Activity

“To be a philosopher, or a scientific man, you must be as a little child, with all the sincerity and simple-mindedness of the child’s vision, with all the plasticity of the child’s mental habits.

What are the exercises conducive to this? Extensive reading to begin with. A hundred volumes a year or 3 2/3 days per volume does not sound like hard work. Fifty volumes are easily read, if you can find so many good books. Real reading consists in putting oneself into the author’s position, and assimilating his ways of thinking. Conversation with all sorts of people whom we do not altogether understand, freshens the mind; but then interesting people are as hard to find as interesting books. As a corrective to all that a suitable dose of rumination and solitude is indicated; provided that it not be idling, but intense and systematic activity of the most definite and diagrammatic thought.

In order to make thought systematic it should be recorded. The record should be brief and almost tabular. No laconism is to be permitted in the record. It should have the style of the obelisk which sets force that which [it] has to express completely, clearly, and purely. Carry your train of thought to its terminus, and draw up the schedule of it in a copy book devoted to it, in such shape that thirty years after, if you wish to recur to it, the force and good sense and unity of the idea may compel you to say, ‘After all, I wasn’t such a fool in respect to what I did see, however much I may have failed to see.’ ”
– Charles S. Peirce from Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898

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After listening to Dr. Farrell with C.A. Fitts discussion of Microcosm and Medium … it was mentioned in their discussion that we (at least the Giza Community) might, at this point, consider the weaponizing of our minds in order to counteract the current culture and to own the culture. Of course this immediately raises questions of aesthetics (the study of the good) and ethics (the theory of self-controlled – deliberate – conduct). Although aesthetics and ethics are certainly of of great importance, leaving direct engagement of those issues aside for the moment, we should, possibly during the next vid chat, explicitly and in detail consider the variety of ways we might go about specifically operationalizing the weaponizing of our minds. I would like to suggest, to quote Peirce above, “extensive reading to begin with.”

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

Hopefully what suggestions are posted here will be a positive contribution to the weaponizing of our minds and our minds then to the work of the manifestation of the GOOD.

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Vincent, Isabel – Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and The Pursuit of Justice, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997.

Kung, David – How Music and Mathematics Relate, in The Great Courses, Course # 1373, 2013, ISBN 159803920-2.

Springarn-Korf, Jason – (film), Life 2.0: Virtual World New Reality, 2012, Virgil Films & Entertainment.

Nicolson, Harold – The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, London: Cassell, 1954.

Trento, Salvatore Michael – The Search for Lost America: Mysteries of the Stone Ruins in the United States, Penguin: Middlesex, 1979.

Halle, Louis J. – The Ideological Imagination: The Rise of Mass Bigotry in our time, and its roots in the thought of Hobbes, Rosseau, and Marx, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972. … his other titles as well.

Kaplan, Robert D. – The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (see also his Balkan Ghosts), New York: Vintage / Random House, 2000.

Houghton, Neal D. (Ed.), Struggle Against History: U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolution, New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.

Gilder, Louisa – The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn, New York: Knopf, 2008.

Scott, Laurence – The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, London: Heinemann, 2015.

Johnson, George – Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, New York: Knopf, 1999.

Ramo. Joshua Cooper – The Age of The Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It, New York, Little: Brown and Company, 2009. Even though a New World Order guy himself … still useful to read what they write.