You apparently never read "Stand on Zanzabar" back in 1969. As Bennie Noakes would say ... "Christ what an imagination I've got."
Tart: Perhaps N. would say its nothing of substance, just (imaginary) bubbles in Consciousness, a flicker of the mind, which itself is just a flicker. (flicker being a word one can easily misread if one is reading rapidly, and in that vein, it raises another way of looking at it, "Its ALL just one huge Mind Fuck!" ........................................................................\ .................................... In "Stand on Zanzabar" -- John Brunner's great, sprawling, sprinting, lunatic of a novel written in 1968 the author foresees the world of 2010 as a place where <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandOnZanzibar> : " the population of Earth has reached 7 billion. The Soviet Union is defunct as a superpower, but China is rapidly industrializing and increasing in power. Giant corporations have large enough economies to control entire countries. In-vitro fertilization and genetic mapping are becoming a reality. A computer the size of a large book is more powerful than the most massive supercomputers of the Sixties. Personalized digital avatars of yourself feature in everyday entertainment. Religious denominations are rapidly polarizing on moral issues like abortion. And ordinary people suddenly snap and go on killing sprees in schools, workplaces, and malls."One of the famous through lines of the multi-viewpoint novel is provided by a stoner named Bennie Noakes, who spends most of his time wasted on a drug called Triptine, randomly flipping through the 1000 channels available on the tv and musing "Christ, what an imagination I've got!"because the sheer weirdness of what he is seeing is getting so dense that it has become impossible for him to believe it. The "wham line" that ends the novel comes from "Shalmaneser", the great supercomputer which controls the media (think Google Cloud) and the economies of much of the planet. And which, having been forced to absorb endless petabytes of data about the totality of the human condition "SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that's processed by General Technics' famed computer Shalmaneser, who sees all, hears all, knows all save only that which YOU, Mr, and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to yourselves."finally comes to this: Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every electrical-mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a 010101 pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, "Christ, what an imagination I've got." --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, tartbrain <no_reply@...> wrote: > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "marekreavis" reavismarek@ wrote: > > > > Thanks for the Nisargadatta quote, Tartbrain. I'm not the hero-worshipped I once was, but Nisargadatta still gets my attention. > > I have read little of him, but picked up and read some of I AM THAT yesterday. I like him. He explained much better the point that I was getting at in my "Cafe" post of yesterday. > > > > > And in that regards the question still remains "who" or "what" is attention? > > Perhaps N. would say its nothing of substance, just (imaginary) bubbles in Consciousness, a flicker of the mind, which itself is just a flicker. (flicker being a word one can easily misread if one is reading rapidly, and in that vein, it raises another way of looking at it, "Its ALL just one huge Mind Fuck!"
