Profit or Usefulness?

Looking at what’s there — and what’s not there

https://medium.com/the-haven/profit-or-usefulness-a34110fd3776

#FigureGround
#OpticalIllusion
#LaoTze
#BlackHoles
#Fiction
#sciencefiction
#story
#shortstory
#flashfiction
#shortshort

Just saw an advert for tickets to a performance of ambient music.

AMBIENT music.

So… you pay, take a seat, then sit quietly to focus attention on an intended background while backgrounding your own intentional foreground activities this background intended to only environmentally frame and support?

It's either a very gestalt McLuhanist surrealism, or I'm missing a point somewhere 🤔

#ambientmusic #muzak #musicforspaceports #figureground

I've just run across an interesting observation on risk perseption and evolutionary selection which strikes me as interesting, and seems to have something of a figure-ground relation.

The passage:

The forces of genetic and cultural selection were not creating brains or institutions capable of looking generations ahead; there would have been no selection pressures in that direction. Indeed, quite the opposite, selection probably favoured mechanisms to keep perception of the environmental backgroudn steady so that rapid changes (e.g., leopard approaching) would be obvious. But now slow changes in that background are the most lethal threats.

-- Paul & Anne Ehrlich, "Can the Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided?", Proceedings of the Royal Society (2012).

(Emphasis added.)

This strikes me as a temporal figure/ground relation, where faster-moving short-term actions dominate attention over much slower-moving risks. (There's also the case of activity that's too fast for preception, such as a hummingbird's wing beats, or many songbird's vocalisations.)

Are there evolutionary structures which do respond to the slower beats? I've thought before that trees don't have brains, but rather forests are brains, operating on timescales we can't readily apprehend.

The human problem of accurate risk perception is its own fascinating / frustrating topic.

#FigureGround #Risk #Evolution #PaulEhrlich #AnneEhrlich #Perception #Time