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Can Human Beings Meet the Moment?
Martin LeFevre: There has never been a global civilization, and no historical, philosophical, psychological and spiritual foundation exists upon which to build one. It can and must be created. Cultures emerged as whole contexts in particular geographical areas. But geography has become irrelevant in the age of jet travel, the Internet and AI. Like it […]
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Woke or Awakened?
Martin LeFevre: The mystery of consciousness is as old as there have been people conscious that they were conscious. However most people, including philosophers and scientists, don’t know what they mean by consciousness. The confusion is compounded when speculating on whether animals other than humans are conscious. The term consciousness can refer to anything from […]
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AI, Darkness, and Consciousness
Martin LeFevre: You can feel the earth ready to explode with life after all the precipitation in California in recent weeks. The squalls of rain and snow off the Pacific continue however, delaying the spring sun. The shallow stream of summer is a small river roaring by, but you can still hear hawks cry, and […]
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What Is Art, and an Artist?
Martin LeFevre: “Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it.”“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.” Rilke There’s a strong correlation between […]
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Ending the Continuity of Thought
Martin LeFevre: It was a beautiful afternoon, the first sunny day in over a week. California has been hit with another series of storms, this one bringing snow to much of the state. It’s strange that the almond trees are blossoming at the same time there’s been snow in the Central Valley. Despite the chill […]
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Why Activism Is Not Enough
By Martin LeFevre Bill McKibben, the author of the particularly pessimistic book, “The End of Nature,” now says, “for an activist to have hope is the most important thing.” That contradictory worldview sums up much of what’s misguided about activism. As recently reported, “Mr. McKibben has written more than a dozen books about climate change and […]
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The Internet and AI: Is Human Consciousness Obsolete?
By Martin LeFevre The Internet and artificial intelligence have made the underlying actuality that human consciousness is a single thing the overarching reality of every person on the planet that is connected to it. Prior to the Net, cultural and linguistic backgrounds were primary. Prior to jet travel, geography was. As the initial idealism and naïveté […]
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Concerning Stagnancy, Demography and Vitality
By Martin LeFevre To make demographics the issue when Americans awoke to another mass murder in this disintegrated country land absurd. This time it’s in Los Angeles, with ten dead as of this writing in a Chinese community celebrating the Lunar New Year. Here’s my candidate for the stupidest sentence of the young year: “Just […]
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One Brain, Two Kinds of Mind
By Martin LeFevre It was a day of intense, opaque light during a break between storms that have been pounding California. Though there wasn’t a smidgen of blue sky, sunlight reflecting off the creek-turned-river was so brilliant that you couldn’t look at it without sunglasses. I live at the northeastern corner of the Great Central Valley, […]
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The State of Insight
By Martin LeFevre After high winds snapped four posts and brought down the back fence last night, there was a break this morning in the “atmospheric river” that’s been deluging California with one heavy storm after another. The true meaning of carpe diem becomes abundantly clear when the next tempest is just a few hours away. […]
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The Pinnacle of Creation – The Human Brain
By Martin LeFevre It’s nearing sunset on a mild autumn afternoon in northern California. My eyes are drawn to a maple between the houses draped in red that looks like it’s on fire in last rays of the sun. A huge hawk takes off from the red maple and arcs up to the top of a […]
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Without Respect To Movements, Power and Time
By Martin LeFevre With characteristic obtuseness about the undercurrents of American culture, the New York Times offered readers “a black hole” to write their feelings about Donald Trump’s return to the political stage. America’s newspaper of record led off its op-ed section yesterday with the headline, “You probably have a lot of feelings right now. We […]
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Intelligent Life and the Great Filter
By Martin LeFevre Have you heard of something called “The Great Filter Theory?” It’s the idea that when intelligent life (actually potentially intelligent life) on a planet reaches the level of technology and complexity that human civilization has, most or all extinguish themselves. The Great Filter Theory is the answer many scientists give to physicist’s Enrico […]
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The Inter-National Order Is Dead and Gone
By Martin LeFevre During the pandemic I initiated a series of dialogues with the rector and others at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica. UPeace is the only UN-mandated University in the world, formed by the General Assembly in 1980. The thematic question of our dialogues was: “Psychological Revolution and the Emergence of […]
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