Technological Mindbenders

Superhuman thinking warps our preconceived notions of the conventionally achievable in ways that never fail to amaze us. It sometimes has the capability to remold our belief systems into something unrecognizable even to ourselves. It is the challenge met and proved doable. We are human and we can do it because we are inspired by what we are capable of believing. Free the mind and the rest will follow, so goes a song. Bend the mind and the world flexes. Nothing is the root of all things. It is the beginning of practical thought from where imagination springs. Welcome to the warp and meet the world’s biggest mindbenders!

Believe the impossible

Impossible is nothing and three-time world boxing heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali is one of the reasons why sporting records are all meant to be broken by all athletes capable of doing so. The impossible to Ali is state prosecution and racial discrimination bearing down on his boxing career to strip him of the heavyweight title he won by knocking out Sonny Liston in 1964. Impossible is Ali staging a comeback and winning the title anew in 1974 via a KO win against the vaunted George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. Belief is Ali rising from defeat dealt by Leon Spinks in 1978 and winning back that crown in a succeeding rematch. Up until that time the boxing world had never heard of anyone winning the heavyweight title three times. The enigmatic charisma of Muhammad Ali and his belief in the impossible makes it easy for us to acknowledge new boxing greats like Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar dela Hoya, and eight-division champ and all-time pound-for-pound fighter Manny Pacquiao.

Question the infallible

The world is round, not flat. The earth revolves around the sun in perpetual motion around its own axis and this determines when the sun rises and when it sets. Simple? Now, yes. In 1619, however, it wasn’t and you could spend serious time in jail or house arrest for the rest of your life if you believed so. Physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei did so. Radical in those days, Galileo’s incontrovertible ideas about planetary motion and how the Roman Catholic Church defies scientific logic and evidence, illustrate the daring by which Vatican infallibility can be questioned by any one. Especially if you are equipped with discernment and knowledge-based fact and information, it is your duty to shed the light of reason into the most absolute of medieval ideas. Genuine liberation from ignorance resides not in dogma but scientific inquiry. Cause and effect.

Investigate the improbable

The cosmos is too vast and life on earth for us could be so vain to imagine or accept known reality that we are alone in this universe. Not because you don’t see something or anything and it doesn’t make itself felt to you by some strange technology you have yet to be aware of — but simply because! We need to know and confront our most serious doubts. Can we communicate with intelligent aliens? Carl Sagan threw this question at us close to 30 years ago and we all threw ourselves an entirely new question: How could we communicate with alien civilizations? This wasn’t about space exploration or some weird interplanetary virtual PBX back then. The question refuses to die and begs bigger, deeper more satisfying research. Science fiction just doesn’t hack it for you and I.

Imagine the unthinkable

Painting is to art as ornithology is for the birds. Art is a habit-forming drug. War is the peak of civil refinement. Art is the marriage between an umbrella and a sewing machine. It is the 1920s and The Futurists rock. Dismayed by the politics and the world order of the era, Marcel Duchamp and his retinue of Paris art punks and punsters dared the unthinkable. Art meant to outrage the intelligentsia and modern rationalism made stupid by the recently concluded First World War in 1919. Duchamp’s Futurism regarded widely accepted art making such as painting and sculpture insignificant in context as artifacts of civil refinement. We now perceive modern art this way and this is the reason why we encounter modern art in various forms. Unexplainable and imperceptible perhaps, but nevertheless compelling.

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