CxD #178: 🐼🥕
"Life isn't about finding yourself or finding things. Life is about creating yourself and creating things." ~Bob Dylan
Bo Burnham’s Netflix special is a world of creativity when there was no other choice.
The new “comedy” special Inside is the most uncomfortable yet funny yet creative but salt-in-the-wound critiques of our online lives I’ve experienced. What would you create if you were stuck in one room for a year? So fucking poignant and rascally and pomo and sincere and hall-of-mirrors delightful.
2. Because last week’s Simone Biles features weren’t enough, your eyes need to witness her flight in slow motion:
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I just finished Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli’s explanation of what quantum mechanics shows us empirically and what those discoveries mean for us and for our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Having spent several years now trying to understand the science of quantum theory, this poetic synthesis finally helped me reach the next “level” of understanding of what all this says about what everything is. It is profound and beautiful and I couldn’t recommend this book any more highly. Here’s a preview:
"If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain. But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in __this__ physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness. If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, without the metaphysical foundation of a material substance perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole."
If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality."
4. Having figured out the nature of reality, here are some animals for you. Like me and you, they are what the universe is. What is it about your mind that convinces you that you are separate from them and stand outside the universe somehow?
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