We all know the story of the Library of Alexandria, the vast repository of ancient texts that was burnt to the ground by Caesar in 48 B.C. While the story itself isn’t accurate, it speaks to us today as we face the digital book burnings that are threatening the modern-day Library of Alexandria: the internet. In this speech delivered at the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s Justice Rising conference on September 13, 2020, James Corbett connects the dots from that ancient story to the internet censorship of today, and outlines what we can do to fight the fire that is threatening our most important information.
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The Facts:An article written by astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Ph.D. in Forbes tells readers it is dangerous to do your own research on important topics of our time. He suggests we should only listen to experts.
Reflect On:Why do we hold on to ideas even when new evidence tells us it’s time to question? What state of being identifies so strongly with ideas of the mind that we think those ideas are our identity?
In a recent article out of Forbes, scientist Ethan Siegel suggests people should not “do their own research” on topics as they are not qualified to understand, and doing that research yourself could be dangerous. Throughout the article, Siegel cites the public health disaster that he believes ensued as a result of people questioning vaccines. He also points out that people doubt the validity of water fluoridation due to their dangerous research, and now there exists people who question water fluoridation when they shouldn’t.
To both vaccines and water fluoridation, Siegel believes there is scientific consensus on safety and effectiveness, and therefore anyone doing their own research must stop, and if they come to a different conclusion than the consensus, they must be unqualified.
This is where Siegel’s lack of digging and research is revealed. There is plenty of scientific evidence that would lead any functioning individual to question the safety of both vaccines and water fluoridation. In fact, the science is on the sides of both vaccines having inherent dangers we need to come to terms with, and water fluoridation having serious effects on brain function. Thousands of scientists see this. These are not rare, internet-driven realities, they are extremely well scientifically backed, and the only thing to points to them being untrue is unbacked mainstream scientific culture.
This is though, the natural progression of information. At first, it is ridiculed heavily, even when the evidence points to the fact that we are incorrect to ridicule. It’s odd because many scientists seem to throw the scientific method out when doing their work. “Once we know something, it cannot change, even when new research comes forth” This is the unscientific sentiment it appears many are operating from. But why? Why do we get so stuck in our ideas?To
Here’s six steps to filter out media noise, break the hypnosis of the mainstream media, and get to the information that truly matters.
There is no information age. It doesn’t exist. There is only the Age of Noise. Because although we now appear to have an infinite ability to see everything that’s going on in the world at once, from photos of the world from space to the fact that our friends are indecisive about what to eat tonight, we have no ability to filter that information and sort for what matters. We have no reliable media gatekeeper. We only have the so-called “mainstream media,” which is just the advertising wing of multinational corporations.
We used to pay people to filter information for us: these were called professional journalists, writers and artists, whose job it was to dive into the sea of information and come back up with pearls for us. But we don’t pay those people anymore, because the media conglomerates that have consolidated into only a few massive holdings since the 1990s have realized that they don’t have to.
They don’t have to because their interest isn’t providing real information or truth, their interest is in providing content that gets as many people as possible to look at it, in order to get the most advertising money possible, because that’s how they get paid and can afford the salaries and insurance costs of the large staffs they need to do what they do. That’s their daily reality. And so they’re in the business of giving people what they want.
Since the 90s, the trend has increasingly been to cut out professionals and get people to generate their own content. That means reality television, YouTube, Facebook. No big budgets needed and far more profit gained. Since everybody is a star now, everybody is constantly generating more free content than we can ever consume. And so professional creatives have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and instead of getting reporting on, say, Karen Silkwood blowing the whistle on nuclear power, or Gary Webb’s expose of CIA drug trafficking, you’re getting reporting about how some celebrity is in a Twitter feud.
We have no more professional gatekeepers. We are scattered to the four winds, drowning in Facebook feeds or aggregation blogs. These mega-blogs, which we have mistakenly expected to replace mainstream media outlets, are in the same position: largely beholden to the tastes of their audiences, and stuck having to keep people happy with unchallenging, crowd-pleasing content to drive traffic to their site advertisers so that they can eat.
So where does this leave the information-poor individual who hopefully wants to get their head over the waterline enough to start to see the things that actually matter?
It means you have to be your own media gatekeeper. Flat out. You can’t outsource that job to somebody else anymore, because the mainstream media, or the alternative media, or Blog X, Y or Z, are not going to comprehensively do that job for you the way you need it done. They’re too beholden to economics, ratings and their own viewpoints and reality tunnels. And more and more, they’re probably not able to do that job because they’re not properly trained for that job, and I don’t mean just bloggers, because these days very few people who work in the mainstream media have any journalistic training at all. Nobody can get the information you need for you, you’ve got to do it yourself.
Luckily, we’ve got tools that can help us do that. Here’s a few beginning steps:
1. Decide what matters.
Faced with infinite information, you’ve got to decide up front what you’re going to filter for, at least initially. You’ve got to restrict your data to some extent, which sounds counterintuitive, but is necessary. You don’t need more information, you need more information about the things that matter. I suggest that the things that matter are, simply, information that can directly positively effect the welfare of you and your family, and information about the general welfare of the planet.
2. Use web tools to automate your info intake.
Everybody on the web is largely in the same position: grab info from a few news sources (like AP or Reuters) and then recycle it into blog content. They’re using the same tools as you to get their info. So cut out the middleman. I recommend setting up Google Alerts, for a start, to give you info about the issues you actually care about instead of waiting for somebody else to. Beyond that, I highly recommend using an RSS aggregator like Feedly to dump a lot of media outlets into an easy-to-digest feed. Work done upfront will pay off in time saved later. Reddit is also an excellent tool, as long as you stay off the dreaded, time-sucking front page and keep to subreddits pertinent to important topics.
3. Expand outside of your demographic bubble.
Whoever you are, you fit a demographic, which means that the mainstream media specifically tailors content that it knows you will like for the shows you watch and blogs you read, so advertisers can sell you products they’ve determined your demographic buys and use the language and images they know you will respond to, all in order to get you to make that purchase.
Expand out of the box they’ve decided you fit in. Read blogs and consume media from sources outside of your demographic, and that definitely means outside of your political and religious persuasion. Otherwise you’re blinkered not only to things that are going on around you, but also to parts of life you might be ignoring.
4. Read a book.
You still won’t get nearly as good of an info download from months on the Internet as you will from reading a well-researched, info-dense book, a book which, never forget, can represent years or decades of professional research and experience rather than an afternoon spent dashing off a blog post to throw out into the netherworld. Don’t stop reading, and reading better and more challenging books. The Web is really only a menu of culture; don’t forget to eat the meal.
5. Think critically.
Understand what confirmation bias is, and always consider the source of an article. Who wrote this, and what’s their agenda? What are they selling? Do they cite their own sources? Is this from a professional journalist/writer or from some wackadoo or salesman spouting off on the net? To dig deeper, get this excellent, comprehensive primer in critical thinking skills.
6. Meditate.
Sounds potentially hokey, but there is no better discipline for learning how to shut off what is pointless bullshit and go only for what actually matters than meditation, because in learning to control one’s own thoughts internally, dealing with external noise becomes immensely easier.
Information is power. Know how to get it. Don’t outsource it to the mainstream media to do it for you.
(The image and clip above are from They Live. If you haven’t seen this classic film, you must; it’s actually the best primer on seeing through social hypnosis and the mainstream media that you could hope for. Watch it here!)
Spacetime as Information – An Ordering Principle for Living Systems?
The predominant scientific paradigm does not regard the Universe as a Living System. This stems from a perspective that the Universe is unconnected, and mechanical. What is the difference between a mechanistic concept of the universe (acting like gears and cogs in a machine) versus a dynamical self-organizing system? Information.
Information is the connecting fabric of our Universe. What are dynamic processes? Systems with information feedback operations (such as a fractal), which results in nonlinear evolution and local unpredictability. Interactivity (intercommunication) of such a system with generative and innovative elements results in exponential integration and syntropy. Far removed from the random and mechanical processes envisioned as the law of entropy – which in itself is a highly theoretical case scenario of isolation and disconnectivity. The unconnected and mechanistic worldview does not perceive the potential for nonlocal intercommunication (a universal information network) that may engender specific ordering influences underlying all physical processes. Such powerful deterministic orchestration is largely beyond the purview of such a myopic worldview. The stochastic nature of quantum mechanics – the consensus theory of the fundamental behavior of matter – is a reflection of the fragmented, isolationist worldview. However, even in this theory, it is acknowledged that a measuring device of infinite size could ascertain with complete deterministic certainty the quantum state and spacetime coordinates of every particle in a room. Alas, such a device is impossible, because it would collapse into a black hole. Yet, there is a black hole of that magnitude that is measuring the state of every fundamental quanta in every moment – and that is the Universe, since when the mass of our observable Universe is considered in the current measured radius – our Universe obeys the Schwarzschild condition or the condition of a black hole.
“It from bit”
– John Archibald Wheeler
How is information the connecting fabric of the cosmos? Is this just an abstract – unphysical statement? Hardly. John Archilbald Wheeler, one of the preeminent physicists of the 20th century and colleague of Einstein, developed geometrical equations that described the origin of the most fundamental characteristics of matter – such as a particle’s charge and mass – one of the most active areas of research even today (with contrived notions of a Higgs Boson). His formulations produced these characteristics purely from the geometry of spacetime, therefore deriving ‘charge without charge’, and ‘mass without mass’ – as emergent characteristics of the structure and dynamics of spacetime. While Wheeler is one who, alongside Einstein, understood the primacy of geometry – he later realized there is an even more fundamental source, and that is information – thus coining the term ‘it from bit’. As in ‘it’ all comes from ‘bits’ – base units of information. (coincidentally, Wheeler also formulated a solution to quantum gravity, called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation – but since it did not require time physicists regarded it as unreal – not yet realizing that what we experience as time is a localized evolution of a subsystem through the structure of space, but not a change in the structure of space at the global scale of the Universe –time from quantum entanglement).
The geometrical structure of spacetime is an information encoding medium – planck pixels. The dynamics of spacetime transmit and process information. And the structure and evolution of spacetime determines and engenders the physical characteristics of matter and force in the Universe. Physically, what are planck pixels? That is, what is spacetime physically made of? The answer is zero-point electromagnetic quanta. It is an electromagnetic field filling all conceivable modes. What does this have to do with biology? Other than the obvious inference that we are fundamentally made of electromagnetic quanta (space itself) – it has direct bearing on the nature of biological information processes (self-organizing systems) and most likely on the source of consciousness. Because we are each a functional unit of an information processing medium that is the connecting fabric of the Universe.
What is this a picture of? A brain slice showing the microscopic view of neurons? A computer simulation of the distribution of matter and galaxies in the Universe (based on the observed values of the so called dark matter and dark energy)? Or maybe the quantum foam of the vacuum (spacetime)? Take your pick. Does form recapitulate function at these scales (which happens to scale across all 4 spatial dimensions of the observable Universe)?
The above image gives a sense of the Planck-scale network of spacetime. Much like the filaments of “dark matter” that connect galactic superclusters together, or the dendrites that connect billions of neurons – lattice-like nodal points (The Planck-Kleinert World Crystal) are connected by filaments comprised of Planckian-Einstein-Rosen bridges (Building up Spacetime with quantum entanglement). And much like the electrical propagation of signals through the synaptic network of the brain – bundles of intense lines of electric and magnetic flux course through the Planckian network of spacetime (Poynting vortex fields).
There is a fractal reiteration across the magnitude of dimension. Just as a transistor can function as a binary unit (via the presence or absence of an electrical charge), so too can a single atom, or a subatomic particle – or, as Wheeler posited – the Planck harmonic oscillators of the quantum vacuum, space itself. This is nothing new, it is known as the Holographic Principle. However, what is being emphasized here is that this information encoding medium may be connected in a continuous wormhole network – allowing nonlocal, i.e. superluminal, transmission of information. This means that all sectors of spacetime are acting as one information encoding volume – they are not isolated – it is a manifold information processing network.
What the reader can retain from this discussion, is that our biological structure and the environment of our biosphere, is emerging to be something else than an isolated result of some random fluctuation (a fluke) and much more part of an incredible network information highway that connects all points in our Universe and the multiverse generating highly advanced, complex, self-organizing structures from which information is continuously driving the transformation across all scales in a coordinated and astonishingly rapid evolution. In that view then, not only are the physics of our Universe unified with the biological complexity we are a part of, but the whole of the structure is a manifestation of what we have come to describe as consciousness, or if you’d like a feedback of information across all scale producing self-awareness.
By: William Brown & Nassim Harameinfrom: http://resonance.is/spacetime-as-information-an-ordering-principle-for-living-systems/
