dotAtelier

Getting the new dotatelier book

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:17:08 +0000

The price is 45$ and you can get one at the Alternatives bookstore in Bellingen

or contact dotAtelier..
and we will send you one for $45 (subject to availability).

Book launch day

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:02:05 +0000

Book launch

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:53:11 +0000

the book of dotAtelier

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:50:00 +0000

What do you lose when you lose a war?

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:14:00 +0000

To dispose over territory and labour processes
To determine your own future

The power of individuals is derived from the system they exist in.

In ancient times the losers of wars became slaves of the victors, especially the women. Often the males were all killed - Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great both did this to create a new breed of people with Mongolian or Greek fathers in the conquered territories..the fathers didn’t hang about but left with the army.

Persian women who had been middle class or high class were desirable servants in Ancient Greece. They could be the partners of Greek men but their children were not given the status of citizens- this required both parents to be Greek, with the result that children were born into slavery.

After their states were conquered, Greek philosophers became slaves in Roman households teaching children.

All property was forfeited to the victorious ones.

In modern times the loss of power takes different forms,

In the transition from living in a defendable society to being entirely subjected to the will of external forces and influences, an enormous amount of life quality is sacrificed.

Revolution is another possible outcome of power loss where the vacuum is filled by the power of the organised members of the community.

War disrupts international trade so it also negatively affects the winners. The Trojan Wars resulted in the destruction of the main productive economy in the area which the Greeks traded with and plundered. Soon after Troy was destroyed, Greek society fell into a deep depression and lost their written language for a long time.

War and predictability

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:48:00 +0000

In ancient times it was commonly thought that starting a war was risky. You might lose. Therefore it was always necessary to ask the oracle first.

In the Trojan War against Greek states, the Persians were confident they would win because of their massive army and navy but they were defeated by the cunning of the Greeks as well as the arbitrary circumstances which favoured them. Such as the weather.

Every violent invasion can result in disaster for the assailant. And change the whole world. The process moves out of the control of reason and into the realm of arbitrary causality, for the Greeks the hands of the gods. Only an oracle could help you to understand what they might want.

Talking with the benefit of reason can maintain a peaceful coexistence between diverse societies and secure the good relations necessary for prosperity.

Causality and mysticism

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:05:00 +0000

There are two important different perspectives on events that happen in the world. One is from the point of view of the individual. The other takes the whole in its view. The latter is a scientific method seeing events in a totality of causes and effects. Whatever happens, happens necessarily. The former sees the world as arbitrary, unique and accidental, even mystical. People are free and responsible for their actions. They are lucky or unfortunate.

These 2 standpoints are both legitimate and can coexist despite contradictions.

For example.
A person takes a large knife into a busy shopping centre and stabs people at random. From the individual point of view the victims may ask:
Why me? What did I do to deserve this?
Action:
Let’s punish him..
and all others like him

The larger perspective on the other hand poses the question:
How can such crimes be avoided?
Action:
Let’s prevent him from doing more harm

When a meteor is approaching the earth we can determine where it will collide if we have sufficient causal information. This is the necessity of cause and effect.

If I am cycling on a country road and a meteor hits me or nearly misses me or goes somewhere else totally, this is mysterious and is the basis of mysticism.

A similar dual explanation can be put if a car collides with a cyclist. It is both a terrible misfortune for the individual but also the necessary outcome of transport infrastructure design.

Politically, this uncertainty is the basis of ideologies that blame groups of others for everything undesirable that happens in their surroundings.
Such ideas generalise from individual experiences to statements like:

I hate all……..
I love everybody

These kind of ideas are not legitimate because love and hate are emotions that apply to real relational entities not to abstractions.

Each human life is unique . Each person experiences it as a wonder or as misery unique to themselves.

Swamp wallaby video

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:53:00 +0000

infinity of duck rabbits - Wittgenstein

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 02:47:00 +0000

Wittgensteins duck rabbit picture uses a single figure to show how the observer determines what is to be seen. It changes from a duck into a rabbit usually after a few seconds. Then it changes back again. The picture is ambiguous and keeps jumping from one to another. In German it is called a "Springbild".

But what if there are several figures interacting with one another?

Further, what happens when the number of figures grows into the hundreds?

Or tends to infinity?

The effect depends on the observer.

This picture is quite large, about 2 meters x 140cm with hundreds of duck-rabbits. it can be printed as large as one would want it, so it satisfies the criterion of infinity. Always one more.

What about you? What do you see first if anything? Does it change after a little while? Do they all change at once, or do some remain what you first saw them as?

Breathing and paradise

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 21:25:00 +0000

Imagine floating weightless, all alone, not having to relate to others in language and not having to breathe. Paradise!

We all have some kind of preconscious, bodily memory of this paradisiacal condition before we are born, inside a womb. This is where the idea originates.

The first thing we have to learn when we are born is to breathe. The labour of breathing continues all our lives and becomes more onerous as we get older. Breathing is not only for oxygen to keep us alive but also is the basis of spoken communication. It’s both voluntary and involuntary. We can choose to stop it or deepen it but it defaults back to automatic when we stop thinking about it.

Starting to breathe is a traumatic moment as we leave the paradise of the uterus and have to labour always to stay alive. We also have to eat, struggle against gravity and compete with others like ourselves for scarce resources. We have to learn languages and find joy in our labour. We need to enjoy breathing and take control of it just like the other types of work we do.

Labour is the eternal condition of humanity.

Because of the absence of perfect given conditions free of work we have to develop a will , to become assertive, and learn to love others and ourselves.in a cultural setting.

Without these skills, life becomes miserable, lonely and dependent on others.

duck rabbit crowd

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:36:00 +0000

Wittgenstein

Entropy, warming and the collapse of cultures

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 05:42:00 +0000

Intense human activity generates heat. At the same time it damages the existing order in the world. Every productive intervention increases chaos and makes the place hotter. This is the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

When human societies become concentrated and highly efficient, they increase the entropy and eventually bring their own demise. The Bronze Age ended when increasing temperatures brought failure of food production in the areas where the transformations brought by civilisation were unleashed. Urban centres were overrun and destroyed by hungry neighbours. Dark ages followed in which written languages were lost for centuries.

In modern times the entire planet is affected by efficient and all -transforming production on an unprecedented scale. No continent is spared. Cities are heat islands with temperatures well above the surrounding areas.

A strategy to reduce the impact of productive heating would be to leave large areas untouched, to stop cutting massive holes into forests and to restore the order which was there before. In this way it may be possible to preserve some of the achievements of civilisation by slowing entropy.

Without this, a new kind of equilibrium will emerge after the collapse with or without people and their civilised achievements.

koala god

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:29:00 +0000

Night is the space of timelessness .

The creatures of the night live like gods without a feeling for the progression of time.

The stars tell of years passing and the moon tells of months. But the sense of time comes from the events that the sun allows us to define.

Without the sun it’s just changing states, as experienced by immortal ancient Greek gods.

Koalas are like these gods.

Diurnal creatures of the daylight like humans are often distressed by the night’s darkness and lack of time. Some such people can’t sleep again when they wake up in the night. We make it light everywhere and divide the night into times as we wait sleeplessly for the sunrise to reinvent the time of day. The morning chorus of the birds is a celebration of the return of the sun.

As the day progresses the sun makes it warmer and defines the activities of practical reason. We get things done. Ubiquitous artificial light extends the day.

Sound is an important medium in dark space without time. For the tawny frogmouth, repetition of sounds can do functional things attracting food or for communication.

If we accept the darkness of night as a koala does, the contemplation of our being with no time is a deeply human experience and can be very satisfying.

And you might ask Siri what time it is but what difference does it make if it is 2:22,3:33 or 4:44 when there is no time. Only the first bird brings it.

What wallabies do at 2.30 am

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 06:44:00 +0000

massage, tail wagging

Human bodies and lifeless machines

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 01:46:00 +0000

Human bodies require a will to stand up. (Hegel). Without hope we can still do practical activities but not as well as with it. (Kant).

The presence of a soul or consciousness or spirit distinguishes the body from a machine. We are dead without spirit. Or catatonic.

Machines can be conceived as extensions of bodily functions. For them to work they require some outside thinking manager. A pump can be set up to run automatically up to a point but needs intervention for maintenance by a human from time to time.

A I is self managing software but needs conscious attention from a human coder at times .

Some ideologies treat people like machines.

Mumford puts the position that machines have historically replaced humans in their labour as part of a big machine in mass societies. What can’t be done by machines is done by dehumanised workers with special skills. The machine is constantly seeking new ways to free itself of its dependence upon skilled labour.

Some medical models see bodies as autonomous just needing some drugs to fix them up. Like oil in a motor. There are some similarities but without motivation (will, hope etc) we can’t get healthy again unlike a machine.

Kants universals

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 03:56:00 +0000

A simple test of the ethical status of an action is to universalise it. What would the world be like if everyone was like that?

If the answer is not good then the activity is not ethical.

Here are some examples.

Driving a car to work (traffic jams)or in general ( mass deaths of people and animals, unliveable climate).

Eating meat- how the landscape is changed by having cows everywhere instead of forests.

Using fossil fuels.

Putting rubbish in the ocean.

Aggression and violence.

Uncontrolled pets and children.

Undemocratic behaviour.

Intolerance of others .

Each of these things would be alright in themselves as a one off event but when universalised they become disastrous.

Therefore we should not do them ( Kant).

That’s on the level of the individual. But we’re all in social situations where we have to act within the constraints that are given. No one can alone be a perfect moral agent. Not doing things takes convincing others and changing the context. Hence the personal becomes political. Without using fossil fuels we would get no food.

However many changes are possible immediately without reference to others. How we use machines and the choices we make about technology, how much we waste.

Cosmic Resonance, Thought Transmission, and the Rise of AI Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 22:47:00 +0000

In the 1980s, biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake introduced the concept of cosmic resonance — a radical idea proposing that once something is thought or done in one part of the world, it becomes easier for the same thing to emerge elsewhere. According to Sheldrake, patterns of behavior, ideas, and even biological habits could spread through a kind of non-material resonance, almost like a field of memory connecting all living things. It was a controversial theory, challenging the mechanistic view of reality, and it suggested that thought itself had a kind of real, transmissible power.

Moving on to today, and we are witnessing a materialist version of this same phenomenon — not through metaphysical fields, but through digital networks. Enter ChatGPT and the broader field of artificial intelligence. Once a thought, idea, article, or innovation is uploaded to the internet, it becomes part of a growing corpus of knowledge. AI systems, trained on these vast libraries of human expression, absorb and reproduce this information, making it available to people all over the world, instantly.

In a sense, the internet has become the modern medium for Sheldrake’s cosmic resonance. An idea conceived in a single mind can now ripple outward across the globe, influencing cultures, technologies, and even the models of machine learning that are increasingly steering the flow of information. Once something is written — a solution to a problem, a poem, a philosophical argument — it enters a collective web of intelligence. ChatGPT and its cousins are the first true manifestations of this process, demonstrating how thought itself can now be captured, preserved, transmitted, and even grown across the world.

What was once an esoteric vision of invisible fields linking minds has found a material anchor in the digital age. It is not cosmic resonance in the mystical sense, perhaps, but it is a resonance nonetheless — one that is shaping the future of humanity.

The difference

Unlike artificial intelligence, however, cosmic resonance involves the transmission of spirit itself. It is not the mere movement of symbols, but the living passage of meaning from mind to mind, across time and space. Spirit carries with it an inner knowing, an irreducible presence that AI can only mimic, never embody.

AI, by its nature, is dependent on spirit for interpretation. It is built upon language, but it does not dwell within meaning. It arranges words without understanding their weight; it constructs sentences without tasting their truth. It cannot correct itself for meaning or wisdom — it requires an intelligence outside itself, a human mind, to critique, to discern, to breathe life into what would otherwise remain a hollow form.

Without the animating presence of human consciousness, AI is no more than a repository of unawakened signs — like cuneiform tablets buried in ancient sands, or hieroglyphs carved into stone before the key to their mystery was found.

Information without spirit is inert.

It accumulates, but it does not live. It cannot rise into knowledge, nor blossom into wisdom.

Cosmic resonance moves through life itself; it vibrates in the soul, in the unseen depths where meaning is not constructed but revealed. AI, by contrast, is a mirror that reflects the surface of thought, awaiting the touch of spirit to give it direction, purpose, and truth.

In the end, information alone is not enough.

It is spirit that breathes the breath of life into the dead letters of the world.

written with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Trees

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 03:25:00 +0000

The continuous flow of awareness

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 04:23:00 +0000

With practical reason we tend to constantly divide the time in our life into different periods. Although we distinguish between being asleep and being awake, the reality is that we are always aware in someway all our lives and there is a continuity between dreams and being awake so that even from the deepest dream we’re not surprised to come back into the real world and similarly from reality into dreams. We’re not shocked. It’s a continuous part of existence.

The flow of life continues in sleep just as when awake. When day dreaming we can experience this continuity better. Sometimes you drop off in the daytime and wake up not knowing that you were asleep except that you had a dream.

There is no such thing as dreamless sleep. We are always aware of something.

We can influence our sleep quality by using sheets of chamomile flowers or shells and imagining ourselves on them if we wake up.

Just as in time we also divide space into segments. We distinguish between the self and the other and put boundaries around our experiences as part of functioning in everyday life. To grasp the flow in life we need to let go of the boundaries, to feel our existence in time space as continuous and limitless.

urban fires, bushfires and fuel

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 05:43:00 +0000

In early industrial times London grew to a large city made of inflammable materials. When the great fire cleared the ground, buildings were rebuilt out of stone and bricks.

People have been led to believe that it is dangerous to live in the countryside because of the fuel in forests - leaves and sticks - which can burn quickly and cause houses to burn too. Also grass fuels fires

It is now becoming clear that the cities once again have a great concentration of fuel. Houses are made of inflammable materials, contain lots of burnable consumer goods and have at least one car , but often 4 or more, which burn easily.

Gardens have plastic furniture, toys, tools, and even grass. Multiply this by 2 million and you have a lot of fuel.

Furthermore the temperature in cities is usually higher than in the countryside by a few degrees because there are few trees and the ground is sealed making heat islands.

It is not surprising that massive, uncontrollable urban fires break out when the conditions are so right.

An audit of each home should check how much flammable plastic is stored in each house - boxes from products you may want to return, old toys, old technology that you loved with lithium batteries. Also, what is the house made of and what flammable accessories have been added? Plastic shutters. Screens. Window frames.

Urban fires are far more toxic than bushfires They’re also more difficult to escape from because of traffic. You may be caught between 2 lithium batteries on wheels in a traffic jam of people trying to escape the flames in a 200 kilometer per hour wind.

King Brown

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 20:11:00 +0000

The Bellinger River snakes down to the Pacific Ocean at Urunga accompanied by the music of the local doves

Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 01:33:00 +0000

Foucault wrote about dreams as a kind of phenomenological precondition for knowledge.

The experience in dreams does not distinguish between the immanent and the transcendental, subject and object , reality and imagination, the inner world and the outer, fact and fiction or sensible and senseless. (Träume eines Geistersehers in Geister der Gegenwart, Eilenberger)

Dreams are the experiential space prior to the constructed existence of our lives.

Foucault is critical of Freud's dream theory which posits dreams as dependent on everyday reality.

Freedom is necessity - Kant

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 20:18:00 +0000

We can act spontaneously or we can think about it before we act and work out in our minds what is the best way of doing what it is we want to do. What appears to be successful spontaneous action by some is usually, if it works well, the result of training skills.
For Kant (p 420, Safranski: Schopenhauer), it was clear that arbitrary and unthought out actions are unfree and that freedom is doing what is necessary or best in a situation.
Behaving thoughtlessly and impulsively has consequences that can be really negative. This is true of individuals and for collectives, societies. It is best to research options before acting.
Impulse control is essential for people to live together freely in social formations.
People often believe that it is desirable to break free and let go. It is commonly thought of as freedom.

sometimes I have the desire to be wild No rules no regulations just be wild

This may be useful in a therapeutic situation where the consequences are controlled and limited. But doing this with friends or partners or at work will probably result in loneliness and unemployment.

The energy of impulsive desire combined with the reason and skill of cultivated thought brings about music, theatre, art and dance , i.e. culture . This dynamic is referred to by Nietzsche as the opposition between the Dionysian (wild, uncontrolled) and the Apollonian (reasoned, logical).

Realise your dreams

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Ancient Italian saying:

The gods punish us by realising our dreams.

Our dreams can never fully grasp the extent of contextual influences which will affect their implementation if they are realised.

Language as a carrier of attitudes

noreply@blogger.com (dotAtelier) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 04:47:00 +0000

Language contains all the ideas we have , all our prejudices, values, as a systemic whole however chaotic.

The words , phrases and clumps of words which we use habitually, or choose, tell about what we believe, both as individuals and collectively. Our utterances include culturally specific presuppositions which we may not be aware of which become added onto communicative acts. In this way, simple statements of a neutral nature become packages of ideas disguised as factual propositions.