last updated 21 September 2005

The EV-WEB

- - Eclectic Verity - - - Eccentric Variety - -
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Thought-Provoking Sites

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. . . .virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.  We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind . . .
      --Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell
     This section of my webpage has the least commentary in it; it is my effort to share my internet serendipity at finding sites which shatter paradigms, incite insights, or simply delight a person with a strong twist of perspective.  These are websites which either explore the finding of connections of thought or stimulate the mind with perspectives and thoughts different from those with which most U.S.Americans are familiar.   Edward O. Wilson argues for a return to interdisciplinary or associative thinking in his latest book, *Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge*, discussed in A conversation with Edward O. Wilson in Atlantic Unbound.  Such connections enable a person not only to weave a conceptual web but to personalize her or his connections with these ideas; Karl Erickson explores this personalizing with his melding of idiosyncratic and idea with universe to coin the term Idioverse.  One method of strengthening an awareness of connections is to play one of the variations of Herman Hesse's Glass Beads game: the idea behind this game is explored in this article on the concept while Hipbone Games provides its own clever iterations of the game.  On a more abstract level, The Church of the Virus considers the spread of thoughts (including their interconnections) in its focus on meme theory, the theory that ideas pass from individual to individual in a fashion not unlike the spread of viruses.
     A consilient Theory of Everything which focuses on physics and chemistry but also references metaphysics, psychology, and philosophy & religion can be explored at Virtual Chaos.  A new method for examining evolution and taxonomy can be reviewed at Cladistic Evolution, and here is a website which examines other Controversies about Evolutionary Theory, including its compatibility or incompatibility with religious thought.
     This 1995 article by Tosh Berman describes the Benshi Tradition, a practice of viewing film which is fairly different from what most U.S.Americans are used to (with the possible exception of fans of *The Rocky Horror Picture Show*).  In contrast, U.S.American film as well as other elements of U.S.American popular culture and society are analyzed at Transparency.  This highly accessible primer on Semiotic Analysis teaches the basics of semiotic theory to the budding student of film or literary analysis.
     For those with a sense of humor, I recommend reading about The Great God Contest for a new way of looking at traditional religions.  A website devoted to the equally playful yet far more spiritually serious works of Richard Bach can be found at A Dedicated Page about Richard Bach and his Wife, Former Actress Leslie Parrish-Bach.
     For an incisive review of the less-enlightened offerings on the internet from one of the more enlightened people I know, I commend Kevin M. Clark Page o' Evil.
     Finally, how better to end a section on new paradigms and new perspectives than this revising of the classic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors into Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard.

 

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