Weekly Digest: June 30
Peter McGrath shares recordings from across his career, a deep dive asking whether consciousness is something the brain creates—or something it connects to, and a look at Mosaic Head.
Homo Noeticus - Our Future Selves by Molly Hankins
To know something noetically is to know it intuitively, beyond the realm of ordinary human perception. Homo noeticus, a term coined in 1973 by author John White when he helped establish the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), refers to an evolved human living in an expanded state of consciousness, outside of an egocentric worldview.
One of the pioneers in the field of noetic sciences was Mexican neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, the eldest child of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family that immigrated from Poland to Mexico in the early 20th century. In 1994, he disappeared, leaving behind his radical take on noetic consciousness known as Syntergic Theory, preserved in several books he authored. Part neuroscientist, part consciousness researcher, and part student of shamanic traditions, Grinberg-Zylberbaum spent his career trying to find out how consciousness interacts with reality. Syntergic Theory is a model which proposes that consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather emerges through an interaction between the brain and a deeper informational structure underlying the universe itself. He called this information structure ‘the lattice’ and described it as a pre-physical field of consciousness that permeates everything in existence. His ideas are carried on by the IONS’ science team, who operate on the hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental, rather than a byproduct of the brain.
Mosaic Head by Henry de Waroquier
Peter McGrath has spent decades recording orchestras, chamber ensembles, choirs, and some of the world's greatest classical musicians. More specifically, he's a recording engineer devoted to capturing a musical performance as faithfully as possible. Throughout this conversation with Rick Rubin, Peter revisits recordings spanning his career—from Handel's Messiah with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem to performances by the Jerusalem String Quartet, Jordi Savall, Seraphic Fire, and Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto. The episode unfolds as both a listening session and a reflection on the philosophy behind the recordings.
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