On 13/12/2017 21:20, Bald Eagle wrote:
> Stephen <mca### [at] aolcom> wrote:
> 
>> Actually, I feel quite upset after watching it.
>> I can't say why.
> 
> Wow - Paul is highly educated, well-spoken, and is held in high regard as a very
> serious and knowledgeable mycologist.
> 

Yes, Wow!
It was not his ideas. It was him, himself. And I've not been partaking 
of relaxing herbs. :-)
The part of the brain that puts obscure references together and comes up 
with connections was working overtime. Andy, one of my first best 
friends, who in later years tried to con my grandmother. A close 
relative  who turned into a junkie and could con his way out of 
everything except his own fate. The politicians who are telling obvious 
lies but people believe them... Many more examples on request.  ;)

I may be doing him an injustice but one of the first things he implied 
was that he was very very smart. "My brother who was a super genus much 
smarter than me." Shows a lack of understanding that others can see a 
hidden boast. To my eyes or ears to be more accurate.
I felt dirty after watching what I did. The way people say they do if 
they have been burgled.
Ah! well. There is little chance I will meet him to see if I feel the 
same in person. And thinking about it. It might be the way he is trying 
to project himself after criticism.
But on the whole I would not leave him alone in the same room with a 
baby and a feeding bottle if he needed milk for his coffee.

> He entertains some very interesting ideas, which is why he's probably unpopular
> with the driest of the soul-sucking bureaucratic administrative academics.
> 

I can understand that. I have read some of his ideas reported by others 
and they are thought provoking.

> His interview evoked some of the more interesting science fiction novels
> concerning vast, cluster-type lifeforms such as Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", and
> lifeforms that exist and function in a life-cycle and time scale vastly
> different from our own, such as in Frederik Pohl's novels.
> 

I've read Solaris but so long ago I can't remember it. Frederik Pohl 
more recently and I can see the connection. As with the sentinel.

> That fungi are ancient, exist in vaster colonies than we know, and have the
> capacity to "intelligently"* 



> influence and shape their environment to such a
> degree that they may have directly and profoundly affected the course of human
> evolution seemed quite a provocative hypothesis.
> 
> *He references some experiments on slime molds, and uses their observed
> behaviour as evidence of "intelligence", whereas at the present time I only see
> basic chemotaxis and the inevitable geometric and mathematic inevitabilities of
> iterative selective cycles.
> 
> 
I seem to remember that Tokyo transport used slime moulds to help design 
pars of their transport system.

> 


better. :)


-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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