Your description of the "Age of Forgeries" is chillingly plausible. I especially liked the section on the return to physical effects—that "bespoke" isn't just a luxury anymore, but a psychological oasis. The image of us reading coffee rings and pencil indentations like Bibles is a beautiful, tragic bit of irony.
Thank you! Almost eight years after writing this, and at the point where people are definitely fleeing into the analog and disintermediated material world, my sense is stronger than ever that even this is only temporary solace as we are forced to confront the virtuality of reality itself.
This is why I was so hyped on Federico Campagna's book Prophetic Culture and its insistence that reality always exists in excess of language, and Andrew P. Smith's book The Dimensions of Experience and its rigorous biological walkthrough of how all life forms cognize a few axes of what may ultimately be an infinitely-dimensional cosmos, and convergent work from so many other people this blog has become basically a list of them.
And it's why I stressed that when we finally can't even trust the coffee rings and pencil indentations, then we finally have a more honest relationship with truth. The most efficient encoding of this I've read lately is in Richard Doyle's The Genesis of Now, chapter 7 ("Are You Experienced?") where he shows us how to test for ourselves the claims that "real" is neither "unchanging" nor "material" and the only "real" thing we can find is consciousness itself — but a consciousness that contains, and is not severed from, the world of forms.
If you vibe with this stuff I'll gladly initiate a link dump. (And by all means, send me stuff as well!)
What I do is work my way forward through writers’ stacks. There is a lot on here, so that keeps me busy. What with writing time, work, and reading my favourite novelists (at the moment I’m making my way through Adam Roberts’ oeuvre) I don’t really get the time for that kind of research, unless it’s directly connected to what I’m writing. So, thanks but no thanks. I will, however, keep a eye on your stack, and carry on reading.
Your description of the "Age of Forgeries" is chillingly plausible. I especially liked the section on the return to physical effects—that "bespoke" isn't just a luxury anymore, but a psychological oasis. The image of us reading coffee rings and pencil indentations like Bibles is a beautiful, tragic bit of irony.
Thank you! Almost eight years after writing this, and at the point where people are definitely fleeing into the analog and disintermediated material world, my sense is stronger than ever that even this is only temporary solace as we are forced to confront the virtuality of reality itself.
This is why I was so hyped on Federico Campagna's book Prophetic Culture and its insistence that reality always exists in excess of language, and Andrew P. Smith's book The Dimensions of Experience and its rigorous biological walkthrough of how all life forms cognize a few axes of what may ultimately be an infinitely-dimensional cosmos, and convergent work from so many other people this blog has become basically a list of them.
And it's why I stressed that when we finally can't even trust the coffee rings and pencil indentations, then we finally have a more honest relationship with truth. The most efficient encoding of this I've read lately is in Richard Doyle's The Genesis of Now, chapter 7 ("Are You Experienced?") where he shows us how to test for ourselves the claims that "real" is neither "unchanging" nor "material" and the only "real" thing we can find is consciousness itself — but a consciousness that contains, and is not severed from, the world of forms.
If you vibe with this stuff I'll gladly initiate a link dump. (And by all means, send me stuff as well!)
What I do is work my way forward through writers’ stacks. There is a lot on here, so that keeps me busy. What with writing time, work, and reading my favourite novelists (at the moment I’m making my way through Adam Roberts’ oeuvre) I don’t really get the time for that kind of research, unless it’s directly connected to what I’m writing. So, thanks but no thanks. I will, however, keep a eye on your stack, and carry on reading.
Thanks! Jeez, I wish my stack were more well organized for you. There's a ton of stuff that's not even on here. I'll work on that.
That pretty often the case. I’m ocd about keeping mine trim and focused on science fiction but that’s an effect really. They’re all working drafts.