beginning student quickly learns which questions to ask and which not to ask. And after years of not asking, even remote memories of those questions fade into the background. Reviving those questions, in more mature ways, is one step towards an attempt to regain innocence, to retain a beginner's mind, and from that viewpoint to look at science as a whole.
for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, bracketing, applied epoche, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization, epoche - research application
comment
for: Deep Humanity, DH
annotate
for: empathy, self other dualism, symbolosphere, Deep Humanity, DH, othering, What is it like to be a bat?, Thomas Nagel, ingroup outgroup
date: Oct 1974
comment
NOTE - references - for references to any words used in this annotation which you don't understand, please use the tool in the following link to search all of Stop Reset Go's annotations. Chances are that any words you do not understand are explored in our other annotations. Go to the link below and type the word in the "ANY" field to find the annotator's contextual understanding, salience and use of any words used here
https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true
I'm tempted to say you can look at uh broadscale social organization uh or like Network Dynamics as an even larger portion of that light 00:32:43 cone but it doesn't seem to have the same continuity well I don't you mean uh it doesn't uh like first person continuity like it doesn't like you think it doesn't it isn't like anything to be 00:32:55 that social AG agent right and and we we both are I think sympathetic to pan psychism so saying even if we only have conscious access to what it's like to be 00:33:08 us at this higher level like it's there's it's possible that there's something that it's like to be a cell but I'm not sure it's possible that there's something that there's something it's like to be say a country
for: social superorganism - vs human multicellular being, social superorganism, Homni, major evolutionary transition, MET, MET in Individuality, Indyweb, Indranet, Indyweb/Indranet, CCE cumulative cultural evolution, symmathesy, Gyuri Lajos, individual/collective gestalt, interwingled sensemaking, Deep Humanity, DH, meta crisis, meaning crisis, polycrisis
comment
insight
quote: Gien
for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, poltical polarization, religious polarization, hermenneutic, hermeneutical phenomenological method
summary
comment
On the Function of the Epoche inPhenomenological Interpretations of Religion
for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization
comment
I'm saying these 00:55:43 things and they're Landing in you but that doesn't mean I'm saying what I'm saying it means that the way that it's Landing in you and taking shape and finding form and moving as a Crooked Tree is different than every single person 00:55:58 here
I 00:47:39 haven't heard any suggestion from anywhere in the world uh for a better order than the besmed liberal order which is based again on the very basic 00:47:52 understanding that all humans share the the same basic experiences and therefore we all share some common interests that the pain of as it's 00:48:05 biological that pain and and and despair and sadness they are the same in Israelis and Palestinians in Russians in ukrainians and this simple realization is the basis for the liberal Glo Global 00:48:18 Order
global liberal order, common human denominators, CHD, adjacency, adjancency - global liberal order - common human denominators - Deep Humanity, Yuval Noah Harari
adjacency
We need both, individual and collective.
Because if we do not work on our humanity, our humanity will work on us.
for: Deep Humanity, self-other dualism, othering, transformative empathy
comment
ou certainly have a light cone that does not belong to any of your pieces
for: individual / collective gestalt, Deep Humanity, superorganism, multi-level superorganism, major evolutionary transition, MET, cognitive light cone, umwelt
paraphrase
comment
date: May 12, 2022
abstract
comment
for: Donald Winnicott, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH
title: For Donald Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us
author: James Barnes date: May 18, 2020
comment: insight
‘There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.’
for: Donald Winnicott, quote, quote - Donald Winnicott, quote - human INTERbeing, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, white - humans INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity, altricial, mOTHER, non-duality
quote: Donald Winnicott
comment
, a fundamentally unitary conception of self and other.
quote
comment -The Deep Humanity definition of the individual / collective gestalt identifies the indivisible nature of the individual and collective.
Save Share Tweet EmailJames Barnesis a psychotherapist, lecturer and writer with a background in psychoanalysis and philosophy. He has a psychotherapy practice in Exeter, UK, and sees clients remotely.Edited by Christian JarrettSyndicate this idea Save Share Tweet EmailFor Donald Winnicott, your psyche isn’t just in your head – it emerges from your relationships with others and the world
for: human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity
One of the core principles of Hermetic philosophy is the principle of Mentalism, which states that all things are created from and expand from the mind.
I've been wondering if we are too focused on systems and actions that we can do, rather than on ourselves as human beings and what we can be.
But it's so essential that we go to this place that our brain gave us a solution. Evolution gave us a solution. And it's possibly one of the most profound perceptual experiences. And it's the experience of awe.
-for: awe, wonder, Deep Humanity, inner transformation, transition, inner/outer transformation, social tipping point, individual tipping point - Awe / wonder (getting in touch with the sacred) is evolutions solution to helping us transition into the unknown - This is in alignment with the essence of the open source Deep Humanity praxis - helping individuals to rediscover the sacred, to transform life back into a living experience of awe and wonder - Deep Humanity's purpose is to rekindle awe so that - we may bring about an individual tipping point, and collectively, - collective tipping point in global society to accelerate the transition out of the polycrisis
...moving from the scared back to the sacred
I think this is also part of our sense of who we are as humans, as ourselves, and the idea of the self, the individual, and even the humans as this individual species, these divisions are arbitrary.
forms might be asso-ciated with structures
ideas or images that are generated in the mental realm
claim
comment
length of life is not by a million miles as important as the quality of that life and we will all die of something one day we must focus on quality not quantity of 00:12:55 life
the sense of something sacred that is 00:11:00 very real but beyond everyday language
the sense of something sacred
comment
why is this I suggest it is because we have no longer the foggiest idea what a human life is about
madri
The subject of mothers arises often in the conversations between prisoners in SQ. When Schlome questions Levi in the chapter ‘Sul fondo,’ he asks 'Dove tua madre?' (OC I, 156) Standing in the long-awaited sunshine in ‘Una buona giornata,’ the teenager Sigi ‘[a]veva cominciato col parlare della sua casa di Vienna e di sua madre’ (OC I, 195), and Levi tells us that, in this moment of relative peace, he and the other prisoners likewise ‘siamo capaci di pensare alle nostre madri e alle nostre mogli, il che di solito non accade’ (OC I, 197).
These references to mothers are likely to remind us of the mothers who were deported to the Lager, whom Levi describes in the chapter ‘Il viaggio’:
Ognuno si congedò dalla vita nel modo che più gli si addiceva. Alcuni pregarono, altri bevvero oltre misura, altri si inebriarono di nefanda ultima passione. Ma le madri vegliarono a preparare con dolce cura il cibo per il viaggio, e lavarono i bambini, e fecero i bagagli, ed all’alba i fili spinati erano pieni di biancheria infantile stesa al vento ad asciugare; e non dimenticarono le fasce, e i giocattoli, e i cuscini, e le cento piccole cose che esse ben sanno, e di cui i bambini hanno in ogni caso bisogno. Non fareste anche voi altrettanto? Se dovessero uccidervi domani col vostro bambino, voi non gli dareste oggi da mangiare? (OC I, 143).
This affecting passage - the first instance, after the introductory poem in which Levi confronts the reader directly, demanding that we place ourselves in the position of the prisoners - enacts a human connection intimately related to the bond that Levi and Jean share in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.
CLL
Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
The human--animal - the Darwinian, rather than Hobbesian, social animal endowed with ‘social instincts’ and ‘moral sense’ - is surely the anthropological substratum of the ‘study of certain aspects of the human mind’ that Levi carries out in SQ. However, these verses from canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno seem to contravene such evolutionary--anthropological assumptions, instead claiming the humanist identification of humanity with reason.
This apparent ‘conceptual anomaly’ has led interpreters to diverge, between those who see in this chapter a patent affirmation of Levi’s humanist creed (Farrell, Patruno) and those who remind us that these pages should always be read along with Levi’s naturalistic essays from the 1960s and the 1970s (Benvegnù, Ross), or indeed through the ‘Fascist’ Ulysses of the liceo (Druker). Of course, Levi’s reflection on the human mind is not immune from contradictions or unsolved questions.
However, we might propose that ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be read as an expression of Levi’s mindset as a man of science who does not conceive any rift between the so-called ‘two cultures’. Levi can pair Darwin and Dante without perceiving any contradiction; a mutual reinforcement that does not entail the lack of spirit in the former and the lack of matter in the latter. Put simply, for Levi, in certain moments, the Scholastic Dante (or the Catholic Manzoni) could say more about human experience than the materialists Darwin and Lorenz, but this is no escape from our finitude.
SG
e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle
Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).
What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.
At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?
HPR
gigantesco
Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.
There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.
Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.
What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.
It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).
It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.
Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.
CLL
gigantesco
Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.
There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.
Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.
What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.
It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).
It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.
Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.
CLL
Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
The human--animal - the Darwinian, rather than Hobbesian, social animal endowed with ‘social instincts’ and ‘moral sense’ - is surely the anthropological substratum of the ‘study of certain aspects of the human mind’ that Levi carries out in SQ. However, these verses from canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno seem to contravene such evolutionary--anthropological assumptions, instead claiming the humanist identification of humanity with reason.
This apparent ‘conceptual anomaly’ has led interpreters to diverge, between those who see in this chapter a patent affirmation of Levi’s humanist creed (Farrell, Patruno) and those who remind us that these pages should always be read along with Levi’s naturalistic essays from the 1960s and the 1970s (Benvegnù, Ross), or indeed through the ‘Fascist’ Ulysses of the liceo (Druker). Of course, Levi’s reflection on the human mind is not immune from contradictions or unsolved questions.
However, we might propose that ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be read as an expression of Levi’s mindset as a man of science who does not conceive any rift between the so-called ‘two cultures’. Levi can pair Darwin and Dante without perceiving any contradiction; a mutual reinforcement that does not entail the lack of spirit in the former and the lack of matter in the latter. Put simply, for Levi, in certain moments, the Scholastic Dante (or the Catholic Manzoni) could say more about human experience than the materialists Darwin and Lorenz, but this is no escape from our finitude.
SG
“The purpose of our life should be to build up the Zion of our God, to gather the House of Israel, … store up treasures of knowledge and wisdom in our own understandings, purify our own hearts and prepare a people to meet the Lord when he comes. … “We have no business here other than to build up and establish the Zion of God. It must be done according to the will and law of God [see D&C 105:5], after that pattern and order by which Enoch built up and perfected the former-day Zion, which was taken away to heaven. … We, through our faithfulness, must prepare ourselves to meet Zion from above when it shall return to earth, and to abide the brightness and glory of its coming” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young [1997], 111–12).
a couple things:
as social creatures, human beings rely on establishing relationships with those around us. our existence begins within families, through the union of a mother and a father, and this pattern repeats throughout generations
these communal relationships form the foundation for unity, creating a shared purpose and principles. any discord within these relationships can result in separation
death serves as the most explicit form of separation: firstly, physical death separates the body from the spirit, and finally, spiritual death represents the separation of men from god.
another explicit instance of separation found in the scriptures is the scattering of Israel. our current work involves gathering israel, which requires severing our ties with our brothers and sisters across the globe. this gathering process is vital in building the zion we are commanded to establish before the second coming of christ
[[the church is one body]]
"1 Corinthians 12:12-14 emphasizes the idea that all individuals, regardless of their background or status, are united as one body through the Spirit of Christ. Paul teaches the importance of unity and care for one another within this body to avoid any divisions or schisms. It also emphasizes the interconnectedness of all individuals within the body, such that if one member suffers, all members suffer, and if one member is honored, all members rejoice." - The Doctrine of Belonging - Elder D. Todd Christofferson
the positive ones is we become good parents we spoke about this last time we we met uh and and it's the only outcome it's the only way I believe we can 01:14:34 create a better future
AI could manipulate or figure out a way to kill humans your 10 years time will be hiding from the machines if you don't have kids maybe wait a number of years 00:01:43 just so that we have a bit of certainty
How do we make them ‘‘benefit humanity as a whole’’ when humanity itself can’t agree on basic facts, much less core ethics and civic values?
Right before we left our lunch, Sam Altman quoted a saying of Ilya Sutskever’s: ‘‘One thing that Ilya says — which I always think sounds a little bit tech-utopian, but it sticks in your memory — is, ‘It’s very important that we build an A.G.I. that loves humanity.’ ’’
constructing our perceptual reality
The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.
- Soldiers to kill an enemy soldier.
- We do it to eat food
- Murderers do it before killing .
- Nazi SS guards did it to inmates.
- Cops do it to those they arrest.
- Corporation leaders do it to their workers and to the environment
- Politicians do it to everyone
- factory farming takes away the individuality and recognition of each unique, living being and commodities then all by replacing each life by with the genetic label "food" ( author's addition)
morton suggests our worlds are perforated there they're not 00:03:54 complete in them in and of themselves so this sensory screen actually has holes in it and the worlds of others are also perforated and they these worlds are 00:04:07 constantly leaking into and out of one another so it's not that the sensory screen isn't there it's not that the ego isn't projecting but the screen has 00:04:17 holes in it and we're all inextricably bound up our fragile worlds are constantly overlapping with one another bumping into one another
Regarding climate change, it is as if humanity stands poised before two buttons: one is an economic and cultural reset, while the other triggers a self-destruct sequence. As a community of nations, we can’t seem to agree on which is which. Or, even if we did, we don’t seem to have the collective political will to stop those who seem intent on pushing the self-destruct button—in order, they say, to protect our liberty.
!- comment : the need to spiral towards an INCLUSIVE sacred - science and religion are not opposites, but seek the sacred from different avenues - humanity has collective evolved towards this polycrisis and fragmented worldviews must find their common human denominators and unite in an INCLUSIVE global commons and citizenship
The old humanisms have not so much died as faded away. Alarms about the danger of climate change have been sounded now for so long that urgency is also fading, not the objective reasons for urgency—they burn more brightly than ever—but the willingness or even capacity in many societies to feel it.[19] Indeed, countless Americans won’t submit to a Covid-19 vaccine even though this fundamental gesture of solidarity makes one’s life not merely safer, but better. But as Secretary General Guterres reminds us, there will be no vaccine for climate change. Americans might not take it even if there were. Where can we find the subjunctive politics we need?
!- comment : Old Humanism - Deep Humanity is the intentional examination of the deepest assumptions of our humanity, to exclude nothing and include all the contradictions of a consciousness examining its social reality - The sacred is our birthright, but it has been abandoned, leaving us in a lurch. A world lived without a living, breathing wisdom of the sacred is a dead world, and that is the world we have created
The posture of democratic citizenship is avowal of rights and obligations of membership in a civic community. The rationale for this is the moral and political goodness of a civic way of living and the shared promise of human self-realization through interdependence. As such it is the exemplary, most inclusive form of membership; it is a precondition for the sustainability in the modern secular era of other expressions of membership in our lives—social, economic, kinship, familial, and intimate.[17] Again, citizenship avows—makes a vow, takes on a trust—on behalf of a future of moral and political potential toward which it is reasonable to strive. Citizenship is iterative and ongoing; it provides continuity and provokes innovation; each generation of democratic citizens begins a new story of the demos and continues an ongoing one.[18]
!- key finding : citizenship is a trusteeship - in which the individual takes on responsibility to participate in upholding the mutually agreed principles and promises leading to collective human self-realization - the individual works with others to collective realize this dream which affects all individuals within the group
!- implement : TPF / DH / SRG -implement this education program globally as part of Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity training that recognizes the individual collective entanglement and include in the Tipping Point Festival as well
Let me pose the question in the following way: Is the condition of autonomia fulfilled or undermined by the condition of sumbiōsis? Could it be that autos and sumbios—the most fully realized, best self and the companion—are two sides of the same coin; that is to say, entangled?
!- comment : autonomy and symbiosis entangled - this goes to the heart of Deep Humanity, the entangled individual / collective
Such relational practices of recognition avow that concern and respect are due to others as persons of inherent, not simply instrumental, worth.
!- inherent worth : each person is sacred !- comment : treating ALL human (and non-human) beings as sacred and not just transactional or instrumental is a key starting point - practice of Deep Humanity
new way of seeing could lead to loss of dignity, oppression, and even greater inequality; there are many historical examples of that.[10] But there is also the open horizon of new ways of being that are more humane, more authentic, more just. This horizon is what political theorist William Connolly refers to when he says: “Today perhaps it is wise to try to transfigure the old humanisms that have played important roles in Euro-American states into multiple affirmations of entangled humanism in a fragile world.”[11]
!- quotable : William Connolly !- comment - Deep Humanity?
he regards 00:01:35 the idea of isolated individual as a myth what interested david much more was a dialogue he believed that it is only in dialogue in the class of opinions where answers are formed and how human consciousness is born we humans according to david are the product of our social relationship that's why it was so important for him to be involved in a situation in which 00:02:03 people think and act collectively and david grabber foundation will follow the same path
!- David Grabber Foundation : hosts Fight Club - this talk is on Debt with guests Michael Hudson and Thomas Piketty - David regarded isolated individual as a myth - human consciousness is a product of social relationship
!- isolated individual mythology : comment - Deep Humanity praxis is aligned, seeing the deep entanglement between the individual and the collective(s) the individual is embedded within
We know the information. But information is not changing our minds. Most people make decisions on the basis of feelings, including the most important decisions in life – what football team you support, who you marry, which house you live in. That is how we make choices.” “Thought is at the basis of our feelings, and before we have ideas we have feelings that lead to those ideas. So how do we change minds? A change in feelings changes minds.”
!- "So how do we change minds? A change in feeling changes minds" : Comment - Brian Eno's comment is very well aligned with Deep Humanity praxis, which can be summed up as: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts, an impact appears in our shared reality. - Also see the related story: - Storytelling will save the Earth: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fenvironment-climate-change-storytelling%2F&group=world
i'm going to be doing a powerpoint presentation for which i apologize because i know you're probably sick and tired of these in the zoom world but we do need um to do that in order to 00:09:49 make things work
!- limitations of : current presentation technology !- question : why are people tired of powerpoint presentation technology? - possibly because it is not truly interactive and is simplex (one direction) communication - an alternative technology model is offered by Indyweb, which is based on the people-centered, interpersonal ecosystem founded on Deep Humanity principles of the individual/collective entanglement - The Indyweb /Deep Humanity model articulates a new language that is more aligned to person without a self: it recognizes the human being (noun) as a process (verb) related to the entangled individual / collective
I don't know how this will look like. What I do think is it will come to cultural identity. What is the cultural identity? And that's what we will all gravitate to, and we'll gravitate.
!- future global fragmentation : by culture - Michaux believes people will fragment in the future along cultural boundaries as we move through tumultuous transition. This makes sense as ingroups will naturally form - this should be further explored to explore implications: - will we get political polarization? At what level? National, regional, city / community scale? - what implications will this have on cooperation and sharing? will it create policy gridlock? Will it become even more urgent to educate everyone on a Deep Humanity type of open praxis that finds common human denominators (CHD)?
younger brothers
sense of humanity. one human race. important reason to how land loss took place. Natives understanding of property.
the human brain I've argued for at least two million years has co-evolved with the emergence of these distributed networks and it can't realize its design 00:02:13 potential is to say we wouldn't even be speaking for example until it is immersed in such a network these networks themselves 00:02:24 generate complex cognitive structures which were connected to and which reformat our our brains and therefore the brains task is is very complex we have to assimilate the structures of 00:02:37 culture and manage them and I'm going to argue that a lot of our most complex thinking strategies are actually culturally imposed in the starting point 00:02:51 of the human journey
!- for : individual / collective gestalt - In Deep Humanity praxis, the individual / collective gestalt is fundamental - the individual is enmeshed and entangled with culture before birth - culture affects individual and individual affects culture in entangled feedback loops
Our difficult journey ends in acceptance. Not an acceptance of hope-lessness but an acceptance that our familiar nationcentric way of thinking nolonger serves us and we can let it go. Acceptance, then, is not a capitulationbut a new liberation: we learn to see ourselves and the world with freshworldcentric eyes.
!- similiar to : Ascent of Humanity - Birthing process - Birth to a new worldview - Cannot stay where we are or risk being stillborn - must go through the dangerous journey of birth - what once nurtured us can now destroy us if we stay
On this road we encounter the psychological obstacles to adoptingnew thinking as recognizable staging posts along the road: denial, anger,bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.
!- similiar to : Mortality Salience - grieving of the loss of a loved one - grieving the future loss of one's own life - Ernest Becker is relevant - Denial of Death, Death Terror !- aligned : Deep Humanity
The problem is that adopting new thinking means first loosening andletting go of our existing way, and this involves a terrifying transition.Rather like the mythological bird the phoenix that first had to die andturn to ashes before being reborn, new life can only arise when somethinghas been let go. We have to go through a grieving process for what we arelosing, similar to the one we might experience if someone close to us dies.It can be thought of as a difficult journey – painful but necessary
!- similiar to : Charles Eisenstein - Ascent of Humanity has same theme - http://ascentofhumanity.com/text/
This book takes an entirelyfresh approach by focusing on globalization’s inner aspects – the way wethink and feel about it as individuals and as cultures and how it impedesour ability to solve global problems.
!- aligned : Deep Humanity - Let's see exactly how Simpol Inner aspects match up to Deep Humanity inner aspects
Describing himself as a “messenger from the past”, Berger says that this discovery destroyed the preconceptions of a progressive, linear development of humans from apelike ancestors to what we are now. H. naledi is now dated at between 236,000 and 335,000 years old and was, therefore, a contemporary of Homo sapiens at that stage, which proves that a small-brained hominid was living side by side with its large-brained cousin, who is supposed to represent the apotheosis of sentient beings.
!- for : Deep Humanity - intriguing result with important implications on cultural evolution
once in a while you get a cop out at kerpow is out of that world it's actually an escape from that world
!- similar to : Deep Humanity - Stop Reset Go Deep Humanity praxis is observing the Kerpows of being human - It is the examination of all the assumptions we use but never question in our daily life - such as our use of symbols, pragmatic self/other dualism and our personal mortality
we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.
!- definition : personware * individually constructed network of relationships and social systems that * provides self-reinforced, self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationship with society * Metaphorically conceive of personware as a suit we don based on years and decades of social conditioning "Personware" is a good word to use in SRG / DH framework that views the individual human organism's life journey as a deeply entangled individual AND collective journey or entangled individual/civilzational journey * From SRG/DH perspective the individual human organism is always on an entangled dual journey - from birth to death within a biological body and as part of a much longer civilizational journey since the beginning of modern humans (or even further back) * Individuals make intentional cognitive selections * Individual minds encode state of affair of the world via a combination of cognitive experience and language * Individual minds share their understanding of the world through outgoing language communication * Individual minds decode incoming information and store
Can they reshape the contours and boundaries of their socialsituations instead of being shaped by them?
!- key insight : can an individual reshape the contours of their social situations instead of being shaped by them? * This realization would open up the door to authentic inner transformation * This is an important way to describe the discovery of personal empowerment and agency via realization of the bare human spirit, the "thought sans image"
Consequently, theshape of the gridlock [9], in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity givento a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome.The gridlock is the only configuration in which the global system could have settled. It isthe configuration any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differentlypositioned, differently oriented, heterogeneous decision-makers, operating in different dimensionsand scales, none of which universally dominant and all are co-dependent and constrained by others.
!- question : governance gridlock of disparate actors
The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into anExistential Opportunity
The projected timing of climate departurefrom recent variability
What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive? By Matthew Huber | July 20, 2022
Open-Ended Intelligence
The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing theEpistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “LifeConditions” (Lebenslage)
Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms
Title: Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms Author: Shoshitaishvili, Boris Date: 25 April, 2022
Intentional programming
Title: Intentional Programming Author: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intentional_programming&action=history Date: 2021
The trajectory of theAnthropocene: The GreatAcceleration
Menu Workshops Mortality Awareness Preparedness Project About Us Mission History People Contact About Becker Biography Becker’s Synthesis Books Related Works Becker Fans Resources Terror Management Theory Webinars Educator Resources Book & Film Reviews Interviews Lecture Texts Audio Recordings Video Resources This Mortal Life Becker in the World Death Acceptance Religion and Death Anxiety Art and Artists Climate Talk Discrimination and Racial Justice See All Blog Store The Denial of Death and the Practice of Dying
ind outside Brain:a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition
so first i'm going to really focus on that allure of immediacy and then move into this kind of arc from yamaka through yogachara and into zen and my aim is going to be 00:09:49 um to show you that i think the buddhist tradition gets the all of these issues roughly right that is i'm not simply going to be characterizing what buddhists say about this i'm actually defending it and i think that we can 00:10:02 therefore learn a great deal about subjectivity through very careful attention to the multiple ways in which buddhist philosophers have considered this issue so i'm going to try to be shedding light 00:10:13 on contemporary debates as well by attention to buddhist resources
For Deep Humanity open praxis, we can learn from these compelling philosophical findings from Buddhism and remix them in a form that is authentic to the source but makes it more widely accessible to non-Buddhists.
The key distinction Jay is trying to convey is that our sense and the allure of immediacy is in contrast to the complex and opaque mediating mechanisms that are responsible for us perceiving the world the way we do and cognizing / feeling about the world the way we do.
cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy
Title: cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives from buddhist philosophy Author: Jay L. Garfield Year: 2022
This is a very important talk outlining a number of key concepts that Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity are built upon and also a rich source of BEing Journeys.
In brief, this talk outlines key humanistic (discoverable by a modern human being regardless of any cultural, gender, class, etc difference) concepts of Buddhist philosophy that SRG / DH embeds into its framework to make more widely accessible..
The title of the talk refers to the illusions that our own cognition produces of both outer and inner appearances because the mechanisms that produce them area opaque to us. Their immediacy feels as if they are real.
If what we sense and think is real is an illusion, then what is real? "Real" in this case implies ultimate truth. As we will see, Nagarjuna's denial of any argument that claims to be the ulitmate is denied. What is left after such a complete denial? Still something persists.
so this is white light passing through a dispersive prison and this is a visible spectrum from about 420 nanometers in the violet through 500 nanometers and 00:00:18 the green 580 yellow 610 and orange and 650 red and some of the slides that have this along the bottom axis so how dependent I'll be in color what do you 00:00:30 think we depend on color a lot a little lots okay
Many different color illusions Good to mine for BEing Journeys
I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 00:00:41 So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. 00:01:16 (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, 00:01:40 context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.
The opening title is very pith:
No one is an outside observer of nature, each of us is defined by our ecology.
We need to unpack the full depth of this sentence.
Seeing is believing. This is more true than we think.Our eyes trick us into seeing the same color as different ones depending on the context. Think about the philosophical implications of this simple finding. What does this tell us about "objective reality"? Colors that we would compare as different in one circumstance are the same in another.
Evolution helps us do this for survival.
so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it
Title: Why your brain thinks these strawberries are red Author: WIRED Date:2022
Color Constancy
Use this for BEing journey
Mobilization Systems:technologies for motivating and coordinating human action
Title: Mobilization Systems: technologies for motivating and coordinating human action Authors: Heylighen, Francis; Kostov, Iavor,; Kiemen, Mixel Date: 2014
Peter Whybrow: “When More is Not Enough”
Title: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation Author: Nate Hagen Guest: Peter Whybrow, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author Date: 6 July, 2022
We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C
Title: We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C Author: James Dyke Date: 6 July 2022
you are probably somewhat unfamiliar with the term biosemiotics is not in widespread use um and but it represents a very very 00:00:17 important reference point when we come to theories of embodied cognition the founder of biosemiotics is typically held to be jacob von xcool 00:00:29 biosemiotics is a field within the broader domain of semiotics which considers the manner in which meaning arises through various forms of mediation such as signs indices indexes 00:00:42 symbols and the like
Title: Introduction to Umwelt theory and Biosemiotics Author
so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning
John explains how the 4 P's originated as a way to summarize and present in a palatable way of presenting the cognitive science “4E” approach to cognition - that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures.
Dogen and Nagarjuna’s Tetralemma #6 of 21
Title: http://www.judithragir.org/2017/08/dogen-nagarjunas-tetralemma-6/ Author: Judith Ragir Date: 2017
When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute. Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.
This is like the observation I often make in Deep Humanity and which is a pith BEing Journey
When we move is it I who goes from HERE to THERE? Or am I stationary, like the eye of the hurricane spinning the wild world of appearances to me and surrounding me?
I am like the gerbil running on a cage spinning appearances towards me but never moving an inch I move while I am still The bowl revolves around this pearl.
The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute
Title: The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute Author: Judith Ragir Date: ?
I have written previously about the issue of “both”. In one sense, interdependence and total dynamic working implies that everything is both form and emptiness simultaneously. But the problem is that you can’t PERCEIVE both form and emptiness at the same time. They are both there supporting each other but our discriminative thought can only see one or the other; like the front and back foot in walking, like the old lady and young lady optical illusion, or the front and back of a hand. Both sides are always there. We have a whole hand but you can only see either the front of the hand or the back of the hand in a single moment.
This needs unpacking and can be a good Deep Humanity BEing journey exercise, as all of this can be.
THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI
Title: THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI Author: GRAHAM PRIEST Year: 2010
Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna
Title: JAN WESTERHOFF ON NĀGĀRJUNA Author:Adamson, Peter & Negary, Jardin (???) Date: 23 July 2017
No Four Ways About It: Nāgārjuna’s Tetralemma
Title: 46. NO FOUR WAYS ABOUT IT: NĀGĀRJUNA’S TETRALEMMA Author:
insightful explanation of Nagarjuna's tetralemma!
Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptionsWhat are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention?
Title: Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptions What are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention? Author: Laird, Katie
"Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".
Title: "Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".
we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation
Title: Science-driven Societal Transformation, Part 1, 2 and 3 John Boik, Oregon State University John's Website: https://principledsocietiesproject.org/
Intro: A society can be viewed as a superorganism that expresses an intrinsic purpose of achieving and maintaining vitality. The systems of a society can be viewed as a societal cognitive architecture. The goal of the R&D program is to develop new, integrated systems that better facilitate societal cognition (i.e., learning, decision making, and adaptation). Our major unsolved problems, like climate change and biodiversity loss, can be viewed as symptoms of dysfunctional or maladaptive societal cognition. To better solve these problems, and to flourish far into the future, we can implement systems that are designed from the ground up to facilitate healthy societal cognition.
The proposed R&D project represents a partnership between the global science community, interested local communities, and other interested parties. In concept, new systems are field tested and implemented in local communities via a special kind of civic club. Participation in a club is voluntary, and only a small number of individuals (roughly, 1,000) is needed to start a club. No legislative approval is required in most democratic nations. Clubs are designed to grow in size and replicate to new locations exponentially fast. The R&D project is conceptual and not yet funded. If it moves forward, transformation on a near-global scale could occur within a reasonable length of time. The R&D program spans a 50 year period, and early adopting communities could see benefits relatively fast.
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earthpoints to the need for transformative change
Title: Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change
The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.
The maladaptive cultural evolution of our species has led us to the height of human technological and economic prowess as well as the height of ecological disaster. This can be interpreted as the result of linear vs nonlinear thinking, simplistic modeling vs complex modeling and reductionistic approach vs a systems approach. An attitude of separation engenders a controlling attitude of nature based on hubris, instead of humbling ourselves at the vast ignorance each of us and also collectively we have about nature. Design based on a consistent attitude of willful ignorance is sure to fail. Then Ascent of Humanity will lead to a trajectory of its own downfall as long as that ascent depends on the cannibalization of its own life support system based on ignorance of our deep entanglement with nature. http://ascentofhumanity.com/text/
Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.
Title: Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.
Ronald Wright is the author of the 2004 "A Short History of Progress" and popularized the term "Progress Trap" in the Martin Scroses 2011 documentary based on Wright's book, called "Surviving Progress". Earlier Reesarcher's such as Dan O'Leary investigated this idea in earlier works such as "Escaping the Progress Trap http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book
From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds
Title: From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds
Annotation of source paper preview: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277379121005230&group=world
Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac
Title: Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distribution
Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation
Public Annotation of IPCC Report AR6 Climate Change 2022 Mitigation of Climate Change WGIII Chapter 5: Demand, Services and Social Aspects of Mitigation
NOTE: Permission given by one of the lead authors, Felix Creutzig to annotate with caveat that there may be minor changes in the final version.
This annotation explores the potential of mass mobilization of citizens and the commons to effect dramatic demand side reductions. It leverages the potential agency of the public to play a critical role in rapid decarbonization.
COVID has demonstrated how easy it is to bring life and the economy to a complete standstill, instant reliable result testing is the only way forward, without it, we are at risk of going backwards and bring yet more pressure on the health system, businesses and the public.
Ryder Carroll says in The BulletJournal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some smallhole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”
Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050
The experts were asked to independently provide a comprehensive list of levers and leverage points for global sustainability, based on the potential for disproportionate effects to address and reverse the deterioration of nature while meeting societal needs. They were asked to consider actions by the full range of possible actors, and both top-down and bottom-up effects across various sectors. The collection of all responses became our initial set of levers and leverage points. Ensuing processes were then informed by five linked conceptualizations of transformative change identified by the experts (Chan et al., 2019): ● Complexity theory and leverage points of transformation (Levin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2007; Meadows, 2009); ● Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003; Folke et al., 2010); ● A multi-level perspective for transformative change (Geels, 2002); ● System innovations and their dynamics (Smits, Kuhlmann, & Teubal, 2010; OECD, 2015) and ● Learning sustainability through ‘real-world experiments’ (Geels, Berkhout, & van Vuuren, 2016; Gross & Krohn, 2005; Hajer, 2011).
Set of levers and leverage points identified by the authors.
Creating an open public network for radical collaboration, which we will call the Indyweb, can facilitate bottom-up engagement to both educate the public on these levers as well as be an application space to crowdsource the public to begin sharing local instantiations of these levers.
An Indyweb that is in the form of an interpersonal space in which each individual is the center of their data universe, and in which they can see all the data from their diverse digital interactions across the web and in real life all consolidated in one place offers a profound possibility for both individual and collective learning. Such an Indyweb would bring the relational nature of the human being, the so called "human INTERbeing" alive, and would effortlessly emerge the human INTERbeing explicitly as the natural form merely from its daily use. One can immediately see the relational nature of individual learning, how it is so entangled with collective learning, and would be reinforced with each social interaction on the web or in real life. This is what is needed to track both individual inner transformation (IIT) as well as collective outer transformation (COT) towards a rapid whole system change mobilization. Accelerated by a program of open access Deep Humanity (DH) knowledge that plumbs the very depth of what it is to be human, this can accelerate the indirect drivers of change and provide practical tools for granular monitoring of both IIT and COT.
Could we use AI to search for levers and leverage points?
An important step towards such widespread changes in action would be to unleash latent capabilities and relational values (including virtues and principles regarding human relationships involving nature, such as responsibility, stewardship and care
Practices such as open source Deep Humanity praxis focusing on inner transformation can play a significant role.
Embracing visions of a good life that go beyond those entailing high levels of material consumption is central to many pathways. Key drivers of the overexploitation of nature are the currently popular vision that a good life involves happiness generated through material consumption [leverage point 2] and the widely accepted notion that economic growth is the most important goal of society, with success based largely on income and demonstrated purchasing power (Brand & Wissen, 2012). However, as communities around the world show, a good quality of life can be achieved with significantly lower environmental impacts than is normal for many affluent social strata (Jackson, 2011; Røpke, 1999). Alternative relational conceptions of a good life with a lower material impact (i.e. those focusing on the quality and characteristics of human relationships, and harmonious relationships with non-human nature) might be promoted and sustained by political settings that provide the personal, material and social (interpersonal) conditions for a good life (such as infrastructure, access to health or anti-discrimination policies), while leaving to individuals the choice about their actual way of living (Jackson, 2011; Nussbaum, 2001, 2003). In particular, status or social recognition need not require high levels of consumption, even though in some societies, status is currently related to consumption (Røpke, 1999).
A redefinition of a good life that decouples it from materialism is critical to lowering carbon emissions. Practices such as open source Deep Humanity praxis focusing on inner transformation can play a significant role.
trust in neighbours, access to care, opportunities for creative expression, recognition
Practices such as open source Deep Humanity praxis focusing on inner transformation can play a significant role.
Given that the fate of nature and humanity depends on transformative change of the human enterprise (IPBES, 2019a, 2019b), indirect drivers clearly play a central role.
Key statement supporting transformative change of indirect drivers - ie. Deep Humanity and other work to bring about inner transformation
Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability
Leverage points to study for Rapid Whole System Change
if the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness of the fact that everything you do has an assumption 00:00:14 figure out what those are and by the way the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself it's usually someone else hence the power of diversity the importance of diversity 00:00:26 because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you but it can also complexify your assumptions right because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to 00:00:40 exist within a complex search space not a simple search space simply because of statistics right so whereas a simple search space is more adaptable it's more easily to adapt it's 00:00:52 less likely to contain the best solution so what we really want is a diversity of possibilities a diversity of assumptions which diverse groups for instance enable
From a Stop Reset Go Deep Humanity perspective, social interactions with greater diversity allows multi-meaningverses to interact and the salience landscape from each conversant can interact. Since each life is unique, the diversity of perspectival knowing allows strengths to overlap weaknesses and different perspectives can yield novelty. The diversity of ideas encounter each other like diversity in a gene pool, evolving more offsprings which may randomly have greater fitness to the environment.
Johari's window is a direct consequence of this diversity of perspectives, this converged multi-meaningverse of the Lebenswelt..
the inter-connectedness of the crises we face climate pollution biodiversity and 00:07:54 inequality require our change require a change in our exploitative relationship to our planet to a more holistic and caring one but that can only happen with a change in our behavior
As per IPCC AR6 WGIII, Chapter 5 outlining for the first time, the enormous mitigation potential of social aspects of mitigation - such as behavioral change - can add up to 40 percent of mitigation. And also harkening back to Donella Meadows' leverage points that point out shifts in worldviews, paradigms and value systems are the most powerful leverage points in system change.
Stop Reset Go advocates humanity builds an open source, open access praxis for Deep Humanity, understand the depths of what it means to be a living and dying human being in the context of an entwined culture. Sharing best practices and constantly crowdsourcing the universal and salient aspects of our common humanity can help rapidly transform the inner space of each human INTERbeing, which can powerfully influence outer (social) transformation.
Chinese scientists call for plan to destroy Elon Musk's Starlink satellites
This is another example that our culture has reached an inflection point, when we begin to divert previous time and material resources on conflict because we are not wise enough to cooperate, instead of more urgent problems affecting us all.
The journey of civilization to a technological modernity places us in a precarious position. The fundamental misunderstandings arising from a toxic mix of different political, religious and cultural ideologies threatens to destabilise the human project. We are spending ever increasing resources on defensive and offensive technologies to protect our ingroup against perceived outgroups instead of technologies for defending against the destruction of the global commons which e ourselves have brought about and which threatens our entire species.
By so doing, we create a self-reinforcing feedback loop of antagonism which increases the likelihood of violence.
This underscores the urgency for deep inner transformation, trapping into our deep Humanity to mitigate the social antagonism that is so destructive to global society.
new way of being
It may be that our civilization must undergo a transformation process that places less emphasis on intelligence and more intelligence on wisdom. That wisdom is intimately bound with rediscovering the essence of what it is to be a living and dying human being. The enormous polycrisis of the Anthropocene leads us to the inescapable conclusion that human intelligence alone is insufficient to lead to a holistic wellbeing within the biosphere. Insofar as the biosphere is a vast interconnected mutually supporting web of life, the overconsumption by one species, modern humans has upset the balance of the biosphere.
A new way of being requires fundamental collective reassessment of what it is to be a living and dying being. The intelligence alone of our species has led to an extreme imbalance of the natural world, whose blowback we are now beginning to experience. The blind, recursive application of intelligence has led to greater and greater separation from nature to the point of the present polycrisis. As a species, we can only distance ourselves apart from nature to an extreme extent when nature reminds us we are NOT separate from her. She is now violently reminding us that we ARE a part of nature. A new way of being is to reconcile technology, that pushes the limits of intelligence alone, with ourselves as being a product of nature herself.
Deep Humanity is that open collective process we call which reminds us that we are a product of nature in every way, and is a journey to reconnect with nature. BEing journeys are the crowdsourced processes of rediscovering our deep connection with nature through participatory, compelling, interactive, immersive explorations of what it is to be a living and dying human being.
OP VAK is a concerted effort to make the hyperthreat visible and knowable across the broad spectrum of society. This has practical, educational aspects, including increasing CEC literacy and improving ecoproduct and services labeling. It also links to the integration of CEC into the remit of mainstream intelligence agencies. To address sensory and affective knowing, as well as the deep framing and meaning-making dimension of hyperthreat “knowing,” it will partner with the communications, arts, and humanities sectors in line with the “60,000 artists” concept.24 It will also harness the potential of virtual reality technologies, which have already proven effective in CEC communication.25 Finally, it will involve fast-tracking relevant research and improved mechanisms for conveying and sharing research and knowledge.
Deep Humanity open access education program in museums, workshops and at public festivals can use the tool of compelling, engaging, interactive BEing Journeys to make the invisible hyperthreat visible.
Here, in PLAN E, the concept of entangled security translates this idea into meaning that humanity itself can make a great sudden leap.
An Open Access Deep Humanity education program whose core principles are continuously improved through crowdsourcing, can teach the constructed nature of reality, especially using compelling BEing Journeys. This inner transformation can rapidly create the nonlinear paradigm, worldview and value shifts that Donella Meadows identified as the greatest leverage points in system change.
What prospects are there to reconfigure great powers’ approach to geopolitical security in a way that aids containment of the hyperthreat? Possible angles include:
Othering needs to be critically examined from a Deep Humanity lens so that we can begin to see ourselves as one united but diverse human family instead of multiple fractured families.
Given wide-ranging concerns about globalization, the performance of international organizations, and perceptions that the so-called “liberal rules-based order” holds lingering colonial power dimensions, an overarching conclusion is that the post-World War II global architecture, designed before the advent of CEC or the internet, is outdated and ripe for redesign.16 A new neutral rules-based order could be established, one that is based on ecological survival and safe Earth requirements. Akin to the 2015 Paris Agreement, this might be acceptable to all nations because all are threatened by the CEC hyperthreat. It is an approach that builds on environmental peacekeeping rationale.
Again, like the above point, some kind of global Deep Humanity training that results in gaining appreciation of the Common Human Denominators (CHD) is critical for open communications and finding common ground for dialogue.
A global ceasefire could be declared for between 2022 and 2030 to enable all nations to undertake an emergency hyper-response.
State level government officials would need to undergo some kind of global open Deep Humanity type education to begin to shift their inner worldviews, paradigms and value systems, along with business leaders, as the close ties between the influence of business lobbies on governments has a very powerful controlling influence.
Of course, this would be easier if there were a concerted global effort to nominate proactive, empathetic ecocivilizationally and social justice minded women to positions of power.
Second, acknowledging increased affective insecurity and that heightened vulnerability and fear will be a factor, great efforts must be made to bolster the care, support and protection provided to people.
Mortality salience for the masses - operationalizing terror management theory (TMT) and Deep Humanity BEing Journeys that take individuals to explore the depths of their humanity to make sense of the times we are in will play a critical role in contextualizing fear of death triggered by unstable circumstances and ameliorating these fears with the wisdom that comes from a living comprehension of the sacredness of our life and eventual death.
A stretch target set for the second half of the twenty-first century is for it to be a time in which humanity has gained knowledge, experience, and confidence in dealing with an entangled security environment and coexisting with the hyperthreat. The collective global effort and learning during phases 1–4 will have allowed ingenious solutions for interdependence to emerge. It will be a time of flourishing invention and inspiration.
A critical part of Deep Humanity is the elucidation of progress traps, the unintended consequences of progress. There is an urgent need to advocate for an entirely new human science discipline on progress traps. The reason is because the polycrisis can be seen and critically explained from a progress trap lens.
Progress traps emerge from the unbridgeable gap between finite, reductionist human knowledge and the fractally infinite patterns of the universe and reality, which exists at all scales and dimensions.
The failure to gain a system level understanding of this has led to the premature global scaling of technologies whose unintended consequences emerged after global markets have been established, causing a conflict of interest between biospheric wellbeing and individual profit.
A systematic study or progress traps has rich data to draw from. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there has been good records of scientific ideas, their associated engineering and technological exploitation and subsequent news media reports of their phase-delayed unintended consequences. Applying AI and a big data scientometric approach can yield patterns in which progress traps emerge. From this, our scientific-technological-industrial-capitalist framework can be modified to include improved regulatory mechanisms based on progress trap research that can systematically grade the risk factors of any new technology. Such risk categorization can result in technologies that require different time scales and aggregate knowledge understanding before they can be fully commercialized with time scale grades ranging from years to decades and even centuries.
All future technology innovations must past through these systematic, evidence-based regulatory barriers before they can be introduced into widespread commercial use.
Attributes such as hope, heroism, humor, humanity, hospitality, and honor will be critical.
Early education starting in 2022 of open access Deep Humanity praxis will be critical to prepare future generations to cope with the future shock to come.
It is anticipated that this period will address the harder aspects of global transition, in terms of technology, infrastructure, and social behavior change. As initial enthusiasm may have waned, a stoic approach will be required, refreshing the workforce and dealing with more dangerous hyperthreat actions.
It is clear that through such a massive and unprecedented transition, a whole being approach must be adopted. This means dealing with the inner transformation of the individual in addition to the outer transformation. The hyperthreat increases the attention to each individual's mortality salience, their awareness of their own death. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker noted in his "Denial of Death", our fear of death is normatively suppressed as a compromised coping mechanism. When extreme weather, food shortage, war, pandemic become an unrelenting onslaught, however, we have no escape from mortality as the threat to our lives will be broadcast relentlessly through mass media. Inner transformation must accompany the outer transformation in order for the general population to emotionally cope with the enormous stress. Deep Humanity (DH) is conceived as an open praxis to assist with the inner transformation that will be needed for mental and emotional well being during these trying times to come.
In general, I would say that I think there are only a few circumstances in which markets produce good incentives and distributions, and that these depend heavily on publicly accountable governance that set up their rules.
Amen. This resonates with my concern about systems that want to govern human relations without humans at the center. It's not like I believe having humans at the center of our relations guarantees good practices and outcomes (we have ample proof it does not), but rather that NOT centering humans in human relations may cast aside what's good about humanity along with what's bad.
David Chalmer’s beautiful metaphor of the ‘Extended Mind’ (Chalmers, 1998). Chalmers promotes the idea that media, such as, e.g., smartphones, have already begun to function as an extension to our mind, allowing us to navigate and manage an increasingly complex world
The extended mind of Chalmers is like the expansion of the sensory bubble in Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity framing. It can also be seen as an extension of our Umwelt (Uexskull).
You know, when you look at the real power balance, if the Europeans stick together, if the Americans and the Europeans stick together and stop this culture war and stop tearing themselves apart, they have absolutely nothing to fear -- the Russians or anybody else.
Indeed, if we can unite ALL cultures together because of the Common Human Denominators (CHD) that is the hallmark of being human, this is the cultural shift that needs to happen to navigate the existential polycrisis we now face. Deep Humanity praxis is a framework for exactly this.
Within the diversity of cultural lens' are common human denominators that unite all of the subclasses of homo sapien Left vs Right Russian elites vs Ukraine and the West Straight vs LBGTQ+ West vs Arabic Black vs White
First, there is the life insurance rationale. Although the chance of a planet-wide calamity extinguishing our species is low, it is not zero.
Notably Steven Hawking (and others) warned about this year ago already. Not to take away from Musk's achievements, but he's not the first to recognise and work on this problem.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interstellar-travel-starmus-speech
But the coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims.
The goal is not to humanize society but to divinize humanity
Yes! Divinize humanity!
Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system.
Every element receives its value based on the network of links and connections it has with other elements. This is just as true for ideas on index cards in a zettelkasten as it is for people within a society.
idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society
What other elements in complex systems is this analogy true for? Is it a truism for all elements in complex systems? What other examples can we come up with?
While reading The Dawn of Inequality, it occurs to me that much less look at humans and inequality or fairness, there's been reasonable research on other animals and their perception of fairness.
This example is a simple example which scratches the surface and many more could be added.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97944783
In other words, the palette of social organization was rich and diverse from the beginning: early humans, like us, were constantly in the business of shaping and reshaping their social arrangements, with evidence of conscious embracing and rejection of all sorts of social forms.
In an ever-evolving manner, humans are constantly working at shaping and reshaping ourselves.
How does our drive to have and establish identity cause us to evolve as a species? Is identity the root gene that is driving change within society? Is there an identeme (a tacit portmanteau of identity + gene) that works at both the local level as well as at the group level? How might this fit into the selfish gene theory?
We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if wetreat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playfulcreatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead oftelling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state ofequality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptualshackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility ofreinventing ourselves?
The RCMP says it arrested 14 people and cleared a forest service road in northern British Columbia that was barricaded by a crushed van and another vehicle that was set on fire by Wet'suwet'en and Haudenosaunee members opposing construction of a multi-billion dollar natural gas pipeline.
Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.
The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.
Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.
CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)
This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)
We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.
Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.
Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.
That's a picture of it in the background. And this organism has the special trick that we call "photosynthesis," the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. And over the course of billions of years, so starting from two and a half billion years ago, little by little these bacteria spread across the planet 00:07:08 and converted all that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. And it was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas, then they had to saturate the oxygen that the earth would absorb, and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere. So you see, just after about 900 million years ago, oxygen starts to build up in the atmosphere. And about 600 million years ago, something really amazing happens. 00:07:35 The ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere. And it sounds like a small deal, like we talked about the ozone a couple decades ago, but it actually turns out that before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really able to sustain complex, multicellular life. We had single-celled organisms, we had a couple of simple, multicellular organisms, but we didn't really have anything like you or me. 00:07:59 And shortly after the ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex multicellular life. There was a Cambrian explosion of life in the seas. And the first plants got onto land. In fact, there was actually no life on land ahead of that. Another way to see this is, this is kind of a chart of pretty much most of the animals that you guys are familiar with. 00:08:24 And right at the bottom in time is the formation of the ozone layer. Like nothing that you are familiar with today could exist without the contributions of these tiny organisms over those billions of years. And where are they now? Well actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants of the cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants. And they're now called chloroplasts. 00:08:49 So this is a zoom-in of a plant leaf - and we probably ate some of these guys today - where tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped - contributing photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half of our lungs on earth. And in this way, our breaths are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored by the in-breath of a plant,
This would be nice to turn into a science lesson or to represent this in an experiential, participatory Deep Humanity BEing Journey. To do this, it would be important to elucidate the series of steps leading from one stated result to the next, showing how scientific methodology works to link the series of interconnected ideas together. Especially important is the science that glues everything together over deep time.
today I'm here to describe that everything really is connected, 00:02:02 and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct, understandable way. And I am going to do that with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind.
These three are excellent candidates for multimedia Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey.
It is relevant to introduce another concept that provides insights into another aspect required for engaging a non-scientific audience, and that is language.
The audience is important! BEing Journeys must take that into consideration. We can bias the presentation by implicit assumptions. How can we take those implicit assumptions into consideration and thereby expand the audience?
For a non-scientific audience, these arguments may not be so compelling. In this case, it is important to demonstrate how science can lead us to make such astounding predictions of times and space not directly observable to normative human perception.
Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
Object Oriented Ontology - Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. ... There is no "outside" - just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
This needs to be harmonized with Stop Reset Go (SRG) complimentary Human Inner Transformation (HIT) and Social Outer Transformation (SOT) strategy.
The next day, I assumed we would begin our quest to find signs of hyperobjects in and around the city of Houston
This would make an excellent Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey
Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible for as much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twice the emissions of the poorest 50% (2).
Even more recent research adds to this:
See the annotated Oxfam report: Linked In from the author: https://hyp.is/RGd61D_IEeyaWyPmSL8tXw/www.linkedin.com/posts/timgore_inequality-parisagreement-emissionsgap-activity-6862352517032943616-OHL- Annotations on full report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__
and the annotated Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/KKhrLj_bEeywAIuGCjROAg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/ https://hyp.is/zo0VbD_bEeydJf_xcudslg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/
This suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. The COP meetings are focused on nation states. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.
Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,
A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it to accelerate transition.
Anderson has contextualized the scale of such an impact in his other presentations but not here. A recent example is the temporary emission decreases due to covid 19. A 6.6% global decrease was determined from this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3#:~:text=After%20rising%20steadily%20for%20decades,on%20daily%20fossil%20fuel%20emissions. with the US contributing 13% due to lockdown impacts on vehicular travel (both air and ground). After the pandemic ends, experts expect a strong rebound effect.
A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.
The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, human inner transformation (HIT) approaches and cultural methodologies.
Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
The sleeping giant of billions of potential change actors remains dormant. How do we awaken them and mobilize them. If we can do this, it can constitute the emergence of a third unidentified actor in system change.
The Stop Reset Go (SRG) initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity (DH) as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview advocated by Meadows. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.
There are a number of strategic demographics that can be targeted in methodical evidence-based ways. Each of these is a leverage point and can bring about social tipping points.
A number of 2021 reports characterize the outsized impact of the top 1% and top 10% of humanity. Unless their luxury, high ecological footprint behavior is reeled in, humanity won't stand a chance. Annotation of Oxfam report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__ Annotation of Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotorcool.org%2Fhc-posts%2Frelease-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles%2F&group=__world__
Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).
This is indeed a problematic feature of human evolution. It has given rise to what Timothy Morton refers to as "hyperobjects", objects of such vastness in space and time that it defeats human mechanisms of perception at local scale: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://hyp.is/xROjpD_jEey4a6-Urbh4_Q/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way within the context of Deep Humanity open source praxis BEing journeys.
As in the New Yorker interview with Morton, we can take Deep Humanity participants on BEing journeys, walkabouts to identify hyperobjects.
Hyperobjects are also cognitive and highly abstract in nature. This is a clue to another idea that could be enlightening to understanding the problematic context of appreciating hyperobjects such as climate change, and that is the idea of Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt:
"Uexküll was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). He argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, 'self-in-world' subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,[9] phenomenal world,[10] self-world,[10] environment[11] - lit. German environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which would be the living being's surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the human observer. Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. By studying how the senses of various organisms like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms work, he was able to build theories of how they experience the world. Because all organisms perceive and react to sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that they were to be considered as living subjects. This argument was the basis for his biological theory in which the characteristics of biological existence ("life") could not simply be described as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had to be described as subject and a part of a sign system.
The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The Umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Giorgio Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,
"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."[12]
Thus, for the tick, the Umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairiness of mammals." ( From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll)
The human umwelt limits us to a relatively small range of sensed signs. CO2 particles is not one of them. We rely on scientific narratives but these are far removed from direct sensing, into the field of conceptualization and abstraction. We have evolved to respond to danger that is sensed, less so to danger that is conceptualized.
This report is an essential companion for policymakers working at the intersection of society and climate change.”
Policy alone may not be sufficient to change this deeply ingrained luxury lifestyle. It may require deep and meaningful education of one's deeper humanity leading to a shift in worldviews and value systems that deprioritize materially luxurious lifestyles for using that wealth to redistribute to build the future wellbeing ecocivilization. Transform the wealthy into the heros of the transition. Shaming them and labeling them as victims will only create distance. Rather, the most constructive approach is a positive one that shifts our own perspective from holding them as villains to heros.
Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”
This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.
Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.
A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.
The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.
Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.
We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html
Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.
Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:
"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."
But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.
To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.
Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.
Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.
At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.
social evolution
How did we get here?
Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.
It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.
Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.
A recent survey found that only 14% of people they surveyed in the United States talk about climate change. A previous Yale study found that 35% either discuss it occasionally or hear somebody else talk about it. Those are low for something that over 70% of people are worried about.
Conversation is not happening! There is a leverage point in holding open conversations where we understand each other’s language of different cultural groups. Finding common ground, the common human denominators (CHD) between polarized groups is the lynchpin.
For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”
We often talk about the same things, share the same values, have the same common human denominators, but couched in different language. It is critical to get to the root of what we have in common in order to establish meaningful dialogue.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe stresses the need for finding shared values, rather than trying to change someone’s mind, as a basis for productive conversations
What first appears as difference may actually emerge from consciousnesses that have more in common than one first realizes. Finding the common ground, what we refer to as the common human denominators (CHD) within the open source Deep Humanity praxis becomes the critical climate change communication leverage point for establishing genuine communication channels between politically polarized groups.
This is aligned to the Stop Reset Go project and its open source offshoot, Deep Humanity praxis that seeks conversations and personal and collective journeys to appreciate Common Human Denominators that are salient for all participants. It also underscores the value of integrating with the Indieverse Knowledge system, with its focus on symathessy embedded directly into its codebase.
I was speaking in Iowa, and I was asked, “How do you talk to people in Iowa about polar bears?” I said, “You don’t; you talk to them about corn.” If we begin a conversation with someone with something we already agree on, then the subtext is: “You care about this, and I care too. We have this in common.”
This stresses the importance of applying Deep Humanity wisely by finding the most compelling, salient and meaningful common human denominators appropriate for each conversational context. Which group are we interacting with? What are the major landmarks embedded in THEIR salience landscape?
The BEing journeys we craft will only be meaningful and impactful if they are appropriately matched to the cultural context.
The whole mind- body understanding of how we cognitively construct our reality, via Deep Humanity BEing journeys, can help shift our priorities.
I am frequently shamed for not doing enough. Some of that comes from the right side of the [political] spectrum, but increasingly a larger share of that shaming comes from people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are so worried and anxious about climate impacts that their response is to find anyone who isn’t doing precisely what they think they should be doing and shame them.
Love, or recognizing the other person in the other tribe as sacred, is going to connect with that person because we are, after all, all of us are human INTERbeings, and love is the affective variable that connects us while shame is a variable that DISconnects us. Love is , in fact, one of our most powerful common human denominators.
Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance andimportance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitiveshortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and respondingto climate change (152),including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physicallyremote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview(153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangiblethreat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does notpresent itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events.
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way wiithin the context of Deep Humanity BEing journeys.
A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and withthe potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many ofthe topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highlydiverse cultural foundations.
The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, inner transformation approaches and cultural methodologies. Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
The Stop Reset Go initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.
Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible foras much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twicethe emissions of the poorest 50% (2).
this suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.
Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,
A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it accelerate transition.
With the aid of the concept of opposing pairs of magnetic poles, we can clearly contribute in a significant way to our expression and understanding of basic relationships in the overall magnetic field. We are proposing to look at soma and significance in a similar way. That is to say, we regard them as two aspects introduced at an arbitrary conceptual cut in the flow of the field of reality as a whole. These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality.
When Bohm writes "These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality", it reveals the true nature of words. Their only ever revealing aspects of the whole. They are NOT the whole.Hence, as linguistic animals, we are constantly dissecting parts of the whole of reality.
Deep Humanity open-source praxis linguistic BEing journeys can be designed to reveal this ubiquitious aspectualizing nature of language to help us all better understand what we are as linguistic beings.
You might be looking for a gift for a friend, doing research for a project, trying to learn other perspectives — they filter all data through the lens of capitalism and how they can sell you more things. That’s no replacement for human connection, or expertise a person has that could help you leap to things you didn’t know to look for.
Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH. (2021, September 23). The world has administered 6 billion doses of COVID vaccines to 3.4 Billion people For people waiting for more data before getting the shot The data is in We’ve vaccinated nearly half of all humanity The vaccines are safe [Tweet]. @ashishkjha. https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1440880130331746307
Once in attendance, they were under military rule: The Superintendent shall again ring, - when, on a motion of his hand, the whole School rise at once from their seats; - on a second motion, the Scholars turn; - on a third, slowly and silently move to the place appointed to repeat their lessons, - he then pronounces the word "Begin" . . .93 T
Have we industrialized the humanity out of our society? Where is the space for creating identity, autonomy, and self-direction?
Where is our humanity?
Indeed, where is our humanity?
From the POV of educational technology, we seem to be bent on replacing humanity with machines as fast as possible, either "because technology scales" and so we need it to deliver more educational goodness to the growing population of potential learners, or because technology "capitalizes" and so enables some people to generate more/new revenue from education.
Meanwhile, the one thing we have in abundance that we know improves learning outcomes is...humans. Let's use them!
Bowes, S. M., & Tasimi, A. (2021). Clarifying the Relations between Intellectual Humility and Misinformation Susceptibility. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x37c5
All humanities courses are second-class citizens in the ed-tech world.
And worse, typically humans are third-class citizens in the ed-tech world.
New Atlantis was the title Francis Bacon selected for his speculative story of a society living with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology. Bacon, a founder and champion of modern science, sought not only to highlight the potential of technology to improve human life, but also to foresee some of the social, moral, and political difficulties that confront a society shaped by the great scientific enterprise.
But it quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.
Mingling with the author has a pleasant ring to it. Better than a "conversation with the text"? Definitely has a nicer warmth.
He could have replace plane with something warmer as well.
This is related in a way with the way [[Niklas Luhmann]] spoke about communicating with his [[Zettelkasten]] as means of collaborating. (See: http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes)
But a better path forward is one of true global cooperation based on mutual benefit and reciprocity.
This is the case for so many human endeavors.
How might game theory help to ensure it? Are there other factors that could assist as well?
reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create
reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create possibilities when they're read in you know its full context um but some of what is happening or some of what the role of the the classroom or the the person is to do is to try to say this is the range of the acceptable response and i feel like as a teacher our role is to kind of say you get to choose how you want to show up but base it in something that's real that's authentic that's not just about you this but it's about the collective so how do we cultivate that connection to collectivity how do we cultivate that ethical uh commitment and conviction to one another but at the end of the day how do we allow young people and everyone really the agency um to decide how they want to like show up—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)
This is a powerful teaching philosophy. Return to reflect on this.
it is not about the product
it is not about the product, but about the process—Christopher R. Rogers
In humanity there is no product. We're collectively about the process.
Similar to the idea of human "being" not human "doing".
Sadly corporations have been exerting power over people and turning us into products or inputs in their processes and dramatically devaluing and erasing our humanity.
a lot of our assessment system our accountability
a lot of our assessment system our accountability system in education is built around being able to say oh are you on the right path and not acknowledge the multiplicity of paths or in in some ways that the uh the things that are structuring this path is oppressive to our humanity in the first place—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)
He very carefully encapsulates a lot of the issues we've got in modern education here. Should we worry about the "standards" like memorizing and correctly using a semicolon over acknowledging our humanity and removing focus from eudaimonia?
“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
This is the problem however. We can't program humans out of the equation entirely, for what is the general enterprise meant for in the first place?
we all may appear to be different on the outside, but we are all made up of the same things in the inside.
Teach a child to see the shared humanity in all of us. And part of that commonality is to have our own quirks. We need to find teach to see that balance and nuance.
Get1Give1 Worldwide: COVID-19 Vaccines for all. (n.d.). Retrieved May 12, 2021, from https://get1give1worldwide.org/
Like a criminal, I have accepted, routinized, and implemented them without moral revulsion or political indignation or resistance.
“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come -- ” Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett
Roy, A. (2021, April 29). ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Murray Adcock</span> in theAdhocracy (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 16:10:45</time>)</cite></small>
In this future, we’re all being asked to accept that the sticker price of our success is indifference to how things turn out for others. Of course, this isn’t a novelty, and it’s barely a disruption; this is how the demands of profit have needed work to be managed for a long time.
e
(commenting the end of McCaffrey's because we can't highlight the text):
I'm debating Helva’s access to independence--her life also prescribed and assigned like Delphi's, even to the practice of metaphorical marriage with the scout. But she could still choose Jennan, she could mourn his loss, and she was well aware of what she was programmed not to overthink.
Perhaps McCaffrey celebrates the ambiguity of fate alongside programming, and the humanity of hybridity--embodied in Helva’s own voice, both beyond human capability and deeply moving to the ear. Perhaps not?
I love when mechanized parts can invoke the indescribable, like the feeling of a song.
Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that human-ity to their sexuality. I n the Christian world, s exuality was believed to be the animal t rait of humans.
Warren, M. (2019, December 10). Good At Heart? 10 Psychology Findings That Reveal The Better Side Of Humanity. Research Digest. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/12/10/good-at-heart-10-psychology-findings-that-reveal-the-better-side-of-humanity/
Avaaz. 10 Reasons to Love Humanity right now. https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/covid19_reasons_to_hope/
I did not have much time to take the picture because helping those people get off the vessel was the priority for everyone. I put my camera down after a few shots, and I started to help people.
When shooting photos is your job and you put your camera aside to help people, this decision honors you in every possible way
Remove humans from the equation, and we are less complete as people and as a society.
The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously.
Escobar casts wide the net of his critique, his objective is not merely to tackle neoliberal capitalism, rampant individualism, patriarchy or colonialism — although each of those topics are explored in detail. He is writing against nothing less than all of modernity, a “particular modelo civilizatorio, or civilizational model… an entire way of life and a whole style of world making.” Our toxic, modern lifestyle in the Global North and the way it understands (or fails to understand) the relationality between humanity and other forms of life plays the dominant role in creating the contemporary crises. To preserve the future we need a different way of life and way to relate to all of life, “no less than a new notion of the human.” The crises are inseparable from our social lives. We need to step outside of our established worldviews to bring about significant transformations. Is this possible? How can we achieve such a transition?
Designs for the Pluriverse book review
My argument is that today the critical posthumanities are emergingas post-disciplinary discursive fronts not only around the edges ofthe classical disciplines but also as o
What if we view the posthumanities as it's own evolutionary process? Much like the "Dawn of Humanity" film explained with human evolution, the posthumanities could be seen as evolving as a braided stream alongside the classical disciplines.
The Bank of England’s survey asks participants to choose their preferred way to receive money as a Christmas gift, showing the options cash, bank transfer, gift voucher and digital currency. At press time, 8,230 people have responded and 70 percent of them have chosen digital currency.Cash is in second place, with 21 percent of respondents indicating it as a their “favorite way to get” money as a gift. Bank transfers and gift vouchers are currently the least popular forms, chosen by 7 percent and 2 percent of respondents respectively.
<big>评：</big><br/><br/>「礼物」是一种颇有人文主义关怀的存在，它让人直观感受到 “live in the moment” 的美好。不管是国外的 gift card 还是中国人喜欢发的红包，它们身上那种「即时触碰」的特质都能触发某种廉价而有质感的梦幻——就像过去几十年人类为各种平权运动摇旗呼喊时一样。<br/><br/>现如今，数字货币以暧昧的身份介入到这场并无虚荣可言的游戏中。有多少人是奔着它的匿名性而去？可能暗恋中的小青年和别有心思的贿赂者会为了不暴露身份而选用其作为礼物。但是不争的事实是，大部分人已不再贪图现世，转而把目光锁定在了未来的价值。
For the age of biotechnology is not so much about technology itself as it is about human beings empowered by biotechnology
The author mentions a great argument surrounding modern technology which is not limited to biotechnology alone. when new technologies are invented the entire focus of humanity will be shifted towards the effects of that certain technology on human beings and not the technology itself therefore in the age of biotechnology we will be more concerned about the results that biotechnology brings rather than the biotechnology itself
The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable. And it may not be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious explanation that undergirds it.
Saying that the usual and formal definition of Technology as simply a tool or a means to end is untenable, not able to be defended from objection, is to take away Technology's connection to humanity. This is problematic. Technology, at least in the way humanity knows it, would never exist without humans. Sure, if you classify the way an otter uses a rock to open a clam or the way a monkey uses a stick to get ants as technology, then yes it would exist without humanity. However I believe that although technology can be classified as a tool, I do not believe that a tool can be classified as technology. Technology, as defined, is the practical application of knowledge to an area. A tool is a device used to accomplish a task, especially in a profession. The key to Technology is the idea of knowledge. Does an otter have knowledge about the anatomy of the clam or of the physics behind using a rock to open the clam? No, so the rock is a tool. Technology only exists because of Humanity's knowledge, humanity creates Technology as a tool to solve our problems, technology has in its very existence an instrumental definition. Taking that away, takes away it's connection to humanity. It makes it impersonal.
The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.
Mastery is a very interesting word here. It would be assumed that anything that humans have the capability to create we could retain mastery over. It is also interesting to consider the two meanings we could take from mastery. On one hand its that we are the masters or owners of that object, on the other it could be a mastery in the way a person masters a craft or a skill. So would this quote mean that compared to improving technology and the possibility of an ultra-intelligent A.I, our skill of creating technology would appear to be becoming obsolete, or does it mean the gradual loss of our control over technology? Either way it raises an important concern over the dangers of advancing technology and the ever looming possibility of an ultra-intelligent A.I.
Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means.
The author suggests that technology can be both negative and positive. If used inappropriately it can create chaos but if used in the proper way it can be a tool to take humanity to new highs as it has been doing so, so far.
– Do you know what happened? I’m sorry, Dave. I don’t have enough information.
Hal is having a very human experience at this point in the film. Not only has he killed one of the cremates and intends to kill the other cremates, but he has some sense that it is wrong and it will lead to bad things for him. Even though he knows exactly what happened, he knows that it would be best for him to keep it away from Dave. This human experience only enhances when begins to die through the slow and monotonous process of being shut down. He begins to tell Dave that he can feel it and that he is afraid, showing that he has more than intelligence, but that he also has consciousness.
old man with wrinkled dugs
The term which is repeated often, "jugs" is the same as "dugs" in it's reference to female breasts. This once again touches upon not only Apollo's clairvoyant prophet, but the concept of life and nourishment.
Unreal
This word is mentioned three times within the poem, pointing out how reality is often presented in a fictitious light and at times, can be truly hard to fathom.
rose and fell
Rising and falling again, like the sun each day, Eliot is reflecting upon life's many instances of change.
Son of man
In Christian scripture, Jesus often refers to himself as the "Son of man." This shows his humanity, rather than solely identifying his divinity.
While this false vision, inspired by Desire, caused many mis-steps and much trouble andsuffering, and you gradually lost confidence in your Self -- in Me, the Impersonal One within, --in fact, you forgot Me, so that you did not know where to turn in your helplessness; yet it wasonly through your thus losing the memory of your Divine estate, and centering all yourconsciousness in these Earthly conditions, that I could develop your human mind and will, andall your faculties, and provide your human body with the strength and powers that would enableMe to give perfect expression to My Divine Idea on Earth, which eventually must BE
"While this false vision, inspired by Desire, caused many mis-steps and much trouble and suffering, and you gradually lost confidence in your Self -- in Me, the Impersonal One within, --in fact, you forgot Me, so that you did not know where to turn in your helplessness; yet it was only through your thus losing the memory of your Divine estate, and centering all your consciousness in these Earthly conditions, that I could develop your human mind and will, and all your faculties, and provide your human body with the strength and powers that would enable Me to give perfect expression to My Divine Idea on Earth, which eventually must BE"
So having fallen or stepped out of your Impersonal or Edenic estate, you yielded completely tothe lure of this Dream World, and now permitting Desire wholly to lead, you no longer werecapable of seeing the Reality or Soul of things; for you had put on a physical body, an Earthlycovering with a human brain, which acted as a veil to your Soul Consciousness, and sobedimmed your sight and clouded your mind that the light of Truth did not penetrate through,and everything was falsely colored and distorted by your human understanding.In this Dream condition you saw all things darkly, as through a mist, and with this mistenshrouding everything you could not see things in their Reality, but only their mistyappearance, which now however seemed to you the real things themselves.This was so with everything you saw through your Dream eyes, with things both animate andinanimate, with everything you conceived in your human mind, with even your own Self andyour other Selves round about you.Thus no longer seeing the Soul of things, but only their misty shadows, you grew to thinkingthese shadows were real substance, and that the world about you was composed of and filledwith such substance
In the immersion into humanity with body and mind I lost conscious connection with Soul and hence Truth was conscious to me..... no longer seeing Truth rather 'misty shadows'.
While dwelling in the Garden you were still wholly Impersonal, for you had not yet tasted of thisfruit. Having once yielded to Desire, the Earthly agent of My Will, whose main work is to makeyou eat this fruit, the moment you had eaten, that moment you descended, or fell, or were forcedfrom your Edenic estate (like the chick from the shell or the rose from the bud), and you foundyourself involved in conditions altogether new and strange. For now, instead of having dominionover the lower kingdoms, and of their supplying your every want, you had to till the ground toget it to bring forth fruit, and by the sweat of your brow had you to earn your bread.Having taken upon yourself this Earthly mission, it now became necessary for you to enter fullyinto all conditions of Earth life, in order to develop a mind and perfect a body capable ofexpressing perfectly My Idea on Earth, -- the real cause and reason of your entering into thisDream condition.
Gods desire was for us to fully immerse in the human experience....... it is necessary to fulfil this Earthly mission.............. to have a body mind capable of expressing God in this dimension.
all Desire to express in Words that Idea, without the consciousness of My Will being theOne and Only source of Inspiration, is futile. Likewise, all desire to express that Idea in livingacts, without losing all consciousness of your human personality -- of your personal part in theacts, and centering your self wholly in Me, -- is vain and fruitless and will end only in failure,disappointment and humiliation
"all Desire to express in Words that Idea, without the consciousness of My Will being the One and Only source of Inspiration, is futile." "Likewise, all desire to express that Idea in living acts, without losing all consciousness of your human personality -- of your personal part in the acts, and centering your self wholly in Me, -- is vain and fruitless and will end only in failure,disappointment and humiliation."
n Your search for the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of Your particularattributes, You gradually spread over the face of the Earth, each containing many words, and allborn of Desire in the human mind to express in Earthly terms the infinite phases of My Idea eversurging within.The more the human mind strove thus to express " in Words" My Idea, the greater and moreabject the failure
The desire to express is all born of Gods desire, yet the more we tried to express in our humanity the more we failed to truly express.
, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.
I really enjoy this idea, for some reason, as something so unfathomably sad has happened to Dorian, as if his life were a novel (hmhmhm) and he finds it too amusing to be bothered by. Wilde demonstrates the surreal reality that plagues life and continues somewhat of a commentary on how precious one's life is, and how it must not be wasted on conforming when one does not see fit.
He was made to be worshipped.
Wilde over-exaggerates the human form here, specifically for a man, painting Dorian as something of a god.