The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature’s processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.
If you like the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
Crysis 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Officially announced 16 April 2012, it is the third main installment of the Crysis series, a sequel to the 2011 video game Crysis 2.
Set in the year 2047, the game takes place in New York City, which has been encased in a giant Nanodome created by the corrupt CELL corporation, and turned into a veritable urban rainforest. Crysis 3‘s story revolves around Prophet, a Nanosuit holder who is on a quest to take revenge on the Alpha Ceph, the leader of the Ceph alien race, with the help of Prophet’s former comrade, Psycho. The game’s story serves as the end of the Crysis trilogy. Gameplay revolves around the use of the Nanosuit, which grants players a variety of abilities such as being invisible. New features introduced in Crysis 3 include a new Nanosuit ability called “Rip & Throw”, a new compound bow and the “hacking” feature, which allows players to hack into enemies’ equipment, drones, and automated security defenses.
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic New York City, in an effort to combine the urban landscape of Crysis 2 and the forest setting of the original Crysis. The game introduces the “Seven Wonders”, with each wonder having its own unique landscape and tactical layout. Due to complaints about Crysis 2‘s linearity, the game’s levels were opened up so as to grant players more freedom. The development team also put efforts into creating a more emotional story, and the story’s protagonist was inspired by the lead character of District 9. The game was developed by a team of 100 people during its 23-month development cycle. (wiki)
minimum system requirements: CPU: Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 Ghz (E6600) / AMD Athlon64 X2 2.7 Ghz (5200+) // RAM: 2GB Memory (3GB on Vista) // GPU: DirectX 11 graphics card with 1Gb Video RAM Nvidia GTS 450 / AMD Radeon HD5770 // DX: Directx 11 // OS: Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 // Store: At least 17 GB of free space
TimeSpace Warps 