Embrace the Light

This is a new realm of experience for me -- and many others like me. There are now AI websites which allow you to generate music that, with a modicum of tweaking, sounds radio-ready. With one called Udio.com, I made the song below -- outside of any genre I have worked in before (and indeed, I played around with several before hitting upon the central structure of this one, and building out from there)

It it, in a word, transformative. Not the song, especially, but the technology behind it, and more impactfully perhaps, the experience of having no musical skills beyond being able to pluck a few notes, and yet being able to instantiate something like this. And remember, we are at the very beginning of this journey. We are Marconi's first fiddling with radio waves compared to where we will be just a few years from now.

Along the way, enjoy the music!!

#AI #Music #AIArt #AIMusic #TheFutureIsNow

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page, redux

Some three years ago I blogged about record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism -- observing then that the page had hit an all-time high in daily page views at 1,227 (part of a pattern in which several of the highest-viewed days were scattered over a surrounding period of weeks). That spike was a mystery, the previous record of 901 views having been attributable to Pandeism being mentioned in an article in Scientific American.

Well, all that is now water under the bridge insofar as record page view days go.

For on February 26, 2023, a new page views record of 2,231 nearly doubled the old record, and was followed by a day of 1,483 views (itself exceeding the record set in 2020), followed by a day of 1,162 (with this whole run being preceded by a day of 906 views).

Well it seems that all of this is because of cartoonist Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays on Twitter) making news (in a very negative way, unfortunately).

You see, one of Adams' more archaic claims to fame is having written the book God's Debris (actually a quite incisive work which I still put forth as recommend reading) describing a school of Pandeism as its worldview. Interestingly, a key point of Pandeism -- that we are all equally fragments of our Creator, and how we treat our fellows is how we contribute to creating the experience of our Creator -- ought to strongly motivate seeking to help all humans to overcome whatever barriers separate us, for the  common achievement of greater joy in our lives.

Now then, I wouldn't especially want the hundreds-of-years-old theological theory of Pandeism to be drawing attention solely due to an association with a person who's in the news for all the wrong reasons. But.... if even a handful of Wikipedia visitors are enlightened by it, well, you know the old saw, The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways. Perhaps one of those mysterious ways is to make a current celebrity act in such a way that they unintentionally draw attention to a theory they espoused in the past perhaps much more beautiful than what they espouse in the present.

Pandeism has steadily been gaining renewed interest for the past decade, so anything which informs people that the idea exists is doing them a service, perhaps offering a light to come out of shadowy events.

Pandeism: An Anthology -- five reviews, five stars every time!!

This one has been sitting in my outbox for five years....

An old favorite....

 

How accurately human of a conception this is....

Kickstarter underway for Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself

 

Our Kickstarter is underway for our next collection: Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself.

This is unlike any of our previous collections, as it is not explicitly about Pandeism (though it is explicitly about many other things).

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page

Recently I noticed that Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism --  has been seeing record traffic. So much that five of its ten biggest days EVER have happened within just the past thirty days (including by far the single biggest day, the second being in December)

Wikipedia's Pandeism page has been around since 2013, and there are stats for how many times it has been viewed since around mid-2015.... and between 2015 and August of 2019, the most pageviews in a day was 618, in 2017. That number was beaten by about 50 on August 29, 2019.... And then on December 11, 2019, two days after Pandeism was mentioned in an article in Scientific American, the views were 901, a third higher than ever before. But in the past thirty days, there have been pageviews for the day of 533, 548, 618, 638, and 1227!!

The 1227 view day is 1/3 more than the December 11 record, and nearly doubles anything seen for over four years before that, and was itself surrounded by days higher than those usually seen in years before. And unlike the Scientific American episode, there's no clear reason.

For further context, the *average* pageviews per day for Wikipedia's Pandeism page for the period from mid-2015 up to a month ago (April 2020) are around 162-163. In that stretch, pageviews broke 500 only six times (and in fact, only even broke 400 eight times). Contra approximately the past 35 days, in which the daily average has been around 360 views per day, mightily pulled up by those five very high days (not to mention two other days breaking 400).

So I am really baffled and curious -- what is going on with Pandeism and consciousness of it that hundreds, perhaps thousands more people over the course of the past month or so have seen fit to visit Wikipedia's Pandeism page?

I wonder if perhaps the coronavirus situation has people seeking solutions in Pandeism....

Somebody even suggested to me that this could be the result of people not knowing how to spell "Pandemic" -- and you know, at first I took this as a joke, but now I’m thinking people really may well actually be typing in the p-a-n-d-e.... and get that far, and Pandeism pops up as an option, and they wonder, “well what is that?”

.... or perhaps the quarantine-bound are simply on the Internet more.

A mystery, and one I'd love to solve.

"Beyond Physicalism" from Scientific American

On December 9, Scientific American magazine published a most remarkable article, "Beyond Physicalism: Philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch defends the idea that consciousness pervades the cosmos." Mørch, a philosopher and associate professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, was interviewed for this piece by science journalist John Horgan, who asks whether God fits into her philosophical propositions, Mørch answers:

Not really. But there is a religious view I find interesting, which is pandeism: the view that God used to exist, and be the only thing that existed, and then transformed himself into the universe, and so no longer exists. The reason God did this was basically for fun, or to see what happened. And maybe at some point the universe will transform itself back into God—that would be like nirvana or heaven. But then eventually God would get bored again and start the cycle over. As I understand it, this is close to some parts of Hindu cosmology.

Horgan's response? "I like that! I think I’m a pandeist!"

Mørch goes on to explain that the tendency of life to alternate between true pain and the essential pain of pleasure extended to the point of boredom "is also partly why the pandeistic view I just described appeals to me."

Interestingly, in the days following the publication of this Scientific American magazine article, the Wikipedia Pandeism page experienced an indisputable upsurge in viewership -- going from an average of about 175 views per day over the preceding weeks to over 1,600 views over the following three days, with a peak of over 900 views in a single day, an all-time viewership record for that page!!

This more than anything demonstrates the power of conveying information about a rising mode of thought to people, even when buried deep within a scholarly piece of journalism.