I am I'm completely transcendent of this thing. And to the my suffering is not recognizing that my suffering is entirely being caught in my avatar.
For - key insight - my suffering comes from identifying too strongly with my avatar. -
I am I'm completely transcendent of this thing. And to the my suffering is not recognizing that my suffering is entirely being caught in my avatar.
For - key insight - my suffering comes from identifying too strongly with my avatar. -
We will each die. That's incontrovertible. So any attachments I have to this world will cease. There's no doubt. The question is can I let go of the attachments now or will they only go for my cold dead hand?
for - quote / key insight - die before we die - Donald Hoffman - We will each die. That's incontrovertible. - So any attachments I have to this world will cease. - There's no doubt. - The question is can I let go of the attachments now - or will they only go for my cold dead hand?
if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear.
for - adjacency - letting go - of knowledge - of theories - Donald Hoffman - I've often felt as he does - it's a conundrum of letting go of that (knowledge) we've invested so heavily into - quote / key insight - letting go of theories of science and self - Donald Hoffman - Science is great, but don't believe any theory. <br /> - Theories are just tools. They're not the truth. - No scientific theory, my theories included, are the truth. - And so also is my theory about who I am not the truth. - So to really let go of any theory, if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear
The issue is then when I look at that fear response, can I look at it and accept it or do I identify with it? Do I identify with the fear response or can I step back and be the observer that watches the fear response?
for - key insight / quote - Do I identify with my fear or step back and be the observer that watches the fear response? - Donald Hoffman? - adjacency - calmness - in the face of death - fear of death - Donald Hoffman
t keeps you from just talking abstractly about this stuff and and and and being real about it is what do I really feel about it?
for - key insight - adjacency - fear - near death experience - experiential knowledge vs abstract knowledge - Donald Hoffman - He articulates a very important point, that many of us, are only partially there on the journey of journey of discovery - Belief only takes you part way there, - Embodiment is the real proof - We need to have the experience to be certain
consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's how it's creating this headset.
for - quote / key insight - consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's creating this headset - Donald Hoffman
The reason to love your neighbor as yourself is because your neighbor is yourself just with a different headset.
for - key insight / quote - the reason to love your neighbor - Donald Hoffman - The reason to love your neighbor as yourself is because - your neighbor IS YOUR (TRUE) SELF, just with a different headset. - And the only reason we have problems is - we don't realize how incredible you are. - So you are that which is creating this VR simulation with all of its beauty, all of its complexity. - All the complexity is you and you're doing it effortlessly.
adjacency - infinite intelligence - hologram metaphor - your neighbor is your (true) self - Deep Humanity motto - Join together (instead of Join us) - face behind the mask - Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that the Deep Humanity motto of "Join together, NOT join me/us" is deeply connected to what is being discussed in this annotation. - The problem with "joining me" is that it reflects we are still stuck in the ego reification paradigm while "join together" reflects awareness that the boundless intelligence is the true face behind the mask of each different species and each different individual of each species
All the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world because you don't know who you are
for - key insight / quote - the reified ego is the root cause of all the problems in the world - we reify because we don't know who we REALLY are - Donald Hoffman - All the egoic stuff that we do causes all the problems in the world because - you don't know who you are. - You're creating this whole thing. - You're not a little player. - You're the inventor of this whole thing. - You have nothing to prove and - you don't need to be better than anybody else. - They're also master creators. - They're creating entire universes that they perceive as well. - And my own take on on this is that - you and I are really the same one reality - just looking at itself through two different headsets, - two different avatars and having a conversation. - And maybe that's what is required for this one infinite intelligence to sort of know itself.
From an evolutionary point of view, perception is expensive
for - quote/key insight - perception serves reproduction, not seeing reality as it is
quote / key insight - perception serves reproduction, not seeing reality as it is - Donald Hoffman - From an evolutionary point of view, perception is expensive. - It takes a lot of calories. - You have to eat a lot of food - to run your brain and - to power your eyes and your ears. - - And so you need to do shortcuts. - You need to make your sensory systems not chew up so much of your energy. - The more expensive your perceptual systems are, - the more you've got to eat to to power those. - So that means you have to go out there and forage and put yourself at harm. - So there's a trade-off. - We try to do things cheaply in evolution. And you don't need to actually go for the truth because that's very very expensive
if we ignore how we get to neurons from the cells then we again we're not going to understand how the system functions.
for - key insight - from cells to neurons
they considered other living beings as kin, being animated by powerful spiritual beings which demanded a certain respect,
for - key insight - indigenous vs modern culture - spirituality - indigenous people had / have strong spiritual beliefs that mitigate extreme forms of environmental destruction and promote stewardship
Gross carbon accounting (consistent with treatment of all other emissions) reasons that old growth deforestation carbon is equally ‘new carbon’.
for - key insight - GHG accounting - gross carbon accounting - count old growth deforestation as new carbon emissions - just like exposing millions-of-years-old fossil fuels
what you have access to are the information traces the engrams whether in DNA or or in your brain the engrams that the past has left as messages to your present self from your past self and those messages have to be interpreted.
for - quote / key insight - messages from past self to present self - Michael Levin - salience - high - engrams from past self to present self
all intelligence is collective intelligence in the sense that every agent is made of parts, all of us. And what you want is for the agent to have a causal power uh that is not the same as uh simply tracking the microates, the particles
for - quote - consciousness vs cellular level intelligence - Michael Levin - key insight - high level governance (consciousness) vs low level intelligence adjacency hierarchical control - high level consciousness - low level micro intelligence quote - consciousness vs cellular level intelligence - Michael Levin - all intelligence is collective intelligence in the sense that - every agent is made of parts, all of us. - And what you want is for the (high level) agent to have a causal power that is not the same as simply tracking the microstates, the particles.
key insight - high level governance (consciousness) vs low level intelligence - This is a very important observation - It says that a multi-cellular being such as a human being can have consciousness that has agency for the entire organism and governs at that high level, and it must have this beyond just the cognition and intelligence at the lower cellular and subcellular level
what unification uh allowed us to do with a uh a good theory of electromagnetism is to say that first of all all of these are actually uh examples of the same underlying phenomenon. So we were able to put them on one continuum
for - key insight - scientific theory - transition - from different - to similiar - key insight - organizing principle - organizes reality in new ways
key insight - scientific theory - transition - from different - to similiar - New scientific theories make us cognitively reorganize our experiences - What was thought of as separate in an older conceptual framing - suddenly become similiar with the new framing
This worldview also has to restore the enchantment, communality, and connection to the sacred that is ubiquitous in pre-modern and indigenous worldviews, yet is severed in the process of modernization
for - key insight - new worldview must restore enchantment, community and connection
key insight - new worldview must restore enchantment, community and connection - This worldview also has to restore the - enchantment, - communality, and - connection - to the sacred that is - ubiquitous in pre-modern and indigenous worldviews, - yet is severed in the process of modernization — - resulting in the pervasive sense of - alienation and - meaninglessness - that characterize both modern and postmodern worldviews. - As research underscores, - a sense of - meaning, - inner purpose, and - community - are crucial for human well-being and cannot be replaced by high levels of economic prosperity.
while postmodernism thus represents a new awareness of how our paradigms construct our world, it appears markedly blind to its own worldview — its own postmodern metanarrative.
for - key insight - postmodernism is blind to its own narrative - quote - postmodernism is blind to its own narrative - Annick de Witt - observation - adjacency - postmodernism - alternative facts
adjacency - postmodernism - alternative facts - observation - also we are seeing the shadow side of postmodernism in the Trump era where "alternative facts" have become dangerously fashionable - obviously the complete denial of an objective reality is not tenable while the complete denial of constructed reality is also no tenable - what we need is an integration, as Annick contends
With far-right parties in power, it needs to present a real alternative — both to what the right offers, as well as to its past offering, which has failed to convince and inspire.
for - key insight - genuine alternative - past didn't work - neither does the present - the future must be intentionally designed to be different than the past or the present
Experienceenriches language by rooting its structures in the robust structures of perceived things(perceiving the skin as sunburned fills out the meaning of “My skin is sunburned”)
for - key insight - language - induction leads to general categories - neonates experience reality as a continuous, unbroken stream of consciousness - To form objects required object permanence - which in turn requires us to impute general categories first, - which is constructed upon a process of induction - based on the raw material of particular, remembered gestaltic experiences - ideas ( and therefore words) are essentially constructed categories that allow us to unite entire series of remembered, gestaltic experiences of phenomenological reality - Consider the author's example of sunburned skin: - Suppose the is an infant for whom the word 'skin' does not have a meaning. - The infant may have experienced many separate pre-linguistic, gestaltic experiences involving his skin: - sunburned skin - itchy skin - skin scalded by hot water - skin that is cold - dirty skin from playing in the dirt - clean skin after waking the dirt off - cut skin from a knife cutting it accidentally in the kitchen - bandaged and healed skin - All of these gestaltic experiences, when accompanied by the appropriate vocalisations of the caretaker who is present that use the word 'skin' help the infant to construct the category meaning of the word 'skin' - Early language training is an induction-intensive process - Unless we learn how to construct abstract categories at a young age, we cannot become proficient abstract language users as adults - By abstract, I mean the category nature of word s and ideas, which give them their flexibility and modularity
consider to be polarities. Differentiation of the poles of a polarity into separateconcepts, then, would emerge after the underlying form of experience (thetraversing of terrain or the passage of time, or, simply, ongoingness of expe-rience of a cyclical nature) was noticed and exploited for some purpose, suchas safety or ease. For example, it is easier moving through the forest by day,and it is cooler moving through the desert at night. There was survival valuein distinguishing different aspects of unified experience.
for - key insight - language - emergence of polarity - evolutionary fitness
vocal communication. Indeed, we learn to use language before we understandlanguage, as exemplified by a friend’s 2-year-old grandson who adeptly appliedwords he had heard his parents say and demanded that “someone change myfucking diaper!” We learn to understand language before we learn to questionlanguage. Rarely do we learn to question language itself.
for - key insight - language - unanswerable questions of the experienced language user - we learn to apply language long before we know what it is.
analysis - Language allows us to ask questions about our reality, but there are certain questions that are intrinsically unanswerable - As an experienced language user, we cannot know what our experience of reality would be like had we not learned a language
if i cannot adjust to guessing right about meaning i will never learn in this way very well at all
for - key insight - natural language acquisition - guessing
as adults we have what we grew up with as young kids the the innate or the natural ability to acquire a language but most of us we've also learned and gained another quite natural ability and that is to learn things on purpose right so and so those two natures do conflict i don't think they fit well together
for - key insight / quote - innate language learning is in conflict with intentional learning - David Long - Common Human Denominator - learning language
Assumptions: Implicit and ExplicitIn our inquiry into language, this is a fundamental paradox we need toacknowledge: it is impossible to write about the implicit assumptions of ourlanguage system without simultaneously invoking those very assumptions.
for - adjacency / insight - language - circularity of - paradox
adjacency / insight - between - language - circularity - adjacency relationship - I've always strongly felt this inherent paradox of investigating language, that - by invoking language to investigate language, we are already trapped in a circular argument
Invisible architectures, on the other hand, consist of ways that our worldis structured for us and by us, except that the structure itself is not imme-diately visible
for - meme - invisible architecture - insight - language - as unintentional invisible architecture
Itoccurred to me that as long as I feel separate from space itself, I am not experi-encing on
for - key insight - excluding space is excluding self - as long as "I" feel separate from "space", I cannot experience oneness
When I look around myyard, I’m not seeing the tree-in-itself. I’m seeing the photons that bounce offthe surface of the tree as filtered through my perceptual organs and as madesense of by my conceptual structures. Photons are a 20 th -century conception;in the future we might have a different way of explaining perception.
for - insight - perception and conception - physiosphere and symbolosphere
comment - concepts help us to organize our perceptions - but since concepts are continuously changing - making sense of the world is in continuous flux - Hence, do not attach to them or take them too seriously, as they will change again in the future
“I’m not... [fill in the blank].” Those are the shad-ows that you are disowning, the aspects of yourself that you have “othered.”
for - insight - adjacency - disowning - self othering
The nourishing contact with others that we so desperately crave can never be realized by selves that relate to others solely in the narcissistic terms of how those others can satisfy what our egos project upon them as potential sources of affirmation.
for - quote / key insight - the shallow internet can never truly fulfill us
quote / key insight - the shallow internet can never truly fulfill us - The nourishing contact with others that we so desperately crave - can never be realized by selves that relate to others solely in the narcissistic terms of how those others can satisfy what our egos project upon them as potential sources of affirmation. - Relating to each other out of the fullness of our egos, - we look to one another for nurturing support but cannot receive each other. - There are no hollow places in ourselves - that make room for the other’s presence, - that welcome the other in. - All that confronts the other - is an ego that allows space for nothing but its own self-obsessed cravings.
In the body, the awareness of absence, of the hole in one’s individual being, can metamorphose into a cognizance of the paradoxical (w)holeness of a larger being, the flesh of the world. The crux of the matter is holding the paradox. As long as I proceed from the ego, I will continue my flight from paradox. So “I” must proceed from the ego’s empty core, from the hole in the “I” that can bring (w)holeness.
for - key insight - transformation - from sense of lack - to wholeness - adjacency - sense of lack - ego's empty core
adjacency - between - sense of lack - ego's empty core - adjacency relationship - This is a very pith statement: - In the body, the awareness of - absence, - of the hole in one’s individual being, - can metamorphose into a cognizance of - the paradoxical (w)holeness of a larger being, - the flesh of the world. -The crux of the matter is holding the paradox. - As long as I proceed from the ego, - I will continue my flight from paradox. - So “I” must proceed from the ego’s empty core, - from the hole in the “I” that can bring (w)holeness.
the anthroposin makes sense less as a geoplanetary period than an historical period relating to humans is very anthropocentric issue and that means that Social science must be uh uh at the core of the challenges and the issue of the uh uh uh anthroposine uh question
for - key insight - social science must be at the core of the challenges of the Anthropocene
It became clear to me that he truly loved Trump not just because he identified with Trump the politician but because he identified with Trump the person being considered “bad” by progressive standards.
for - cosmopolitan magazine - liberal woman dated conservative MAGA men - insight
insight - Interesting insight about how deeply he identified with Trump on a personal level, He projected all the criticism Trump receives as his own.
Dermatology of the environmental political is problematic in itself because it is a confined space in which particular Futures can be legitimately brought to the fore and others are excluded
for - key insight - dramaturgy of environmental science - biased to some futures and excludes others
Practices mediate, curate, create and enact imaginations of possible futures in the same ways that they create our lived-in reality.
for - key insight - practicing performative futuring
One of the biggest lessons of the Occupy movement was that you can't only have a demonstration. Demonstrations are great. Demonstrations are important to bring attention to certain critical issues. But if you lack mobilization and organization and a political strategy, then you're just basically engaging in a performative act. You're indulging in a performance. You aren't really changing the course of history.
for - key insight - occupy movement - occupy wallstreet - key insight - Robert Reich - 10 year anniversary
It makes a lot of sense to have this different strategy of being rooted in the real physical world and have digital nomads being as like a guild of knowledge workers that seed their specialized knowledge because localism is necessary and good, but it's also not necessarily very innovative. Most people at the local level just keep repeating stuff. It's good to have people coming in from the outside and innovating.
for - insight - good for digital nomads to be rooted somewhere in the physical word - they are like a cosmo guild of knowledge workers - localities tend to repeat the same things - digital nomads as outsiders can inject new patterns - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2
the death example actually points to something more primordial! It points to the fact that I can never make a focal object of my framing, my capacity for Relevance Realization. I mean, Perspectively. What I mean by that is whenever I am thinking or doing anything, [-] it's always framed because if I'm unframed, I'm facing combinatorial explosion, which is not intelligible to me.
for - key insight / adjacency - relevance realization - I can never make a focal object of my framing, my capacity for relevance realization - source - Meaning crisis - episode 33 - The Spirituality of Relevance Realization - Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness - John Vervaeke - adjacency - focal object - framing - relevance realization - attention - intention - language - gestalt - infinite nesting - design - aspectualize - - source - Meaning crisis - episode 33 - The Spirituality of Relevance Realization - Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness - John Vervaeke
adjacency - between - focal object - framing - relevance realization - attention - intention - language - gestalt - infinite nesting - design - aspectualize
adjacency - between - focal object - framing - relevance realization - attention - intention - language - gestalt - infinite nesting - design - aspectualize
adjacency - between - focal object - framing - relevance realization - attention - intention - language - gestalt - infinite nesting - design - aspectualize - adjacency relationship - As soon as we give attention to one aspect of our gestalt reality, we aspectualize, we frame - All of the below involve framing / aspectualizing - thinking - language use - design
Returning to Bevan’s brilliant question, today it is easier to see how wealth persuades poverty to give up its freedom
for - key insight / quote - source - article - Le Monde - Musk, Trump and the Broligarch's novel hyper-weapon - Yanis Varoufakis - 2025, Jan 4
key insight / quote - (see below) - Returning to Bevan’s brilliant question, today it is easier to see how - wealth persuades poverty to give up its freedom and, instead, - to serve the broligarchs-in-charge: via their cloud capital - that has a capacity, - unlike any hitherto form of capital or government department, - to shape our behaviour - automatically and - directly. - Nothing short of a revolution can restore any hope of personal agency, - let alone of democracy.
How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power?
for - key insight - inequality - elites - How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? - source - article - Le Monde - Musk, Trump and the Broligarch's novel hyper-weapon - Yanis Varoufakis - 2025, Jan 4
language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand.
for - key insight - ideas are multidimensional - speech is one dimensional - language is one dimensional - from TED Talk - YouTube - A word game to convey any language - Ajit Narayanan
The idea here is a potential ‘entanglement’ between the local and the translocal level, which creates new levels of strength and capacity for the local.
for - key insight - leverage point of the 99% - our numbers - from Substack article - The Cosmo-Local Plan for our Next Civilization - Michel Bauwens - 2024, Dec 20 - key insight - 6 levels of individual / collective gestalt - from Substack article - The Cosmo-Local Plan for our Next Civilization - Michel Bauwens - 2024, Dec 20
key insight - 6 embedded levels of individual / collective gestalt, - first level is from individual quanta to collective atoms - second level is from individual atom to collective molecules - third is from individual molecule too collective living cells - fourth is from individual living cells too collective multicellular living organism - fifth is from individual multi-cellular organism to collective culture at local level - sixth is from individual local culture to to collective trans-national alliances - At each level except the first, a perspective shift occursc in which the collective is seen from a different lens as an individual
key insight - leverage point of the 99% - our numbers - The trans-national companies power is in their capital - The trans-national alliances leverage point is our large numbers of people - Through our strength in numbers, we can mobilize trans-alliance resources such as human innovation resources, which most local actors are lacking in
shi-ne
for - definition - Shi-ne - Shamatha without object - open awareness - the Tibetan meditation practice of becoming aware of our habitual tendency to reify and essentialize phenomena, experiencing them as having independent, non-relational reality of their own, both for - inner phenomena (thoughts and emotions) - outer phenomena (sensations) - It also goes by two other names - Shamatha without object - open awareess - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7 - adjacency - Tibetan shi-ne meditation - insight into our habit of reifying reality into objects - object permanence in child psychology - feral children and role of language enculturation in our constructed reality - Deep Humanity BEing journeys to give insight into deeper layer of phenomenological experience
adjacency - between - Tibetan shi-ne meditation - insight into our habit of reifying reality into objects - object permanence in child psychology - Dr. Oliver Sacks medical case histories - feral children and absence of enculturation on human experience of reality - potential Deep Humanity BEing journeys to penetrate early deep conceptual layer - new relationship - question - Is shi-ne, in one sense attempting to get us to penetrate our deep conditioning of object permanence in our early child development years? - Before we mastered object permanence, we essentially experienced really as an undivided whole, a gestalt - To understand how non-trivial construction of object permanence is, we can read the late Dr. Oliver Sacks writing on his medical case studies of patients whose medical conditions caused them to experience reality in the danger way ordinary people do - The study of feral children also provides important insights into linguistic conditioning's role in our construction of reality - This area can inspire many important Deep Humanity BEing journeys relating - our habitual propensity to reify - object permanence - Shi-ne meditation and to offer us a way to penetrate our early deep conditioning of object permanence - Doing so allows us to get in touch with a pure, unconditioned, more primordial experience of reality free from layers of deep conceptualisation
To engage with form from the position of emptiness is to see every phenomenon as a manifestation of the infinite web of relationships. Unique and precious, but impossible to isolate, as the play of light in the jewel of Indra’s web.
for - key insight / adjacency- Indra's net metaphor - emptiness and form - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7
key insight / adjacency - between - Indra's net metaphor - emptiness and form - new relationship - Of course! Indra's net! - Every specific form we encounter in reality - is like a node, a jewel in Indra's net - Any form is related to all forms
the experience of spaciousness and the empty nature of phenomena are related in the following way. As our mind lets go of reification, phenomena arise as continuously interconnected and interdependent, yet without ground in essence.
for - key insight / adjacency- Dzogchen practice - the experience of spaciousness and emptiness of phenomena - neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's question about the newborn classifying the world - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7
key insight / adjacency - between - Dzogchen practice - the shi-ne experience of spaciousness and emptiness of phenomena - Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's question - how does a newborn learn to classify an undivided world of phenomena? - new relationship - As the mind lets go of our habitual tendency to reify and create artificial independent things - phenomena begin to appear to arise as continuously interconnected, interdependent, yet without ground in essence - This gives us a sense of space where every phenomena is arising inter-relatedly. - This is related to Gerald Edelman's question of - how a newborn is able to start classifying a world that is undivided - Does shi-ne training take us back to our first experience of reality as a newborn, when - there was not even any inter-relationships because there were no separate objects to be in relation with each other
I've encountered several people in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions who say, "Oh, we, you know 'tukdam,' yeah, people go in 'tukdam,' "but it's like, you know, not that big a deal. It's, we don't care that much." Part of the reason they don't care that much is that the idea that you need to go into this completely, kind of, a state where there's no phenomenal content— that's just a pure clear light mind— actually is something that many of the contemporary practitioners and teachers in those lineages don't agree with.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - Kagyu and Nyingma schools don't make a big deal out of Tukdam - nondual awareness can emerge with other techniques - key insight - Buddhism - Tibetan - Clear light meditation at time of death - Tukdam - a physiological technique - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
it's said that you can get there by doing like philosophical analysis, but this is using basically physiological techniques to get to the same place phenomenologically. So that's what "tukdam" is theoretically
for - key insight - Buddhism - Tibetan - Clear light meditation at time of death - Tukdam - a physiological technique to get to the same place as philosophical analysis - recognizing nondual, ultimate nature of reality - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
So the concept here is that you're actually no longer even capable of thinking, you're no longer capable of seeing, you're no longer capable of hearing, and so on. All that's left is just this kind of sheer consciousness itself, which doesn't even have a subject-object structure. So for the Gelugpas that lack of subject-object structure is not really relevant. For the other traditions it's extremely relevant, because it's said that if you're going to understand the nature of the mind, the fundamental distortion in the mind is precisely that subject-object structure. So you have to cultivate a non-dual awareness,
for - key insight - Buddhism - TIbetan - Clear light meditation - Tukdam at time of death - no longer capable of thinking, seeing, hearing, etc - all that's left is naked consciousness without even subject-object from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
these winds, right— these energies—are already flowing, of course, and they flow in very deep patterns that basically constitute one's own ordinary identity. And so quite literally one's own ordinary identity is, is the patterning of these winds.
for - key insight - one's ordinary identity IS the pattern of the flow of the winds - this makes practice of Tukdam very difficult - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne - a tendency towards lust, aversion, etc is accompanied by a flow of wind. - to practice this during life, we have to get out of the deep patterns we identify with in life
research shows that it's not so much about changing the narrative that is important but it is changing our relationship to this narrative so that we can see the narrative for what it is which is really a constellation of thoughts
for - illusion of self narrative / construction - third pillar - insight - key insight on insight! - not about CHANGING NARRATIVES - but about PENETRATING THE NARRATIVE to understand its essence - - Youtube - Tukdam talk - An Overview Of CHM’s Work On “Well-Being And Tukdam” - Prof. Richard J. Davidson
the third pillar we call Insight
for - third of four pillars of wellbeing - insight - a curiosity driven knowledge of the self - Youtube - Tukdam talk - An Overview Of CHM’s Work On “Well-Being And Tukdam” - Prof. Richard J. Davidson
comment - this insight is specifically about the nature of self as a narrative construction imposed upon a constellation of changing thoughts and emotions - when we gain the insight that the solid-appearing self is constructed on emptiness, research shows that this insight sets the stage for wellbeing to emerge
we think of kindness and compassion in a way that's very similar to the way scci other scientists think about language
for - comparison / key insight - compassion is like language (and also like genetics) - every infant has the biological capacity for these - Youtube - Tukdam talk - An Overview Of CHM’s Work On “Well-Being And Tukdam” - Prof. Richard J. Davidson
comparison / key insight - compassion is like language (and also like genetics) - compassion, like language and genetics is intrinsic to our human nature. Every newborn comes into the world with the biological capacity for kindness/compassion, language and for genetic expression. However, - how we actually turn out as adults depends on what variables exist in our environment - If we have a compassionate mOTHER, our Most significant OTHER, she will teach us compassion - just like a child raised in a community of other language speakers in the environment will enable the child to cultivate the language capacity and - without a community of language speakers, a feral infant will grow up not understanding language at all - a healthy environment triggers beneficial epigenetic processes - Again, the chinese saying is salient: (hu)man on earth, good at birth. The same nature, varies on nurture
to - feral children - Youtube - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FTKaS1RdAfrg%2F&group=world - Chinese saying: (hu)man on earth, good at birth. The same nature, varies on nurture - https://hyp.is/TWOEYrlUEe-Mxx_LHYIpMg/medium.com/postgrowth/rediscovering-harmony-how-chinese-philosophy-offers-pathways-to-a-regenerative-future-07a097b237a0
The Greeks took that material change and they mythologized it into the soul. And then, of course, Genesis—the creation of the world in Christianity—says, the world is here for humans. It was created for humans to use, to dominate, to exploit, you know, in their trial here to see if they’re righteous or not.
for - key insight - roots of anthropomorphism - Greek and Christian narratives - from - Emergence Magazine - interview - An Ethics of Wild Mind - David Hinton - adjacency - existential polycrisis - roots of anthropomorphism in the written language - Deep Humanity BEing journeys that explore how language constructs our reality
key insight / summary - roots of anthropomorphism - Greek and Christian narratives - The Greeks defined the soul - The Genesis story established that we were the chosen species and all others are subservient to us - From that story, domination of nature becomes the social norm, leading all the way to the existential polycrisis / metacrisis we are now facing - This underscores the critical salience of Deep Humanity to the existential polycrisis - exploring the roots of language and how it changes our perceptions of reality - showing us how we construct our narratives at the most fundamental level, then buy into them
But once you can write things down, then that mental realm suddenly starts looking timeless and radically different from the world around us. And I think that’s what really created this sense of an interior, what became, with the Greeks and the Christians, a kind of soul; this thing that’s actually made of different stuff. It’s made of spirit stuff instead of matter
for - new insight - second cause of human separation - after settling down, it was WRITING! intriguing! - from - Emergence Magazine - interview - An Ethics of Wild Mind - David Hinton - adjacency - sense of separation - first - settling down - human place - second - writing - from - Emergence Magazine - interview - An Ethics of Wild Mind - David Hinton
adjacency - between - sense of separation - first - settling down - human place - second - transition from oral to written language - adjacency relationship - Interesting that I was just reading an article on language and perception from the General Semantics organization: General Semantics and non-verbal awareness - The claim is that the transition from oral language to written language created the feeling of interiority and of a separate "soul". - This is definitely worth exploring!
explore claim - the transition from oral language traditions to writing led us to form the sense of interiority and of a "soul" separate from the body - This claim, if we can validate it, can have profound implications - Writing definitely led us to create much more complex words but we were able to do much more efficient timebinding - transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. - We didn't have to depend on just a few elders to pass the knowledge on. With the invention of the printing press, written language got an exponential acceleration in intergenerational knowledge transmission. - This had a huge feedback effect on the oral language itself, increase the number of words and meanings exponentially. - There are complex recipes for everything and written words allow us to capture the complex recipes or instructions in ways that would overwhelm oral traditions.
to - article - General Semantics and Non-Verbal Awareness - https://hyp.is/BePQhLvTEe-wYD_MPM9N3Q/www.time-binding.org/Article-Database
next, I think, was writing
for - new insight - second cause of human separation - after settling down, it was writing! intriguing! - from - Emergence Magazine - interview - An Ethics of Wild Mind - David Hinton
Algorithmic control of our lives is an expression of the rot at the heart of Western civilisation: quantitative values subsuming qualitative experience.
for - key insight - algorithmic control - quantitative values subsuming qualitative experience - Substack article - Best Served Cold: Luigi Mangione and The Age of Breach - Alexander Beiner
trauma creates patterns of adaptive responses
for - key insight - trauma creates patterns of adaptive responses - Youtube - Prenatal and Perinatal Healing Happens in Layers - Kate White
the richest are those who determine countries’ carbon emission levels.
for - key insight - carbon inequality - the rich individuals of any country - are the ones most responsible for determining the carbon emissions of a country - adjacency - carbon inequality - wealthy - carbon emissions of individuals - carbon emissions of a country
adjacency - between - carbon inequality - wealth inequality - the richest individuals of a country - the carbon emissions of a country - adjacency relationship - It's startling to draw the connection that - it is the wealthiest individuals in a country - that are most responsible for the bulk of a country's emissions!
And for for someone like me who was born in this in the country of the US, who came into life as a white presenting woman, it is the work of my life to entirely and utterly work to dismantle oppressive systems simultaneously while I'm actually working to shift my consciousness about how I respond
for - key insight - challenging ourselves for authentic, transformative change - inner and outer work to dismantle oppressive, entrenched systems - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023
we kept looking at the a couple of assumptions and it was assuming almost a linear journey of we're going to take the power and the money from the elites and we're going to put it in the hands of the community and the peoples and what we know throughout history is many different social movements over the past hundreds of years have endeavored to make that shift. But unless we actually get down into the deeper thought forms that underlie power and domination themselves, we're not actually in a cold, liberatory kind of framework
for - quote / key insight - must interrogate the deeper thought patterns else - we risk repeating simplistic linear transition social movements that have failed over the past centuries - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023
There's not necessarily a process by which that communities decide who comes in or countries decide who comes in to work on these problems that have been decided outside.
for - key insight - Philanthropies have decided on the outside, which communities and which problems need to be solved - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023
comment - So true! Who hasn't experienced the NGO coming into the community with a know-it-all attitude and already decided who will receive what funds for what project. It's all decided ahead of time then offered! - We don't want to fall into the same trap!
as individuals, we're replicators of neoliberalism. Not just intellectually, cognitively, medically, but semantically our physical bodies. We have given somatic real estate to aspects of neoliberalism.
for - key insight - as individuals, we promote neoliberalism - via entrenched and unconscious colonialism - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - deep entrenchment and entrainment of neolieralism in our bodies - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023
comment - The depth of entrainment of neoliberalism in our bodies is very pronounced - This is why it is so difficult to make adhoc change because it faces so much opposition emerging from the unconscious
Lynne and I interviewed a couple of people who had come into huge amounts of wealth, and we're just setting up their their philanthropy. And they would they would be very optimistic at first. They would have these huge sort of ranges of potential of what they believe they could achieve. And then we would talk to them six months later or a year later,
for - key insight - severe limits of philanthropy - abiding by neoliberal logic severely constrains them - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023
neoliberalism and its predecessors of industrial capitalism and even proto capitalism were based on separation from the natural world. And and we can we call it sort of separation or dualism
for - key insight - neoliberalism and industrial capitalism were based on Descarte and our separation from the natural world - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - adjacency - materialism, science and neoliberalism - will technology save us? - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - to - The Three Great Separations
key insight / summary - neoliberalism and industrial capitalism were based on Descarte and our separation from the natural world - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - FIrst, Descarte separated the mind from the body. We have the paradox of: - godlike mind housed in - animalistic bodies - (incidentally, this sets us up for the exageration of the existential crisis of the denial of death in modernity - Ernest Becker) - Then we impose separation of external vs internal world - Then, we have separate categories of mind and nature, and we begin othering of: - women - other (indigenous) cultures - What Alnoor and Lynn forgot to mention was that there is another separation that preceded the industrial revolution, the separation of people into distinct classes of: - producer - consumer - Then with the advance of Newtonian physics and the wild success of materialist theory applied to create a plethora of industrial technologies, a wedding occurred between: - dualism and - materialism - Materialism decomposes everything into subatomic particles that a rational mind can understand - To those who think science and technology can save us from the crisis it helped create - the deeper understanding reveals that science and technology are themselves agents of separation.
to - See the three great separations - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
Behavioral change is a key mitigation strategy since demand-side options have a high mitigation potential7. Yet, it has only recently started being discussed in the literature, compared to traditionally studied supply-side solutions.
for - key insight - behavioral change is a key demand-side mitigation strategy yet has only been recently discussed - supply side solutions have been the main focus - Pizziol & Tavoni, 2024
what the defeat of Harris shows about the US is this people like everywhere else want a real alternative to business as usual and if there is no authentic left option people vote for a fascist instead it's happened again and again in history
for - key insight - quote - Why Harris lost US election - no perceived genuine alternative to BAU - Roger Hallam - from - Medium article - An Emerging Third Option: Reclaiming Democracy from Dark Money & Dark Tech Seven Observations On 2024 and What’s Next - Otto Scharmer - terminology - Status Quoism
key insight - quote - Why Harris lost US election - no perceived genuine alternative to BAU - Roger Hallam - (see below) - What the defeat of Harris shows about the US is this. People like everywhere else want a real alternative and - If there is no authentic left option, people vote for a fascist instead. - It happens again and again in history
from - Medium article - An Emerging Third Option: Reclaiming Democracy from Dark Money & Dark Tech Seven Observations On 2024 and What’s Next - Otto Scharmer - terminology - Status Quoism - https://hyp.is/Mxp1GqtFEe-pKzNGX6BrhQ/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b
that's why they have the chips act because they want to reduce Your Capacity to invest in this super highway and make it attractive for everybody else this is why they are creating circumstances of choking anyone outside the United States wants to trade with China because they don't want this Super Highway way so it's not that China is getting bigger it is not that China is spying it is not Taiwan it is that China has built a digital Cloud Capital based super highway for payments which is a clear and prais danger to the Monopoly of the dollar payment system which is the only reason why the United States is hegemonic
for - key insight - US hegemonic foreign policy - for cold war with China - in order to protect the US global reserve currency - Yanis Varoufakis - Yanis Varoufakis provides a key insight here about the reason for the US cold war with China - Yanis validates his one party claim by saying that the clashing economic fiefdoms of - big tech (Silicon Valley) and - Wall street - are both antagonistic towards China - Biden's Chips Act and - Trump's huge Tariffs - are both continuations of the cold war towards China
when he saw the macroeconomic statistics and he saw that from 1968 from 1968 onwards America for the first time since the 1930s had become a deficit country
for - key insight - When Henry Kissinger was Nixon's national security advisor, he saw that from 1968, the US became a deficit country - Yanis Varoufakis
why did the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration after that were so gangho about trading with China why did they not start the new Cold War against China in the 1990s in the year 2000 in 2004 2005 200 8 why was it only around 2014 that this establishment decided to unleash the war against China
for - key insight - key question - why did US foreign policy against China switch only in 2014? - Yanis Varoufakis
‘The Destiny of Civilization’
for - book - The Destiny of Civilization - Michael Hudson - to - book - The Design of Civilization - Michael Hudson - insight - Greek Society, and later, Western Society grew out of the Greek "conflict" model
to - book - The Destiny of Civilization - Michael Hudson - https://hyp.is/ID3F7KiwEe-26QsBOrdtlQ/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation
the real problem is what we're layering the web on we shouldn't be doing the web over this kind of just simple file distribution system that works over TCP and you have to work really hard to put over anything else we should be putting the web over a distribution system that can deal with the distributed case that is offline first and uh this is are kind of like stats showing the usage of mobile apps versus uh the web and so on so this is a very real real thing
for - quote / insight - We shouldn't be doing the web over this simple file distribution system that works over TCP - Juan Benet - IPFS
it's a linear increase in performance and the reason I mentioned that is because as probably know that's the signature of unconscious learning
for - insight - linear increase in performance - indicates unconscious learning - David Eagleman - sensory substitution
the problem is is we're not listening to the fifth person perspective physicists we're listening to the third person perspective physicists and mainly because the source of power is located in our planet at third person perspective that's where the power band is attempting to hold control
for - quote / insight - power is being held at the 3rd person perspective, not the fifth or higher person perspective - John Churchill
quote / insight - power is being held at the 3rd person perspective, not the fifth or higher person perspective - John Churchill - (see below) - The problem is is we're not listening to the fifth person perspective physicists, - we're listening to the third person perspective physicists - and mainly because the source of power is located in our planet at third person perspective. - That's where the power band is attempting to hold control
comment - The same is true of politics
the newsphere is the mental body of the planet which is essentially what's attempting to come into configuration and to the extent to which you can actually Liberate the technology to become that essentially you're building a platform that allows the embodied in the intelligence of the earth into the technology so that it can then synchronically unfold Evolution based on how things spontaneously unfold anyway
for - quote / insight - human technology to wisely synchronically unfold the universe - John Churchill
quote / insight - human technology to wisely synchronically unfold the universe - John Churchill - (see below) - What you build is a noospheric platform so - the noossphere is the mental body of the planet - which is essentially what's attempting to come into configuration - To the extent to which you can actually liberate the technology to become that, - essentially you're building a platform that allows the embodied in the intelligence of the earth into the technology - so that it can then synchronically unfold evolution based on how things spontaneously unfold anyway
so because now the mind is not because the the the mind isn't separate from everything else your mind begins to become more and more synchronistic
for - insight - embodied wisdom of interdependent origination - increase in synchronicity - John Churchill - metaphor - node in an interconnected graph of reality
insight - embodied wisdom of interdependent origination - increase in synchronicity - John Churchill - This is an interesting insight - We can possibly explain it this way: - When we have a limited embodiment of who we are as the traditional ego-bound-to-body, our experiences are interpreted in a limited way, though we aren't aware of it - However, when we have a more expanded embodiment of who we are that is more nondualistic, in which - sense of self and - the environment - become blurred due to experiencing cause-and-effect between self and environment in a more nuanced way - When we don't have enough perceptual acuity to understand that one event is related to another, we infer correlation instead of causality - events that appeared random from the limited perspective become nonrandom and more noticed at the more expansive perspective - From a more expansive perspective, we could feel more strings attached to us and events pull on us through those connecting strings - When we feel separate, we don't experience the pull of those connecting strings - Indeed, we do not even perceive there to be strings that connect us
metaphor - node in an interconnected graph of reality - One possible metaphor is that as we expand our perception and cognition, we become more aware that we are like a node with infinite connections to other nodes of reality
states of Consciousness are not structures so you know I can huff and puff my breath for an hour or take some plant medicine or do a meditation technique that might open up a particular state now now that state might even stick but the state isn't the same thing as the structure which means whenever you come back to your structure you you you you come back to where you really are back to Baseline
for - quote / insight - difference - between states of consciousness and psychological infrastructure - John Churchill
quote / insight - difference - between states of consciousness and psychological infrastructure - John Churchill - (see below) - States of Consciousness are not structures - I can - huff and puff my breath for an hour or - take some plant medicine or - do a meditation technique that might open up a particular state - Now that state might even stick but the state isn't the same thing as the structure which means - whenever you come back to your structure, - you come back to where you really are - Back to Baseline
the soul is also a collective being right so you know you have to have done your own individual work so to speak before you do that because otherwise you're going to have conflicts with the with the collective because you know if you're not yet individuated you're going to have issues with a collective because you have to be paradoxically an individual in order to actually fully function within a collective without being swallowed
for - question - Can he give concrete examples of 'individual work"? - for John Churchill - insight - individual / collective gestalt - need to be fully formed individual to work effectively in a collective - John Churchill
it isn't just about alleviating their own personal suffering it's also about alleviating Universal suffering so this is where the the bodh satra or the Christ or those kinds of archetypes about being concerned about the whole
for - example - individual's evolutionary learning journey - new self revisiting old self and gaining new insight - universal compassion of Buddhism and the individual / collective gestalt - adjacency - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER
adjacency - between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER - adjacency relationship - When I heard John Churchill explain the second turning, - the Mahayana approach, - I was already familiar with it from my many decades of Buddhist teaching but with - those teachings in the rear view mirror of my life and - developing an open source, non-denominational spirituality (Deep Humanity) - Hearing these old teachings again, mixed with the new ideas of the individual / collective gestalt - This becomes an example of Indyweb idea of recording our individual evolutionary learning journey and - the present self meeting the old self - When this happens, new adjacencies can often surface - In this case, due to my own situatedness in life, the universal compassion of the bodhisattva can be articulated from a Deep Humanity perspective: - The Freudian, Klinian, Winnicott and Becker perspective of the individual as being constructed out of the early childhood social interactions with the mOTHER, - a Deep Humanity re-interpretation of "mother" to "mOTHER" to mean "the Most significant OTHER" of the newly born neonate. - A deep realization that OUR OWN SELF IDENTITY WAS CONSTRUCTED out of a SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP with mOTHER demonstrates our intertwingled individual/collective and self/other - The Deep Humanity "Common Human Denominators" (CHD) are a way to deeply APPRECIATE those qualities human beings have in common with each other - Later on, Churchill talks about how the sacred is lost in western modernity - A first step in that direction is treating other humans as sacred, then after that, to treat ALL life as sacred - Using tools like the CHD help us to find fundamental similarities while divisive differences might be polarizing and driving us apart - A universal compassion is only possible if we vividly see how we are constructed of the other - Another way to say this is that we see others not from an individual level, but from a species level
However, skip-gram is a discriminative model (due to the use of negative sampling
this is a great insight.
There appears to be no theoretical explanation for this empirical finding about the approximate low rank of the PMI matrix.
This comment highlights the gap in the theoretical understanding of why the PMI matrix exhibits an approximately low rank. It raises the question of whether this low-rank property could be formally proven or if it is purely an empirical observation.
the emergence of greater vulnerability because of the increasing number of interconnections that link that wealth, and those who control it, in efforts to sustain it
for - quote / insight - decreased resiliency due to tight network of elites - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - creative alternatives - liminal spaces - rapid whole system change
quote / insight - decreased resiliency due to tight network of elites - (see quote below) - The front-loop phase is more predictable, - with higher degrees of certainty. - In both the natural and social worlds, - it maximizes production and accumulation. - We have been in that mode since World War II. - The consequence of this is not only an accumulation and concentration of wealth, - but also the emergence of greater vulnerability because of - the increasing number of interconnections that link that wealth, and - those who control it, - in efforts to sustain it. - Little time and few resources are available for alternatives that explore different visions or opportunities. - Emergence and novelty is inhibited. - This growing connectedness leads to increasing rigidity in its goal to retain control, - and the system becomes ever more tightly bound together. - This reduces resilience and the capacity of the system to absorb change, - thus increasing the threat of abrupt change. - We can recognize the need for change but become politically stifled in our capacity to act effectively.
to - quote - we are now in a back-loop of a planetary adaptive cycle - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds - Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - https://hyp.is/FTRDoJFuEe-rsvdKeYjr0g/www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11/main.html?ref=ageoftransformation.org
comment - These ideas are quite important for those change actors working to emerge creative alternatives - liminal spaces - rapid whole system change
stable irregularity in language
This is best understood through two english examples 1. The irregualr verb "to be" is used in many other constructions e.g. the future tense, so instability would have significant impact on learning. 1. there are many loan words in english which preserved thier forien morphology. This makes learning them as a group easier (they are irregualr but follow a template)in
the false reality governed by images facilitates the work of the cap capitalist system the system gives you the illusion of having Free Will and choosing what you consume but in reality everything has already been decided for you
for - society of the spectacle - insight - quote - illusion and free will
society of the spectacle - insight - quote - illusion and free will - The false reality governed by images - facilitates the work of the capitalist system - The system gives you the illusion of having Free Will and choosing what you consume - but in reality everything has already been decided for you
the Society of the spectacle is a society of secrecy and diversion
for - insight - society of the spectacle - secrecy and diversion is inherent to it
insight - society of the spectacle - secrecy and diversion is inherent to it - it's a society where things happen normally like in any other society but - where we don't know who is pulling the strings - Its main objective is - to divert people's attention by - hiding the real and - promoting the Irrelevant
in a form that can be shared in decentralised emergent social knowledge networks.
POTENTIAL The potential is for a record of COLLECTIVE INSIGHT
our love of freedom is is one of the ways that we as apparently limited beings return naturally to our original condition
for - comparison - Rupert Spira - limited human being striving for return to natural condition - Dasietz Suzuki - The elbow does not bend backwards - insight - freedom is our natural state - because in our contracted human form - we desire to return to our original expansive form - Rupert Spira comment - As Dasietz Suzuki observed, within the limitations of our form, there is a freedom - After listening for a 2nd or 3rd time, I noted something I missed on the 1st listening. A metaphor helps - My nickname reflects this desire to return to the original expansiveness. "Bottled up" and existing in a "contracted" human form, - we possess a natural desire to expand out of the contracted human form back into its original, primordial expansive state - This is indicated by our innate desire for freedom
Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.
for - unpack - key insight - with the postulate of consciousness as the foundation, it makes sense that this is - an inner reality made of qualia - and an outer reality made of shareable symbols we call matter - Federico Faggin - question - about Federico Faggin's ideas - in what way is matter a symbol? - adjacency - poverty mentality - I am the universe who wants to know itself question - in what way is matter a symbol? - Matter is a symbol in the sense that it - we describe reality using language, both - ordinary words as well as - mathematics - It is those symbolic descriptions that DIRECT US to jump from one phenomena to another related phenomena. - After all, WHO is the knower of the symbolic descriptions? - WHAT is it that knows? Is it not, as FF points out, the universe itself - as expressed uniquely through all the MEs of the world, that knows? - Hence, the true nature of all authentic spiritual practices is that - the reality outside of us is intrinsically the same as - the reality within us - our lebenswelt of qualia
this localization process enables consciousness to perceive itself as the universe because infinite consciousness cannot perceive its own activity directly because it would have to do so from if infinite consciousness were to perceive the universe directly it would have to do so from every single point of view in the universe it would be the deepest darkest black image you could imagine so in order to perceive an object consciousness must localize itself as an apparently separate subject so this localization of the apparent localization of our self or the dissociation of ourselves as finite minds out of infinite consciousness enables um perception
for - adjacency - key insight - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - discerning single voice at a busy party metaphor - existential isolation - umwelt
adjacency - between - key insight - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - discerning single voice at a busy party metaphor - existential isolation - adjacency relationship - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - This localization process enables (infinite) consciousness to perceive itself as the universe because - infinite consciousness cannot perceive its own activity directly - because if infinite consciousness were to perceive the universe directly - it would have to do so from every single point of view in the universe - It would be the deepest, darkest black image you could imagine - So in order to perceive an object - (infinite) consciousness must localize itself as an apparently separate subject so - the apparent localization of our self or - the dissociation of ourselves - as finite minds out of infinite consciousness enables - perception and - thought
when consciousness puts on the glasses of a finite mind a human mind it puts on the glasses that consist of thinking and perceiving it is that activity which seems to localize consciousness within itself as a separate subject of experience from whose perspective it views its own activity as the outside universe
for - key insight - universal consciousness contracts to localized human consciousness - experiences its own activity as the outside universe - Rupert Spira
there is one aspect one element of the universe that we have direct unmediated access to when i say unmediated i mean we have access to it through a channel that is does not go through perception or thought and that is our knowledge of our self our knowledge of our self is the only knowledge there is that is not mediated through thought or perception and therefore it is the only channel through which we have direct unmediated access to the reality of the universe and it is for this reason that self-knowledge stands at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions
for - key insight - quote - self knowledge - Rupert Spira
key insight - quote - self knowledge - Rupert Spira - There is one aspect of the universe that we have direct unmediated access to w
When i say unmediated i mean we have access to it through a channel that is does not go through
Our knowledge of our self is the only knowledge there is that is not mediated through
and therefore it is the only channel through which we have direct unmediated access to the reality of the universe
It is for this reason that self-knowledge stands at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions.
we are slower we are irrational we are imperfect we are drifting away we are forgetting stuff we are making mistakes but we are learning from our failures we get support from our from our friends from our from our colleagues and we are understanding and instead of just analyzing the world and this is giving us the ultimate cognitive Edge
for - key insight - human vs artificial intelligence - humans will create the best ideas
key insight - human vs artificial intelligence - humans will create the best ideas - why? - because we are - slower - imperfect - less rational - drifting away - forgetting - and we learn from the mistakes we make and from different perspectives shared with us
you can Google data if you're good you can Google information but you cannot Google an idea you cannot Google Knowledge because having an idea acquiring knowledge this is what is happening on your mind when you change the way you think and I'm going to prove that in the next yeah 20 or so minutes that this will stay analog in our closed future because this is what makes us human beings so unique and so Superior to any kind of algorithm
for - key insight - claim - humans can generate new ideas by changing the way we think - AI cannot do this
Managing problems at the scale the planet, therefore, requires creating governance institutions at the scale of the planet.
for - key insight - governance - new planetary scale - NOT the UN
The UN and its many parts and agencies – from UNICEF to the Universal Postal Union – answer not to humanity nor the world, but the nations that united to join it.
for - climate crisis - key insight - why UN cannot address the climate crisis
climate crisis - key insight - why UN cannot address the climate crisis - The UN responds to sovereign states, not to humanity nor to the planet
leads to an arresting realisation. It is a statistical certainty that people very similar to you and to each one of your friends and family lived in the deep past, are alive now in societies around the world, and will be born in the distant futur
for - key insight - we are the same across deep time and space
key insight - we are the same across deep time and space - He elaborates quite well on the fact that we are the same across deep time and space - This is the Common Human Denominator (CHD) of Deep Humanity praxis
we don't look ahead and that may derive from the fact that we evolved as hunters 00:30:31 and a hunter is always looking for the next animal to kill
for - key insight - we evolved from hunters - who don't look beyond the next animal we kill
key insight - we evolved from hunters - who don't look beyond the next animal we kill - We are in a binge mode of subsistence that requires instant gratification - This is the same default thinking that runs our economy and much of our lives and it takes effort to counter it
one of the things i suggested in a short history of progress is that 00:30:18 one of our problems even though we're very clever as a species we're not wise
for - key insight - progress trap - A Short History of Progress - we are clever but NOT wise!
key insight - progress trap - A Short History of Progress - we are clever but NOT wise! - In other words - Intelligence is FAR DIFFERENT than wisdom
new memes - We have an abundance of intelligence and a dearth of wisdom - A little knowledge is dangerous, a lot of knowledge is even more dangerous
fish oil capsules from fish that ate algae well that means wild fish because Farm fish don't eat algae
for - key insight - farmed fish have no omega 3 because they eat corn, not algae
having a high blood glucose is a manifestation of the problem not the problem itself because if you 00:02:34 didn't have the mitochondrial dysfunction you wouldn't have the high blood glucose so the high blood glucose is Downstream of the actual problem 00:02:45 and insulin is a way to shall we say cover up the problem
for - key insight - insulin covers up the real problem of mitochondria dysfunction
but as the situation continues it may require more and more and more insulin to get the same amount 00:02:40 of glucose into the cells
for - key insight - health - insulin resistance
key insight - health - insulin resistance - This is the key to the mechanism by which insulin levels increase in the blood. - As our diet places higher levels of glucose in the blood, the pancreas responds by releasing more and more insulin to process this elevated level of insulin and the cells respond, - but the cells, especially surrounding the organs no longer store fat when a certain threshold of high insulin is reached - high amounts of visceral fat around the organs is then accompanied by fat being released by the cells into the blood stream, elevating triglyceride levels - The liver then starts to take this up and if there are now elevated trigycerides in the bloodstream, the liver and cells get locked into a vicious cycle of fat release
whoever the Democratic nominee may be um anyone is preferable to uh the uh Prospect of a 00:10:40 Donald Trump emboldened by this decision and threatening to start imposing autocracy
for - key insight - key issue of 2024 election is NOT which democrat to vote for, but to prevent autocracy at any cost
the erosion between whiteness andgainful employment that Davidson and Saul arguedled to a cultural backlash from white Americans andhas caused them to move from the left to the far-rightas a form of retaliation against the neoliberal cosmo-politan left.
for - key insight - gainful employment of white working class led to cultural backlash and shift from left to far-right - to - Neoliberalism and the Far-Right: A Contradictory Embrace
key insight - gainful employment of white working class led to cultural backlash and shift from left to far-right - source - Davidson and Saul
to - Neoliberalism and the Far-Right: A Contradictory Embrace - https://hyp.is/8Hf0lDzqEe-KM9dQxJDxsw/core.ac.uk/download/pdf/84148846.pdf
reducing racial inequality means also addressing class inequality
for - key insight - Wage stagnation is a universal problem of the working class and reducing racial and gender inequality goes hand-in-hand with reducing class inequality.
demography will have an impact on the future of the American economy, politics, and social infrastructure.
for - key insight - demographic shift will have major implications on U.S. economy, politics and social infrastructure.
NAFTA displays the classic free-trade quandary: Diffuse benefits with concentrated costs.
for - key insight - free trade - from - Backfire: How the Rise of Neoliberalism Facilitated the Rise of The Far-Right
quote - free trade - (see below)
key insight - free trade - NAFTA displays the classic free-trade quandary: - Diffuse benefits with - concentrated costs - While the economy as a whole may have seen a slight boost, - certain sectors and communities experienced profound disruption. - A town in the Southeast loses hundreds of jobs when a textile mill closes, - but hundreds of thousands of people find their clothes marginally cheaper. - Depending on how you quantify it, the overall economic gain is probably greater but barely perceptible at the individual level; - the overall economic loss is small in the grand scheme of things, - but devastating for those it affects directly.
from - Backfire: How the Rise of Neoliberalism Facilitated the Rise of The Far-Right - https://hyp.is/F6XYujyREe-TaldInE8OGA/scholarworks.arcadia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=thecompass
here are so many loopholes in our current top AI Labs that we could literally have people who are infiltrating these companies and there's no way to even know what's going on because we don't have any true security 00:37:41 protocols and the problem is is that it's not being treated as seriously as it is
for - key insight - low security at top AI labs - high risk of information theft ending up in wrong hands
Sam mman has said that's his entire goal that's what opening eye are trying to build they're not really trying to build super intelligence but they Define AGI as a 00:24:03 system that can do automated AI research and once that does occur
for - key insight - AGI as automated AI researchers to create superintelligence
key insight - AGI as automated AI researchers to create superintelligence - We will reach a period of explosive, exponential AI research growth once AGI has been produced - The key is to deploy AGI as AI researchers that can do AI research 24/7 - 5,000 of such AGI research agents could result in superintelligence in a very short time period (years) - because every time any one of them makes a breakthrough, it is immediately sent to all 4,999 other AGI researchers
if this scale up 00:20:14 doesn't get us to AGI in the next 5 to 10 years it might be a long way out
for - key insight - AGI in next 5 to 10 years or bust
key insight - AGI in next 5 to 10 years or bust - As we start approaching billion, hundred billion and trillion dollar clusters, hardware improvements will slow down due to - cost - ecological impact - Moore's Law limits - If AGI doesn't emerge by then, then we will need to have major breakthrough in - architecture or - algorithms
THE PROBLEM WITHPROBLEM SOLVING
for - insight - progress trap - problem with problem solving
summary - This piece is difficult for a non-expert to understand
the real issues are Insidious they're 00:22:00 underground they're down in our our Baseline premises of understanding what life is and what it means
for - key insight - the unconscious - fundamental assumptions are the root problem - Nora Bateson
key insight, quote - the unconscious - fundamental assumptions are the root problem - Nora Bateson - (see below) - Even though we can point with - language and - statistics and - all sorts of measurements - to all the aspects of what we might call - the meta crisis or - the poly crisis - the real issues are: - insidious - they're underground - they're down in our our baseline premises of understanding - what life is and - what it means - To ask - what's in it for me - what's the point of this - where is this going - what am I going to get out of this - These type of questions that have to do with in some way embellishing our individual takeback - are deeply and totally unecological responses - so they're disrupting our possibility for perception
that causality is not singular and so if you address a problem 00:11:06 that's created by a multiple causal process with a singular response you don't actually do anything but make it worse
for - quote, key insight - progress trap - Nora Bateson
quote - progress trap - Nora Bateson - Nora hits the head of the nail with this observation - There are always multiple causes to one result - and by addressing only one cause, we cannot solve the problem, but in fact - allow it to continue and often make it worse - This is essentially another way of stating the teachings of millenia of Eastern philosophy, - that the universe is - infinitely interconnected - and its inherent nature of continuous transformation - Therefore, any state, which might be recognized as a problem state - is the result of many different causes and conditions coalescing
you don't meet something head-on you meet it around you meet it within you meet it 00:04:24 totally in ecological systems nothing is happening one thing at a time there's not a solution to a problem
for - key insight - problem solving paradox - emptiness
key insight- problem solving paradox - emptiness - Due to the complex nature of reality - in which everything we perceive is connected to so many other things beyond our wildest imagination - a - *problem" doesn't have - a "solution" - Why not? - because a problem is human attention devoted to one aspect in our entire field of view (nature) - It's like looking at one stitch in the entire fabric of a weave - That one stitch could be so critical that tearing it off - can cause the entire fabric to fall apart - This massive connectedness and innumerable relationships is also described by the Eastern philosophical terms - emptiness - interdependent origination - references already provided in earlier annotations of this video.
Essentially it analyzes the process of an illusion crystallizing out of emptiness and being taken for reality.
for - key insight - the real is the illusory - interdependent origination - emptiness
key insight - the real is the illusory - There is profundity in this single statement that takes huge effort to truly understand - because we've been heaped with so much social conditioning - For example, a lot of psychological science research distinguishes between - what is real and - what is an illusion - However, the investigations that these teachings are referring to reveal that what both - conventional science and - the ordinary, mundane view of reality - take for real are both illusory when we deeply understand interdependent origination - The illusion is extraordinarily real and - it is a huge leap to know, feel and experience that ALL of reality, including both your - inner private world and the - outer shared world are illusory - That is, that while appearing, everything that appears is only due to other causes and conditions - Another way to say this is that nouns (things/objects) are temporary designations - underneath them is always verbs (processes)
I don't think that anything can happen that influence Russian people to protest or to stand up to disagree whatever if they give their own children Sons with 00:45:48 their own hands
for - key insight - Russian oppression - zero chance of protest and uprising
key insight - Russian oppression - zero chance of protest and uprising - Putin is so ruthless as a dictator that anyone who protests risks death. - Under these conditions, noone dares to organize - If there is a synchronized movement, Putin can be overthrown, but Putin's brutality insures that no such synchronization can happen
to - Jake Broe interview - Russian citizen complacency - like German citizens allowing millions of Jews to die - https://hyp.is/sXpZth5fEe-Xtj_-DhT_BQ/docdrop.org/video/XX3zU5QNvCw/
Ivan papov
for - key insight - geopolitics - arrest of General Ivan Papov - suppress uprising
key insight - geopolitics - Russia - arrest of general Papov - The arrest sends a signal to all the generals - do not try to overthrow Putin
Putin Mafia style autocratic environment um wherever he can
for - key insight - Putin is trying to create autocratic governments all over the world - geopolitics - Putin's influence in Georgia
Putin's Russia is based on corruption corruption is the crime 00:06:30 that uh binds everyone together
for - key insight - geopolitics - Russian government is a mafia
key insight - geopolitics - Russian government is a mafia - everyone is corrupt and almost everyone in Putin's government is loyal to Putin and have committed crimes that Putin can use against them
human Minds have to find a way to cope so that you can get that six to eight hours of sleep at night or whatever and there's a lot of evil things that people will accept just so they can get through the day
for - key insight, adjacency - conformity bias - accepting evil - Russian citizen complacency - no protest
adjacency, key insight - between - geopolitics - Russia Ukraine War - complacency - oppression - adjacency relationship - Just like how ordinary German citizens accepted the death of millions of Jews, the same thing is happening in Russia. - Millions of ordinary Russian citizens are just doing what they can individually to survive day to day - If that means accepting the death of hundreds of thousands of innocents, then that is the price they will pay - Putin's oppression is so brutal that individuals risk their lives if they put up any resistance or protest
since 1992 it's been a good deal The Pact that the Western Alliance has made with dictators around the world we'll buy your oil you can get rich 00:15:16 we'll look the other way when you kill your own people but you just can't attack your neighbors
for - key insight, quote - the Pact between the West and dictators since 1992
quote - Since 1992 it's been a good deal - The Pact that the Western Alliance has made with dictators around the world - we'll buy your oil you can get rich - we'll look the other way when you kill your own people - but you just can't attack your neighbors
the United States was suppressing Democratic movements around the world because if an authoritarian if a communist can win an 00:13:59 election fairly one time that's the end of free and fair elections
for - key insight - why US geopolitics installed dictatorships - progress trap- US foreign policy that shaped modernity
key insight - why US geopolitics installed dictatorships - This was the US's rationale to justify the geopolitical mess it created this century: - If you allow democracy in the age of Communism - people might vote for communism, then - kill all the rich people, then - take their stuff, then - redistribute it - You can get a majority support for that in an impoverished country and that was perceived as a threat - So the United States was suppressing Democratic movements around the world - because if an authoritarian if a communist can win an election fairly one time, - that's the end of free and fair elections - So for decades, the US foreign policy agenda was to install dictators to suppress the threat that democracy could produce communism. - But after "communism was defeated" - all these installed dictators around the world that are the direct result of the pathological US foreign policy posed a new, unexpected quagmire - The decades of US foreign policy had created an enormous progress trap that we are all living through now - The US now had to normalize relations with the new world of dictators it had helped created out of its own fears<br /> - A new US foreign policy rule emerged to deal with this fiasco - Stay in your own country - If you want to kill, imprison, brutalize or subjegate your own people, it is fine with the US government as long as it is done within your own state borders - As long as a nation state abuses their own people, the US will continue to: - buy your oil - trade with you - show up at the UN - even have an occasional State event for you - However, Russia broke that rule
Steffen and colleagues20Steffen W Richardson K Rockström J et al.Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet.Science. 2015; 3471259855 Crossref PubMed Scopus (6576) Google Scholar stated that the planetary boundaries framework was “not designed to be downscaled or disaggregated to smaller levels
.> for - key insight - downscaling planetary boundaries - Steffen et al.
a forest actually moves um and and trees move but one of the things that they do is utilize other organisms to move them to move them 00:41:41 because reproduction is a way in which they plant transplant themselves further away from their sight of of of of their rooted site
for - key insight - reproduction is for adaptability, not to reproduce the gene pool
key insight - reproduction is for adaptability, not to reproduce the gene pool - for example, trees reproduce so they can move themselves - They are rooted so they cannot get up and walk - so they produce seeds that are transported by over living organisms and by the wind
reproduction is not to produce the same it it's not about producing another Perry or another r or another Dennis 00:38:39 it's actually to produce another organism that is adapting and adaptable
for - key insight - evolution - not producing the same, but different, more adaptive
key insight - evolution - not producing the same, but different, more adaptive - The goal of evolution is not to replicate the same individual, but to create a different one that is BETTER ADAPTED to its environment - and towards this end, physiology is evolution, evolution is physiology (via epigenetics)
I think one of the other mistakes that have been made in biology of the 20th century was
for - individual / collective gestalt - gene centrism - paradigm shift - adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, individual / environment gestalt - quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - key insight - mistake of 20th century biology- Ray Noble
quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - (see below)
adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - between - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, - individual / environment gestalt - adjacency relationship - The mistake that 20th century biology has made is in - ascribing too much power to the gene, and - minimizing the role of epigenetics - Focusing the majority of attention and resources on the genes of the organism, and - defocusing attention on the organisms (epigenetic) interactions with the environment, including both - biotic elements and - abiotic elements - It's not the case that the genes are the major determinant factor and the epigenetics play a minor role - It IS the case that epigenetics play an equally important role in transmitting and assimilating features into the genome - The individual organism is intertwingled with its environment and with other living organisms - The individual / collective gestalt and the individual / environment gestalt is the appropriate unit of study
it's an advantage for epigenetic changes to be temporary because if the environment is only a temporary change you can forget about it if the environment is 00:35:19 longlasting it can get a similation in the genome and you've got speciation that's the extraordinary thing natural selection is not the origin of speciation it's epigenetics 00:35:34 followed by the genetic changes the epigenetic leades
for - key insight - natural selection happens by epigenetic change followed by genetic change
key insight - natural selection happens by epigenetic change followed by genetic change - It's an advantage for epigenetic changes to be temporary because - if the environment is only a temporary change you can forget about it - if the environment is long lasting it can get assimilation in the genome and you've got speciation - That's the extraordinary thing - natural selection is not the origin of speciation, - it's epigenetics - followed by the genetic changes - The epigenetic leads - therefore, the environment leads
the organism has that ability already the reason is simply 00:17:41 because it could use the chance events that occur in his molecular mechanisms there's where the creativity comes from then the question is what what emerges from that do you want to keep and what do you want to reject
for - key insight - eliminating cartesian dualism in biology - creativity - multi-scale explanation
key insight - eliminating cartesian dualism in biology - Noble advances a radical and simple explanation to explain how<br /> - higher level organisms and cellular mechanisms make the decisions that inform the genetic switches which decision path to make - The higher level system takes advantage of the random events in molecular mechanisms and chooses the ones that are most fit - This has the potential to explain creativity at all living scales, up to human consciousness itself!
we've spent 20 years now sequencing as many genomes as we can the output as 00:08:46 promised simply hasn't appeared
for - key insight - failure of the gene coding uni-causal model - key insight - failure of genetic determinism
there are no genes for any of those membranes all the lipids that form the membranes and the complicated 00:07:27 structures that you can see in a typical cell none of that is coded for in the genome all of that is inherited
for - key insight - decision-making structures are in the cell membrane, not the genes
key insight - The codes that enable us to make choices are located in - the membranes of our cells and - their protein channels - There are no genes for - any of those membranes - all the lipids that form the membranes and the complicated structures that you can see in a typical cell - None of that is coded for in the genome - All of that is inherited
this is whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness
for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity
key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior
adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.
the one thing I can't teach is taste, and the one predictor I have of the people who will never develop it are
for - quote - taste - who can't develop it - perfectionists - key insight - finding our own unique voice - adjacency - creativity - learning from others - synthesis
quote - taste - who can't develop it - (see below)
comment - We we are overly dependent on others - it becomes difficult to develop our own - taste or - style - To develop our own unique taste is a balancing act - we are influenced by others by digesting the work of others - but then we must synthesize our own unique expression out of that - A useful metaphor is tuning a string - too loose and it can't work - neither if it is too tight - it snaps
adjacency - between - creativity - learning from others - synthesis - adjacency statement - our creativity depends on a balance of - learning from others - synthesizing what we've learned into something uniquely ours
I had the advantage, early in my career, of starting making music without any experience,
for - key insight - not knowing - advantages - quote - Rick Ruben - quote - advantages of having no references
quote - advantages of having no references - (see below)
All roads lead to progress.
for - key insight - all roads lead to progress - progress trap - Prometheus complex - impuslive urge to invent
Comment - This is fleshed out in the final three paragraphs of this article - I disagree with the closing sentence, however
The connections might not be direct, like saying, ‘Oh, I see nuclear weapons in the distance; let’s go there,’
To bring Carlin’s analogy home,
drift toward the very thing we’re debating if we should do.
The Prometheus complex can be seen over and over again
comment - I disagree with the last line - If the meta-poly-perma-crisis is what is meant by "OK", then it is a very distorted use of that word. - Rather, this Promethian way of thinking and act - compounded over the lifetime of human civilization - is EXACTLY what has brought us to the brink of civilizational disaster - and it may not turn out to be "ok"!
our lives really aren’t that important and we’ll all soon be forgotten anyway.
for - cup half full
insight - smaller self vs greater self - or this could be thought in a cup-half-full perspective, - that ALL lives are sacred from the outset - The small self may forget, but the absence of any memories is perhaps the mark of the greater self
What is the most that a working-class person could hope for from a net-zero future?
for - quote - working class - net zero - adjacency - working class - net zero - key insight - working class - net zero
quote - Chris Yates - within class - net zero - (see quote below)
it reveals that it’s those immediate experiences of the environment rather than global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that affect people’s ideas about climate.
insight - hyperobjects
Comment - This of why a Deep Humanity approach that identifies and clarifies the fundamental issues is so important
If acting on climate change means sacrificing what little freedom I have left, then what value is that to me?
key insight - of all about the venison of individual liberty that modernization had sold is a companion bill of goods on
Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling.
for - boredom - Deep Humanity - boredom - psychology - boredom - adjacency - boredom - insight - history - modernity
adjacency - between - boredom - insight - history - modernity - Adjacency statement - This is an insightful observation that - the affordances of a technologically sophisticated modernity - promotes boredom by providing a means to escape it, - rather than deal with it. - The notable decline of religiosity in the West also cuts off a traditional means of getting in touch with the wonder of existence - This could explain the tiffin popularity of meditation in the West as a non religious vehicle for centering in the here and now, - as boredom is a condition of avoiding the here and now
we 00:11:13 have a media that needs to survive based on clicks and controversy and serving the most engaged people
for - quote - roots of misinformation, quote - roots of fake news, key insight - roots of misinformation
key insight - roots of misinformation - (see below)
quote - roots of misinformation - we have a media that needs to survive based on - clicks and - controversy and - serving the most engaged people - so they both sides the issues - they they lift up - facts and - lies - as equivalent in order to claim no bias but - that in itself is a bias because - it gives more oxygen to the - lies and - the disinformation - that is really dangerous to our society and - we are living through the impacts of - those errors and - that malpractice -done by media in America
What is more lacking, however, are approaches to transformation that can be applied in and adapted to multiple (and necessarily unique) contexts
for - key insight - movement of movements - What's missing - transformation catalyst - indyweb / Indranet
Doing that requires new approaches to organizing for transformation where multiple initiatives connect, cohere, and amplify their individual and collective transformative action
for - key insight - global movement requirements - new organising system - indyweb /Indranet - people-centered - interpersonal - individual collective gestalt - a foundational idea of indyweb / Indranet epistemology - Deep Humanity - epistemological foundation of indyweb / Indranet
Comment - indyweb / Indranet is ideally suited for this - seeing the mention of individual and collective in a sentence surfaced the new Deep Humanity concept of individual collective gestalt that is intrinsic to the epistemological foundation of the Indyweb / Indranet - This is reflected in the words to describe the Indyweb / Indranet as people-centered and interpersonal
in general countries tend to excavate enormous volumes of earth and this earth is incredibly considered as a waste material
for - circular economy - building - excavation waste - circular economy - construction - excavation waste - key insight - repurpose excavation waste as building material
key insight - She makes an pretty important observation about the inefficiency of current linear construction process - The excavation part requires enormous amounts of energy, and the earth that is excavated is treated as waste that must be disposed of AT A COST! - Instead, with a paradigm shift of earth as a valuable building resource, the excavation PRODUCES the building materials! - This is precisely what BC Material's circular economy business model is and it makes total sense!<br /> - With a simple paradigm and perspective shift, waste is suddenly transformed into a resource! - waste2resource - waste-to-resource
new meme - Waste-2-Resource
i want to now uh introduce the key concept in in whitehead's mature metaphysics concrescence
for - key insight - concrescence - definition - concrescence - Whitehead - definition - The many become the one - Whitehead - definition - Res Potentia - Tim Eastman - definition - superject - Whitehead - definition - moment of satisfaction - Whitehead - definition - dipolar - Whitehead - definition - ingression - Whitehead definition - CONCRESCENCE - is the description of the phases of the iterative process by which reality advances from the past into the present then into the future - this definition is metaphysical and applies to all aspects of reality
Concrescence is the process by which
There's another domain that whitehead makes reference to
Whitehead describes the process of concrescence or each drop of experience as DIPOLAR, having two poles:
Each concrescence or drop of experience begins with the physical pole
and what the ingression of eternal objects do is provide each occasion of experience, each concrescence with
If the physical pole is what initiates the experience of each concrescing occasion
The subjective form is how the occasion fills the past
And so this is the most general account in Whitehead's view that we can offer
Experience is always in the present and the satisfaction that is achieved by each moment of concrescence is enjoyed in the present
once you dissolve that boundary you can't tell whose memories or who's anymore that's kind of the big thing about um that that kind of memory wiping the the wiping the identity on these 00:06:18 memories is a big part of multicellularity
for - key insight - multicellularity - memory wiping
investigate - salience of memory wiping for multicellularity - This is a very important biological behavior. - Perform a literature review to understand examples of this
question - biological memory wiping - can it be extrapolated to social superorganism?
bound by values rather than beliefs.
for - key insight - spiritual collectives - bound by values instead of beliefs
for - climate crisis - U.S. intra-country migration - key insight - climate migration - towards disaster zones
If there’s a commonality between far Left and far Right,
for - quote - commonality between far left and far right - key insight
If there’s a commonality between far Left and far Right, says Lyons,
we need to make the transition acceptable and attractive for the vast majority of citizens, and the only way to do that, is to make the changes easy to adopt. This requires strong engagement with society at large, and policies that make sustainable life choices not only easier, but also cheaper and more attractive. Or, put it the other way around, it must be more expensive to destroy the planet or the health of our fellow citizens".
for: meme - make it expensive to destroy the planet, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - make it expensive to destroy the planet, key insight - make it expensive to destroy the planet
key insight
As like-minded people organized, the three governance styles manifested into the three sectors (government, corporate, and NGOs). The sectors are emergent qualities of society, not a planned model.
some of the biggest investors in private equity are pension funds. Those are pensions? Do we need to take our money if we have, if we're lucky enough to have a pension, out of the private markets like that? And if so, where do we put it? - Yeah, I would love to see this conversation 00:23:48 happen among institutional investors. I mean, what they have been flocking into private equity and it's the least transparent, the least accountable, the least responsible of the sectors.
for: key insight - adjacency - polycrisis - pension funds investing in private equity are a driving force
key insight
for: James Hansen - 2023 paper, key insight - James Hansen, leverage point - emergence of new 3rd political party, leverage point - youth in politics, climate change - politics, climate crisis - politics
Key insight: James Hansen
reference
Washington is a swamp it we throw out one party the other one comes in they take money from special interests and we don't have a government that's serving the interests 01:25:09 of the public that's what I think we have to fix and I don't see how we do that unless we have a party that takes no money from special interests
for: key insight- polycrisis - climate crisis - political crisis, climate crisis - requires a new political party, money in politics, climate crisis - fossil fuel lobbyists, climate change - politics, climate crisis - politics, James Hansen - key insight - political action - 3rd party
key insight
question
In the neoliberal era, individuals are forced to assume sole responsibility for navigating “every hardship and every difficulty—from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction.” When the pandemic exacerbated these hardships, it was an uphill battle to build solidarity and convince people to support collective solutions. After a lifetime of being told they were on their own, “a subset of the population” doubled down on individualism. It does not, now, seem surprising to Klein that they essentially said, “Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab
for: key insight - anti-vaxxers, key insight - conspiracy theories, key insight - maga, key insight - neoliberalism and failure at collective action
key insight: neoliberalism and failure of collective action
we need to build this this again this bridge and it's obviously not going to be written in the 00:50:41 same style or standard as your kind of deep academic papers if you think this is uh U unnecessary or irrelevant then you end up with is a scientific 00:50:56 Community which talks only to itself in language that nobody else understands and you live the general Republic uh uh prey to a lot of very 00:51:09 unscientific conspiracy theories and mythologies and theories about the world
for: academic communication to the public - importance, elites - two types, key insight - elites, key insight - science communication
comment
key insight
references
history is always the result of a lot of causes coming together you know 00:29:22 you have this metaphor of the chain of events and this is a terrible metaphor for there is no chain of events a chain of events imagines that every event is a link connected to one previous event and 00:29:36 to one subsequent event so there is a war there is one cause for the war and there will be one consequence it's never like that in history every event is more like a tree there is an entire system of 00:29:50 roots that came together to create it and it has a lot of fruits with lots of different influences
for: insight - history - complexity, bad metaphor - chain of events
insight: complexity and history
adjacency between
I think part and you see this kind of delicate dance that when things are going uh uh too slow so people vote in a more 00:25:29 liberal Administration that will speed things up and will be more creative Bolder in its social experiments and when things go too fast then you say okay liberals you had your chance now 00:25:41 let's bring the conservatives to slow down a little and and have a bit of of a breath
for: insight - conservative vs liberal - speed of sdopting social norm
insight
in many parts of the world you see a kind of conservative suicide that conservatives are abandoning their kind of traditional role to slow down and conserve 00:26:09 institutions and traditions and so forth and they still call themselves conservatives but they become this kind of new radical party which is more about ignoring traditions and destroying 00:26:23 institutions and then it becomes the job of liberals to be the audience of the institutions
what you see in a lot of modern politics is this delicate dance between conservatives and 00:24:40 liberals which I think that uh uh for many generations they agreed on the basics their main disagreement was about the pace that both conservatives and 00:24:52 liberals they basically agree we need some rules and also we need the ability to to change the rules but the conservatives prefer a much slower Pace
for: quote - social constructs - liberals and conservatives, social norms - liberals and conservatives, insight - social norms
in other words
insight
adjacency between
does your scholarship suggest why so many societies do that rather than 00:20:09 saying maybe we start with a Declaration of Human Rights today maybe we write a new one from scratch based on what we know today um because it's very difficult to reach an agreement between a lot of 00:20:21 people and also you know you need to base a a a a real Society is something something extremely complex which you need to base on empirical experience 00:20:34 every time that people try to create a completely new social order just by inventing some Theory it ends very badly you need on yes you do need the ability 00:20:46 to change things a long time but not too quickly and not everything at once so most of the time you have these founding principles and shr find in this 00:20:58 or that text also orally it doesn't have to be written down and at least good societies also have mechanisms to change it but you have to start from some kind 00:21:12 of of of of social consensus and some kind of of social experience if every year we try to invent everything from scratch then Society will just collapse
for: insight - creating new social norms is difficult
insight
analogy: changing social norms, sports
the question is often do people acknowledge that say the basic rules of their society were created out of the human imagination or are there some kind 00:15:49 of objective thing that came from outside let's say from God you look for instance at the history of slavery so you know the 10 Commandments in the in the 10th commandment there is an 00:16:02 endorsement of slavery the 10th commandment says that you should not covet your neighbor's H uh wife or ox or field or 00:16:14 slaves implying that there is nothing wrong with holding slaves it's only wrong if you CET your neighbor's slaves then God is angry with you now because the Ten Commandments uh don't 00:16:27 acknowledge that they were created by humans they don't have any mechanism to amend them and therefore we still have the tenth commandment and nobody has the power to change the to to strike out 00:16:40 slavery from The Ten Commandments now the US Constitution in contrast as everybody points out it was written partly by slaveholders and also endorses 00:16:52 slavery but the genius of the American Founders The Genius of the American institution is that it acknowledges its own that it's the result of of of human 00:17:05 creation it starts with with the people not with I am your God and therefore it includes a mechanism to amend itself
for: insight - holy vs human scriptures
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there are good stories and bad stories uh good stories I mean this is very on a very very simplistic level but good stories 00:13:23 benefit people and bad stories can create you know Wars and genocides and and the most terrible crimes in history were committed in the name of some fictional story people believed very few 00:13:38 Wars in history are about objective material things people think that we fight like wolves or chimpanzees over food and territory this is not the case 00:13:52 at least not in the modern world if I look for instance at my country which is at present in at War the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not really about food and territory there is enough food 00:14:04 between the Jordan and Mediterranean to feed everybody there is enough territory to build houses and schools for everybody but you have two conflicting stories or more than two conflicting 00:14:17 stories in the minds of different people and they can't agree on the story they can't find a common story that everybody would be happy with and this is the the Deep source of the conflict
for: stories - consequences of good and bad stories, inisight - war and genocide - when people violently disagree on stories,
insight
what you're referring to is the idea that people come together and through language culture and story they have narratives that then create their own realities like the 00:12:04 sociologist abely the sociologist wi Thomas said if people think people believe things to be real then they are real in their consequences
for: Thomas Theorem, The definition of the situation, William Isaac Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thomas, definition - Thomas Theorem, definition - definition of the situation, conflicting belief systems - Thomas theorem, learned something new - Thomas theorem
definition: Thomas Theorem
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.[1]
In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior.|
key insight: polarization
adjacency between:
adjacency statement
reference
This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
for: quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - elite positive feedback carbon inequality loop, climate crisis - societal aspirations, elites - societal aspirations, societal aspirations, key insight - societal aspirations
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I tell my researchers look for the 00:57:41 positive feedbacks these are not good feedbacks these are self-reinforcing feedbacks where you get a cycle of of causation that causes it to reinforce itself those 00:57:52 positive feedbacks which may cross several systems like climate economic pandemic Health Systems those positive feedbacks are where you're getting the synchronization if you can find those 00:58:04 then you're making real Headway on the synchronization effect
for: adjacency - synchronization - clues - positive feedbacks, key insight - synchronisation - positive feedbacks
adjacency between
have you seen this amazing interview from years ago with um what's he called Andrew 00:50:57 marsky yes and um uh and he says and um Andrew Maron says in a incredibly pompous way you know journalist with a stroppy disputatious
for: media bias - insight of journalist questions
media insight
Although there are manyinitiatives, they have not yet reached the scale necessary to respond effectively to the crises; they oftenlack a stable and facile organisation of collaboration and a clearly structured process of joint decisionmaking
for: key insight - community capacity
key insight - community capacity
it took leadership and circumstance to ultimately 00:08:08 get a public truly mobilized
there must be a dozen bodies around the world who are trying to rethink it to some extent economics and 00:47:49 capitalism my issue with all of that is it's still within the frame that our last election was in 14 parties basically saying our future 00:48:03 is fundamentally modern now some of them might say and we want a new kind of capitalism but they're still in a modern frame and so I want to go back to your comment about Donald Trump 00:48:16 and others that there are people who kind of intuitively get it that that we do need to shake up the systems in a really serious way that we've got 00:48:29 but you see it actually took that idea seriously I mean it's just for the moment you and I agree and and anybody who's listening to this agree what we've done in effect 00:48:41 is by agreeing to be oblivious to the systems that we're actually in we have left to people who want to shake 00:48:55 up systems for their own good and in service of their own ego you end up with the Daniel Smiths on Donald Trump's and Eragon in turkey and the Prime Minister the 00:49:08 prime minister of Hungary um and Johnson who was prime minister in England uh I mean you end up with people who are thoroughly destructive yes they're perfectly willing to shake 00:49:21 things up but in a sense to no good end
Alberta is not a humble place we are not people we are extraordinarily male dominated 00:09:00 you know as well as I do that Alberta did not was not really a place where Europeans showed up uh until late in the 19th century
for: key insight - Alberta
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sadly the now global sustainability industry is mostly stuck with the very 00:05:03 mindset that is the root cause of the wickednesses we are in over six decades
for key insight - sustainability industry is stuck
key insight
one of the things that is true of us I 01:13:59 dare say it is true of all of us in our own ways who are listening to this at whatever time we're listening to it and that is there are voices within as we know when we've been dismissed as a person we know when other people have 01:14:13 seen us merely as a function or have taken a quick glance of us and see nothing there a value and they just and we know how much that shrivels us up you know as we know as persons rather 01:14:26 than as functions we're taught in the modern world to take ourselves as functions to work but not your whole person and so one of the things we know as persons is that we light up like 01:14:38 lightbulbs when other persons recognize us as whole persons as a value as a person
in our modern way of thinking the dominant metaphors 01:10:43 are mechanical and in mechanical system is literally the case if you can make the system more efficient you get rid of waste so if you have parts that duplicate each other they're not needed you can get rid of one of them and 01:10:57 that's true for mechanical systems so that waste and mechanical systems can is something you can get rid of and decrease efficiency but in living human 01:11:08 and even biological systems duplication is not waste its resilience
for: key insight - modernity - inefficiency - biological system - resilience
key insight
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the official fantasy of the 20th century after the war but now also the 21st century is this that of course they will 00:53:15 all become like us and after the war we called it development and they were then third world countries would become first world some second world countries as well and the interesting thing is is 00:53:30 that fundamentally that really hasn't changed if you scratch under the paint of the UN's sustainable development goals what you find is they want to take the very best fruits of modernity and 00:53:42 make them in a fair way distribute them more evenly across the planet so that everybody has the advantages of a modern life and as billa suggested that's a 00:53:56 fantasy that isn't going to happen there isn't enough planet for that to happen but nevertheless this is the official fantasy it drives the OECD and the folks at Davos and the UN and most 00:54:08 universities
for: key insight - modernity framework is the major narrative, quote - modernity framework is the major narrative
key insight: modernity framework is the major narrative
we've got to leave the bottom left-hand corner and that only gives you three other spaces to go to and I've already noted that one of those spaces may be a place that has a certain utility short-run 00:50:27 but don't try to build your culture there because you can't do it it's a place that you want to be in for a while but then you wanna leave so it really only gives you two places
for: major cultural paradigms, modernity - leaving, cultural transition, cultural evolution, MET, Major Evolutionary Transition, kiey insight - 4 major cultural paradigms
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key insight: 4 major cultural paradigms
Due to its nature, phenomenology focuses on experiences and emphasizes the sense thatsurrounds the everyday, the meaning of the human being, that is to say, the experience of whatwe are. Phenomenology is sensitive to the problems around the world of life.The world of life represents the reality of daily life, which is investigated under a non-naive eye. This world without categories or explanations, coming from science, is the life's pre-scientific dimension, characterized by being extremely rich, a world of experiences andexperience. In this world, objective sciences are examined as cultural facts. It is the sum of bordersand horizons in which worldly facts are born and established, and which have to be regeneratedby experience. This study corresponds to the worldly phenomenology.
for: key insight - phenomenology as life's pre-scientific dimension
key insight
the main reason for this lack of 00:11:50 awareness is that our attention is almost completely absorbed into the content the what or object of our experience to the detriment of the experience itself
for key insight: object overshadows subject
paraphrase
geomorphology. That's my favorite word. I always tell my students this, I'm like, "If there's just one thing I want you 00:29:44 to learn in this class, if you do never come back, and you're just here the first two days of class, geomorphic, conforming to the shape of the land." This is, in my opinion, the fundamental flaw of our civilization is that our political boundaries and our land management units, property boundaries are not conforming to the shape of the land. Because if they did, then decisions we made would 00:30:15 have an integrated holistic landscape scale impact instead of a fragmented or fractured impact
for: key insight, key insight - Andrew Millison, key insight - geomorphology, quote, quote - Andrew Millison, quote - geomorphology
definition: geomorphology, geomorphic
quote: Andrew Millison
one of the problems of the double 00:44:14 bind is that you are often so caught in the extreme drama of the situation that it becomes very difficult to see beyond it
for: double bind - difficulty, insight - double bind
insight: double bind
We currently have a climate movement and a biodiversity movement. These are for the most part, two separate movements. As our understandings grow and spread of how important biodiversity is to climate, these two movements can merge and synergize.
for: key insight, climate movement, biodiversity movement, adjacency, adjacency - climate movement - biodiversity movement
key insight
Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on, what they turn out to be is just inferences that we do from marks on the screens of our apparatuses in the laboratory essentially.
for: key insight, science - key insight, science - epoche
key insight
the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist. To see that, it is useful to consider what it might be like to have the freedom to control what thought one had next.
quote: Michael Levin
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example - control agent - imperfection: end
triggered insight: not only are thoughts and actions random, but dreams as well
the Bodhisattva cognitive system is no longer constrained by the perception that one single self—i.e., its own self—requires special and sustained attention. Instead, Bodhisattva cognitive processes are now said to engage with spontaneous care for all apparent individuals. Thus, an immediate takeaway from non-dual insight is said to be the perception that oneself and all others are ultimately of the same identity.
we were designed by you know evolution through evolution we have become we were i really every organism as we'll 00:45:01 talk about in a minute is a problem-solving organism and if i can't solve problems there's like a you know like fundamentally going against the grain of what it means to be an organism
there's 00:08:43 nothing there that could be secured and here's the important point I think we experienced that we experience it as a sense of lack 00:08:58 that is to say the sense that something is wrong with me something is missing something isn't quite right I'm not good enough and the reality is I think all of us to 00:09:14 some degree have some sense of that some sense of lack even though we might ignore it or cover it up there's there's some sense of that but because it's mostly sort of unconscious in the sense that we don't 00:09:29 really know where it comes from
When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home, what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?
Ludwig firebach has this idea that religion is a place where human 00:12:22 beings sort of um alienate their intrinsic superpowers right they they turn them inside out and they push them into some kind of Heaven which is basically the future
-quote - religion is a place where human beings alienate their intrinsic superpowers - author - Timotny Morton, quoting Ludwig Feuerbach
if we want to end up with a world that is shaped by the best of us, rather than very often the worst of us, we have to think carefully, we have to engineer a system.
in any case, the mental world is di¤erent from the physicalworld and constitutes an important part of our reality.
what is 00:02:17 history it's many parallel streams of events which meet at certain points so why not create them as parallel structures
Not all favorites are problems! I don’t phrase everything as a problem. For example, I am writing a collection of short stories set in a prison valley. It is also part of my list of favorites. I think Feynman has 12 favorite problems because as a physicist, you mainly solve problems. But as a writer, you don’t only solve problems, you write texts. There are different types of opportunities, not just problems.
Not everything has to be a problem in the literal sense of the word; it's a tool for generating creative insight by means of prompting and relational thinking.
https://random-blather.com/2014/04/28/information-isnt-power/
Illustration by David Somerville based on the original by Hugh McLeod.
Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/ysRBGgACEe6UNPvIvmWBkQ
This diagram is roughly a cartoon of the zettelkasten process, especially if the panels are labeled: reading, excerpting/synopsis, linking, serendipity, writing.
Without variation on given ideas, there are no possibilities of scrutiny and selection of innovations. Therefore, the actual challenge becomes generating incidents with sufficiently high chances of selection.
The value of a zettelkasten is as a tool to actively force combinatorial creativity—the goal is to create accidents or collisions of ideas which might have a high chance of being discovered and selected for.
Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.
Google translation:
The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.
While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?
Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.
One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?
What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?
An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.
unconscious motivations have not been eradicated by rational analysis.
// Insight Maker is used to model system dynamics and create agent based models by creating causal loop diagrams and allowing users to run simulations on those
Perhaps the best piece of advice I ever got from Jeff Bezos was this: Invest in things that don't change. His example was that customers won't wake up one day and wish shipping was slower or the selection of goods poorer. So investing in logistics and warehousing was investing in things that don't change, and will continue to pay dividends for decades.
This was also discussed at length in one of the Acquired's episode on AWS/Amazon.
While structural injustice and inequality do impede autonomy by fostering force and fraud, oppression and exploitation, these structural conditions also undermine autonomous self-recognition by impeding the psycho-social development integral to fulfilling the capability to be an autonomous self and agent. This is one convergence of symbiotic theorizing and the recognitional practice of autonomy. Through symbiotic practices, the assistance or “affordances” of the material and social worlds can be drawn on to actualize the inherent potential for autonomous action that resides in each human being.[16]
!- key insight : autonomy and symbiosis
What is abrogated here is our right to the future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and thus make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.
!- surveillance capitalism : key insight -mass behavioral modification takes away autonomy
InSight has also been useful because it has a camera attached, allowing it to take some very nice photos of the surface of Mars.
Very cool.
Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.
What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.
You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.
Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas
For example, if I've left myself a note like #pkm/xref this reminds me of something the Carthage expert I like said, but I can't remember her name I will search my notes to figure out the name of the Carthage expert I like, cross-reference the highlight with things she said, and add links and update notes as appropriate. If I said something like This reminds me of the article about the guy a crane is in love with when I was taking notes on something without access to my notes, I will go find the article and link to my notes about it so that my backlinks and graph are updated.
I'm not sure how frequent this pattern is within fleeting notes, but it's something I do myself to create at least a temporary shorthand context of how things interrelate and which can easily be cleaned up later in the longer form permanent notes.
The tougher thing is to always capture these sorts of things which one won't remember, but which quite often create better and stronger insights down the road.