Conscious vs mechanical evolution: transcending biocentrist social ontologies

This article expounds a new theory of humanity that problematizes the discrete, biomaterialist and materially rational individual of Modernity through sensitivity to the human potential for Conscious Evolution [evolution of the ‘invisible self’, which is to say the cultivation of reason, free will, intuition and the other ‘high epistemological faculties’ that allow humans to actualize the potential for self-mediation of the biological desires and animal (irrational) passions]. After defining Conscious Evolution, comparing it with Mechanical Evolution and providing a brief overview of the epistemological processes involved in Conscious Evolution, we examine the ways in which Modernism axiomatically, logically and practically negates the potential for Conscious Evolution and self-mediation as well as the manifestations of this negation in Modernist epistemology and Modernist social systems like Economic Theology or ‘the police’ that, due to their biomaterialist understanding of humans as discrete, biological, materially rational individuals, aim to mediate biological desires and animal passions through external, forceful, hierarchical domination rather than the cultivation of Conscious Evolution and subsequent actualization of the potential for self-mediation. This critique of epistemological and social systems that seek to create order through external, forceful, hierarchical domination sets the stage for a follow up paper titled “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” that critiques contemporary Planning Theory and Practice and calls for planning of social systems from a theoretical perspective where seeking to cultivate Conscious Evolution and the actualization of the social order implicit in the self-mediation made potential by Conscious Evolution is possible (which is to say that (r)evolution of theory must precede (r)evolution of practice)

Concise comparative summaries (CCS) of large text corpora with a human experiment

In this paper we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We argue that sparse methods have much to offer for text analysis and hope CCS opens the door for a new branch of research in this important field. For a particular topic of interest (e.g., China or energy), CSS automatically labels documents as being either on- or off-topic (usually via keyword search), and then uses sparse classification methods to predict these labels with the high-dimensional counts of all the other words and phrases in the documents. The resulting small set of phrases found as predictive are then harvested as the summary. To validate our tool, we, using news articles from the New York Times international section, designed and conducted a human survey to compare the different summarizers with human understanding. We demonstrate our approach with two case studies, a media analysis of the framing of “Egypt” in the New York Times throughout the Arab Spring and an informal comparison of the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s coverage of “energy.” Overall, we find that the Lasso with L2 normalization can be effectively and usefully used to summarize large corpora, regardless of document size.Statistic

Nomad explorations v 2.1 : genesis, eden and the grail in modernity.

‘Genesis’, ‘The Garden of Eden’ and ‘The Holy Grail’ are stories that have captivated the western mind (and the human mind in the iterations of these archetypal narratives in other cultures) for millennia. Though many view Modernity and Modernism as marking the death of religion and religious dogma, we argue that Modernism simply rearticulates Abrahamic-Hellenic (more generally Paternalist) social dogmas within its own logics and axioms (especially cosmological, ontological, teleological and epistemological axioms that reduce humanity to a discrete, biological, materially rational being and reduce reality to the finite world of motion, passing time and physical space); the rationalizations for social dogmas like the notion that ‘order is to be created through hierarchical domination’ may change, but the class relations therein retain their basic form. We illustrate this argument through conducting a Nomad Exploration (NE) of Foucault’s The Order of Things, which illustrates the rearticulation of Genesis in the axioms and logics of Modernity, Haraway’s Primate Visions, which illustrates the rearticulation of the Garden of Eden, and finally the nexus of primatology, transhumanism, ‘vampire therapy’, etc. (attempts at material immortality via ‘curing death’) that typify the Modernist rearticulation of the quest for the Holy Grail (san grail, sang rail). In the ethos of Nomad Exploration (NE) our teleological imperative in this journey is not to ‘answer questions’ by ‘accumulating and analyzing facts’; rather, our goal is to broaden understandings and deepen questions by providing the reader with dimensionally transformative ideas that provide access to new plateaus of perspective—in short, our purpose lies in the production of intimate, inner experience with dimensionally transformative ideas and a concomitant reinvigoration of meaning rather than in accumulating and analyzing facts.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat

Courage/couragelessness: Rethinking the fear/fearlessness dialectic

The net of problems of injustice in the world, past, present and in the oncoming future-present are characteristically rooted in the many and varied contextual manifestations of the superiority-supremacism form. In search of the metaphysical pathology hidden by the banal invisibility of Western thought (worldview/ideologies) for Western subjects, the authors critically recognize, conceptualize and unveil the superiority-supremacism form, the conflation of dualistic and nondualistic phenomena, and the all too common synthesis of superiority-supremacism and the conflation of dualistic/nondualistic phenomena that form an essential aspect of the Colonial Modernist Worldview (C.M. Worldview ; see Barnesmoore 2018) as a critique of Western knowledge and conceptions of human history manufactured therein

Revisiting Critical GIS

The article looks into the critical geographic information science (GIS) in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. It offers trading zones for discussion of issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal. One tension running through critical GIS is the contradictory role it has played in addressing questions of social justice