半梦半醒的人生

船车司机

So what do you think of my little vessel?

She's what we call "see-worthy." S-E-E. See with your eyes

I feel like my transport should be an extension of my personality.

Voila. And this? This is like my little window to the world, and every minute, it's a different show.

Now, I may not understand it. I may not even necessarily agree with it.

But I'll tell you what, I accept it and just sort of glide along. You want to keep things on an even keel I guess is what I'm saying. You want to go with the flow. The sea refuses no river. The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants. That's where you guys come in. It's like you come onto this planet with a crayon box.

Now, you may get the 8 pack, you may get the 16 pack. But it's all in what you do with the crayons,the colors that you're given. Don't worry about drawing within the lines or coloring outside the lines.

I say color outside the lines. Color right off the page. Don't box me in. We're in motion to the ocean. We are not landlocked, I'll tell ya that.

存在主义

The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I 'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, the sense of taking responsibility for who you are,the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite.

Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life.

But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I've read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration.

But when I read them, I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility,he's not talking about something abstract.

He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete. It's you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example.

In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.

语言、感受与精神交流

Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, "water." We came up with a sound for that. Or, "Saber-toothed tiger right behind you." We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think,is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say "love,"the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain,you know, through their memories of love or lack of love,and they register what I'm saying and say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we have connected,and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion.

And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.

进化

If we are looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you are looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological, development of the cities, cultures and cultural, which is human expression. Now, what you are seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that's involved here two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it, you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog.

The digital is artificial intelligence.

The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external. And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and the desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle, because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual,the multiplication of individual existences.

Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations are those social adaptations. You're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These would be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. That is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice.

自燃者

A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, "I must be insane." What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he's gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. Hey, you got a match? And they haven't given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left? I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes.

Let my own lack of a voice be heard.

死后的6-12min

I keep thinking about something you said. - Something I said?

- Yeah. About how you often feel like you're observing your life from the perspective of an old woman about to die. - You remember that?

- Yeah. I still feel that way sometimes. Like I'm looking back on my life. Like my waking life is her memories.

Exactly. I heard that Tim Leary said as he was dying that he was looking forward to the moment when his body was dead, but his brain was still alive. They say that there's still 6 to 12 minutes of brain activity after everything is shut down. And a second of dream consciousness, right, well, that's infinitely longer than a waking second. - You know what I'm saying?

- Oh, yeah, definitely. For example, I wake up and it's 10:12, and then I go back to sleep and I have those long, intricate, beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours, and then I wake up and it's 10:13. Exactly. So then 6 to 1 2 minutes of brain activity,I mean, that could be your whole life. I mean, you are that woman looking back over everything. Okay, so what if I am? Then what would you be in all that? Whatever I am right now. I mean, yeah, maybe I only exist in your mind. I'm still just as real as anything else. Yeah.

灵魂转世

- I've been thinking also about something you said.

- What's that?

Just about reincarnation and where all the new souls come from over time. Everybody always say that they've been the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Alexander the Great.

I always want to tell them they were probably some dumb fuck like everybody else. I mean, it's impossible. Think about it. The world population has doubled in the past 40 years, right? - So if you really believe in that ego thing of one eternal soul, then you only have a 50% chance of your soul being over 40. And for it to be over 150 years old, then it's only one out of six. So what are you saying then? Reincarnation doesn't exist or that we're all young souls like where half of us are first-round humans? No, no. What I'm trying to say is that somehow I believe reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is. There was this article by this biochemist that I read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of a species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on. And this is where we inherit our instincts. I like that. It's like there's, um, this whole telepathic thing going on that we are all a part of, whether we are conscious of it or not.

That would explain why there's all these, you know, seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts.

You know, like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously, a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing.

They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles in relation to the general population. And then they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people. Their scores went up dramatically, like 20 percent. So it's like once the answers are out there, you know, people can pick up on them. It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

囚犯

I'll get you motherfuckers if it's the last thing I do.

Oh, you're gonna pay for what you did to me. For every second I spend in this hellhole, I'll see you spend a year in living hell!

Oh, you fucks are gonna beg me to let you die. No, no, not yet. I want you cocksuckers to suffer. Oh, I'll fix your fuckin' asses, all right. Maybe a long needle in your eardrum. A hot cigar in your eye. Nothing fancy. Some molten lead up the ass.

Ooh! Or better still, some of that old Apache shit. Cut your eyelids off. Yeah. I'll just listen to you fucks screaming.

Oh, what sweet music that'll be. Yeah. We'll do it in the hospital. With doctors and nurses so you pricks don't die on me too quick. You know the best part? The best part is you dick-smoking faggots will have your eyelids cut off,so you'll have to watch me do it to you, yeah. You'll see me bring that cigar closer and closer to your wide-open eyeball till you're almost out of your mind. But not quite,cause I want it to last a long, long time. I want you to know that it's me, that I'm the one that's doing it to you.Me! And that sissy psychiatrist?What unmitigated ignorance! That old drunken fart of a judge!What a pompous ass! Judge not, lest ye be judged! All of you pukes are gonna die the day I get out of this shithole! I guarantee you'll regret the day you met me!

科学之后，如何自由

In a way, in our contemporary world view, it's easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem's been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you're gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they're so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We're just physical systems too. We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water, and our behavior isn't gonna be an exception to basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether it's God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you're gonna do, or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything. There's not a lot of room left for freedom. So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say, "Oh, well, it's just an historical anecdote. It's sophomoric. It's a question with no answer. Just forget about it." But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality, for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty or admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. The question keeps coming back, and we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all your decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens. There's some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. Looks like it's a free action on your part,but every one of those- every part of that process is actually governed by physical law:chemical laws, electrical laws and so on. So now it just looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of our history, the whole rest of human history and even before, is really just sort of the playing out of subatomic particles, according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we are special. We think we have some kind of special dignity,but that now comes under threat. I mean, that's really challenged by this picture. So you might be saying, "Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? "I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. "It's really a probabilistic theory. There's room. It's loose. It's not deterministic." And that's gonna enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it's not really gonna help, because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random.

They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that it's unpredictable, and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that gonna help with freedom? Should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That just seems like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic, physical machine than just some random swerving. So we can't just ignore the problem.

We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons,with all that that it entails; not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility and trying to understand individuality.

反抗者

You can't fight city hall, death and taxes. Don't talk about politics or religion. This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. " Lay down, G.I. Lay down, G.I." We saw it all through the 20th Century. And now in the 21st Century, it's time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization. I don't know about you, but I'm concerned with what's happening in this world. I'm concerned with the structure. I'm concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more! I want freedom! That's what I want! And that's what you should want! It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose and just shovel the greed, the hatred, the envy and, yes, the insecurities, because that is the central mode of control-- make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we're being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control! It's gonna be the age of humankind standing up for something pure and something right!

What a bunch of garbage-- liberal Democrat, conservative Republican. It's all there to control you. Two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control! The C.E.O. job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies! I'm sick of it, and I'm not gonna take a bite out of it! Do you got me? Resistance is not futile. We're gonna win this thing. Humankind is too good! We're not a bunch of underachievers! We're gonna stand up and we're gonna be human beings! We're gonna get fired up about the real things, the things that matter: creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit! Well, that's it! That's all I got to say! It's in your court.

The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.

mind

The main character is what you might call "the mind."

It's mastery, it's capacity to represent.

Throughout history, attempts have been made to contain those experiences which happen at the edge of the limit where the mind is vulnerable.

But I think we are in a very significant moment in history.

Those moments, those what you might call liminal, limit, frontier, edge zone experiences are actually now becoming the norm.

These multiplicities and distinctions and differences that have given great difficulty to the old mind are actually through entering into their very essence, tasting and feeling their uniqueness.

One might make a breakthrough to that common something that holds them together.

And so the main character is, to this new mind, greater, greater mind.

A mind that yet is to be.

And when we are obviously entered into that mode, you can see a radical subjectivity, radical attunement to individuality, uniqueness to that which the mind is, opens itself to a vast objectivity.

So the story is the story of the cosmos now.

The moment is not just a passing, empty nothing yet.

And this is in the way in which these secret passages happen.

Yes, it's empty with such fullness that the great moment, the great life of the universe is pulsating in it.

And each one, each object, each place, each act leaves a mark.

And that story is singular.

But, in fact, it's story after story.

Time just dissolves into quick-moving particles that are swirling away.

Either I'm moving fast or time is. Never both simultaneously.

It's such a strange paradox. I mean, while, technically, I 'm closer to the end of my life than I've ever been, I actually feel more than ever that I have all the time in the world. When I was younger, there was a desperation, a desire for certainty, like there was an end to the path, and I had to get there. I know what you mean because I can remember thinking, "Oh, someday, like in my mid-thirties maybe, everything's going to just somehow jell and settle, just end." It was like there was this plateau, and it was waiting for me, and I was climbing up it, and when I got to the top, all growth and change would stop. Even exhilaration. But that hasn't happened like that, thank goodness. I think that what we don't take into account when we are young is our endless curiosity. That's what's so great about being human. - You know that thing Benedict Anderson says about identity?

- No. Well, he's talking about like, say, a baby picture. So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image, and you say, "That's me." Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, "This was me when I was a year old, and later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am." So it takes a story that's actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity. And the funny thing is, our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We've already become completely different people several times over,and yet we always remain quintessentially ourselves.

Our critique began as all critiques begin:with doubt.

Doubt became our narrative.

Ours was a quest for a new story, our own.

And we grasp toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn't tell it.

Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one.

The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive microsociety in the heart of a society which ignored it.

Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time.

The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication.

The adventure of finding it and losing it.

We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies.

Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible.

And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.

There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life.

I've always found myself in the second category.

When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior.

The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level.

Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human.

The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.

Why so few?

Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress, but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes?

No greater values have developed.

Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are.

So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential?

The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic - fear or laziness?

What are you writing?

A novel.

What's the story?

There's no story.

It's just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions.