychological order of dream. Myths, so to say, are public dreams; dreams are private myths. Both, in his opinion, are symptomatic of repressions of infantile incest wishes, the only essential difference between a religion and neurosis being that the former is the more public. The person with a neurosis feels ashamed, alone and isolated in his illness, whereas the gods are general projections onto a universal screen. They are equally manifestations of unconscious, compulsive fears and delusions.
Myths to Live By, J. Campbell
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Jung about myths
An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. (…) Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch.
They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognised and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums.
Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. (…)
Myths to Live By, J. Campbell
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2. Personal stories and beliefs
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Tendency to create stories about oneself
So much of what we do today is driven by or at least influenced by our internalised stories. Those fragmentary personal narratives, scripts that define who we are, who others are, and how we’re expected to relate to each other.
Some of those stories are quite overt and conscious, as we were specifically taught to think, feel, and behave, by our elders, our teachers, our societies. Others were quietly assembled by us. Day in and day out. Until one time they became who we were, or at least who we thought we were.
If we’re going to understand ourselves, make choices from a deeper place, make authentic choices rather than predetermined behaviours, we have to become more conscious of how those stories operate in our daily lives.
A Life of Meaning, J. Hollis
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Ego
- Every human has an ego, a part of the mind that holds the identity of who we are, who we believe others are, and what we believe about the world around us
- The ego is the ‘voice within your head’ that is attempting to make sense of our human experience. This voice is actually not your own, it’s the internalised voice of those closest to us from birth to age 7 (the stage where ego is developed)
- The ego is not a negative thing, it’s actually a necessary part of our lives that attempts to protect us from pain. The ego can become a ‘negative’ aspect of our lives when it’s fragile (wounded), and we are unconscious (unaware of it)
- When we are unconscious to our own wounded ego, it directs all of our behaviour. We personalise everything that happens to us. We allow it to direct how we interact with others, how we react, and how we behave
How Our Ego Can Keep Us Stuck, The Holistic Psychologist
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3. Dreams – first stories
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Dream – an archetype of a narrative?
Though most remembered dreams are little more than fragments, or a few brief episodes, many have a story to tell, and take a form of a private drama. In these, a definite structure can be perceived, which Jung divided in four stages:
- The exposition – which sets the place and often time of the action, as well as dramatis persona involved
- The development – of the plot in which the situation becomes complicated and a definite tension develops, because one does not know what will happen
- The culmination (peripeteia, greek for reversal of fortune) – when something decisive happens, or something changes completely
- The conclusion, the solution or result of the dream work
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4. Speculation, dreams and science
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Dreams as the alternative to reflect on the present
Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.
Cited in Speculative Everything – look up the author
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A
- Affirmative
- Problem solving
- Provides answers
- Design for production
- Design as solution
- In the service of industry
- Fictional functions
- For how the world is
- Change the world to suit us
- Science fiction
- Futures
- The ‘real’ real
- Narratives of production
- Applications
- Fun
- Innovation
- Concept design
- Consumer
- Makes us buy
- Ergonomics
- User-friendliness
- Process
B
- Critical
- Problem finding
- Asks questions
- Design for debate
- Design as medium
- In the service of society
- Functional fictions
- For how the world could be
- Change us to suit the world
- Social fiction
- Parallel worlds
- The ‘unreal’ real
- Narratives of consumption
- Implications
- Humor
- Provocation
- Conceptual design
- Citizen
- Makes us think
- Rhetoric
- Ethics
- Authorship
Speculative Everything, A. Dunne, F. Raby
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When it comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. In our view, it is a pointless activity. What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones people do not want.
They usually take the form of scenarios, often starting with a what-if question, and are intended to open up spaces of debate and discussion; therefore, they are by necessity provocative, intentionally simplified, and fictional. Their fictional nature requires viewers to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander, to momentarily forget how things are now, and wonder about how things could be.
Speculative Everything, A. Dunne, F. Raby
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Fiction vs fantasy + science as truth
In the scenarios we develop we believe, first, they should be scientifically possible, and second, there should be a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario. A believable series of events that led to the new situation is necessary, even if entirely fictional. This allows viewers to relate the scenario to their own world and to use it as an aid for critical reflection. This is the space of speculative culture—writing, cinema, science fiction, social fiction, and so on.
Although speculative, experts are often consulted when building these scenarios, as David Kirby points out in a fascinating chapter about distinctions between what he calls speculative scenarios and fantastic science in his book Lab Coats in Hollywood; the role of the expert is often, not to prevent the impossible but to make it acceptable.
Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in. Fantasy exists in its own world, with very few if any links to the world we live in. It is of course valuable, especially as a form of entertainment, but for us, it is too removed from how the world is.
Speculative Everything, A. Dunne, F. Raby
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Nature of science vs truth
But now, finally, what would the meaning be of the word ‘truth’ to a modern scientist? Surely not the meaning it would have for a mystic! For the really great and essential fact about the scientific revelation – the most wonderful and most challenging fact – is that science does not and cannot pretend to be ‘true’ in any absolute sense. It does not and cannot pretend to be final. It is a tentative organisation of mere ‘working hypotheses’ (…) that for the present appear to take into account all the relevant facts now known. (…) There is to be only a continuing search for more – as of a mind eager to grow.
Myths to Live By, J. Campbell
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As skeptical as I am, I think the contemplation of the multiverse is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the nature of science and on the ultimate nature of existence: why we are here…. In looking at this concept, we need an open mind, though not too open. It is a delicate path to tread. Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty. Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is.
Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, Scientific American, George Ellis
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The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as ‘Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.’ This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.
William C. Keel (2007). The Road to Galaxy Formation (2nd ed.). Springer-Praxis. p. 2.
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5. Seeing vs knowing
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Ways of seeing
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. (…) The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
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Reality = perspective
Multiple realities: the awareness that ‘reality’ is a perspective filtered through a person’s past lived experience + that someone else’s reality doesn’t invalidate your own. More than one reality can exist at the same time.
5 Emotional Skills to Master, The Holistic Psychologist
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Art based on knowledge, not observation
Egyptian painters had quite a different way of representing real life from our way. (…) What mattered most was not prettyness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to preserve everything as permanently and as clearly as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them in any fortuitous angle. They drew from memory, according to strict rules which ensured that everything that had to go into the picture would stand out in perfect clarity. Their method, in fact, resembled that of the map-maker rather than that of the painter. (…) Everything had to be represented from its most characteristic angle.
(…) It must not be supposed that Egyptian artists thought that human beings looked like that. They merely followed a rule which allowed them to include everything in the human form that they considered important.
The Story of Art, John Berger
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It is necessary to understand that Praxiteles and the other Greek artists achieved this beauty through knowledge. (…) People often think that what the artists did was to look at many models and leave out any feature they did not like. They say the Greek artists ‘idealised’ nature, and they think of it in terms of a photographer who touches up a portrait by deleting small blemishes. The Greek approach was really exactly the opposite.
Through all these centuries, the artists (…) were concerned with infusing more and more life into the ancient husks. (…) The old types had begun to move and breath under the hands of the skillful sculptor, and they stand before us like real human beings, and yet as beings from a different world, better world. They are, in fact, beings from a different world, not because Greeks were healthier or more beautiful than other men – there is no reason to think they were – but because art at that moment had reached the point at which the typical and the individual were poised in a new and delicate balance.
The Story of Art, John Berger
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6. Memory
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Stories & memory
The Mind: Explained – Memory – how much easier it is for us to memorize through stories
Memories can be strengthened by story. Our brains pay much closer attention to information when it’s in the form of a narrative.
In one study, 24 people were asked to memorize 12 lists of 10 words. Half the people studied and rehearsed the list, and they remembered, on average, 13% of the words. The other half wove the words into stories of their own invention, and they remembered 93%.
The more that you can associate things you want to remember with structures you already have in your mind, the easier it’s going to be to remember. When you’re creating a narrative, when you go to retrieve that memory you have many multiple ways of getting into that memory.
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Oral tradition (memorising through stories)
Homer’s works were orally transmitted and orally performed poems, ever changing in the mouths of the different people who learned them and told them again. The Iliad survived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years as a spoken poem and was eventually written down, around 700 to 750 B.C. But no manuscripts survive from that time.
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Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person wrote the epics, his work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the East and of its leaders’ fateful journeys home had been circulating in Greece for hundreds of years before The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed. Casual storytellers and semiprofessional minstrels passed these stories down through generations, with each artist developing and polishing the story as he told it.
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7. Microcosm, no idea if relevant but why not
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Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
C. G. Jung
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The concept of the cosmic web—viewing the universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity—is deeply ingrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about architecture of this network or its characteristics. Our research used data from 24,000 galaxies to construct multiple models of the cosmic web, offering complex blueprints for how galaxies fit together. These three interactive visualisations help us imagine the cosmic web, show us differences between the models, and give us insight into the fundamental structure of the universe.
The Network Behind the Cosmic Web, K. Albrecht
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While all of the visualizations are beautiful and fun to explore, to me, there is something about Nearest Neighbors. The connection lines appear exceptionally clean, and there is a certain pleasant naturalness about the overall composition; a sense of randomness tempered by an overriding order. One might even compare it to certain structures in nature, such as neural networks in the brain, or a mesh of protein filaments.
The Beautiful Complexity of the Cosmic Web, A. Montañez
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I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of development. It is comparable in magnificence to the stary heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the Universe within is the Universe without.
C. G. Jung