Jim O'Shaughnessy Profile picture
Oct 24, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read Read on X
1/ Origin Myths all share quite a bit in common if you read a lot of them together. For example, Eve was seen to bring down humanity by eating the apple of knowledge. Robert Anton Wilson in "Ishtar Rising" recounts:
2/ "In the Greek story, Zeus slights Eris (the Goddess of Chaos) by not inviting her to a banquet on Olympus and she gets her revenge by manufacturing a golden apple inscribed KALLISTI ("To the prettiest one") and rolling it into the banquet hall.
3/ Immediately all the goddesses begin squabbling, each claiming to be the prettiest one and entitled to the apple; this quarrel worsens until men as well as gods are drawn into it and eventually the Trojan War results.
4/ Eris became known as the goddess of chaos and the golden apple is called the apple of discord."

To this day, a "religion." apparently started as a gag by Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley, called Discordianism, which "worships" Eris, the Goddess of Chaos,
5/ "Discordianism is centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder is any more accurate or objectively true than the other."
~@Wikipedia
6/ Wilson goes on to note "The similarities here — the role of the female, the presence of the apple, the sequence of supernatural calamities — suggest that there might be a common origin to these myths.
7/ Such is indeed the case, according to Joseph Campbell's monumental four-volume study, "The Masks of God."

🤔Ah, now where have we seen Campbell before? Things just get curiouser and curiouser... Image

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More from @jposhaughnessy

Feb 12
Fun experiment with books:

As part of a project I was working on, I created a list of books that I thought would be worth re-reading and wondered if—despite addressing seemingly very different ideas—they shared any similar underlying themes.

Here's the list:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig

"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu

"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

"Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

“The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” by Steven Pinker

“Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff

“Cloud Atlas: A Novel.” by David Mitchell

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” by David Mitchell

“Foundation.” by Isaac Asimov (and all of its follow on books)

“The Dog Stars” by Peter Heller

“Paris in the Present Tense” by Mark Helprin

“Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” by James Gleick

“Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

“The Lessons of History” by Will and Ariel Durant

“Letters of Note” by Shaun Usher

“Money: A Suicide Note” by Martin Amis

“The Razor’s Edge.” by W. Somerset Maugham

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi

“Wolf Hall: A Novel” by Hilary Mantel

"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton

“A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age” by Jimmy Soni

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

“Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel” by Peter Pouncey

“The Screwtape Letters” By C.S. Lewis

"Twins: And What The Tell Us About Who We Are” by Lawrence Wright

“What do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard P. Feynman

"The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse

"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

“Ubik” by Philip K. Dick

“VALIS” by Philip K. Dick

“Unflattening” by Nick Sousanis

"Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland

"The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit" by Michael Finkel

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

“All the Light we Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr

“Adventures of a Bystander” by Peter Drucker

"The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominique Bauby

“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin

“Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields

“The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History” by Howard Bloom

“Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish’d I’d Know Earlier” by Kevin Kelly

“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

“The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx

“A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

"One Summer: America, 1927" by Bill Bryson

“The Fifth Science” by Exurb1A

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII" by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila

“The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf

“The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

"The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper

"The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski

“Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir” by Werner Herzog
I put the list in our in-house AI and asked it to synthesize the themes all of the books shared.

Here's the answer it gave: Image
1. Ontological Exploration—Reality as layered construct:

From Pirsig's quality metaphysics to Dick's VALIS gnostic visions and Rovelli's quantum time
Perception as active creation: Explored through Mitchell's nested narratives (Cloud Atlas), McCarthy's post-apocalyptic sensory focus (The Road), and Bauby's locked-in perspective (Diving Bell)

2. Epistemological Tension:

∃Knowledge∈[Science∩Art∩Spirituality]∃Knowledge∈[Science∩Art∩Spirituality]

Paradigm shifts: Kuhn's scientific revolutions vs. Deutsch's infinite knowledge
Information theory: Gleick's histories vs. Shannon's mathematical communication
Memetic evolution: Bloom's Lucifer Principle vs. Rubin's Creative Act
Read 16 tweets
Dec 7, 2024
1/ While playing around with our @osventuresllc AI Lab, I glanced to my right and saw "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" and wondered if you could create a game based on the world Dick builds in this massive tome.

It was a really fun exercise, and here's the first pass Image
2/ First prompt: "Please create a comprehensive review of "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" by Philip K. Dick and describe how one might use the insights to build a real-world game based on its views on reality"
3/ It came back with this:

The key themes include:

Reality Layers: Multiple overlapping realities existing simultaneously

Time Perception: Non-linear time and temporal displacement

Divine Communication: Information-rich pink light and cosmic consciousness

Hidden Knowledge: The concept of hidden truth beneath apparent reality

Identity Fluidity: Multiple personalities and shared consciousnessImage
Read 20 tweets
Jan 28, 2024
1/ From the ever provocative Jed McKenna via JEDVAITA website--"Dreamweaver"

"Dreams feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
~Dom Cobb, Inception.
2/ "That incessant chatter going on in your head might not be mental pollution, as it seems. It might actually be how you constantly weave your dream state, yourself included, into existence.
3/ Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, your reality has no independent reality. It's all in your head, including your head.

That might be a nice thing about meditation - that you can close your eyes, turn off your brain, and spend some quality time away from the
Read 22 tweets
Apr 2, 2023
Arthur C. Clarke 🗣️

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.”
“I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.”

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”

“Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence”
“Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological”

“Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.”

“He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.”
Read 4 tweets
Mar 16, 2023
Henri Bergson 🗣️

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”
“Time is invention and nothing else.”

“Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.”

“The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.”
“Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.”

“No two moments are identical in a conscious being”
Read 4 tweets
Mar 11, 2023
1/Implicate and explicate orders--A thread

“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.”
~David Bohm
2/ David Bohm was a quantum physicist whose work focused on understanding the fundamental nature of reality. Bohm's concept of implicate and explicate orders is a way of understanding the relationship between the manifest world we experience and often
3/ think of as “reality” and the underlying system that gives rise to it.

The explicate order is the consensus reality that we share directly. We perceive the world of objects, space, and time with our senses. The explicate order is what we see and experience now,
Read 20 tweets

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