• claim
  • the nonmaterial
    • constitutes a domain of existence with its own characteristics and
    • with the ability to exert downward influence on the material domain

• claim
  • we inhabit a world that is both material and nonmaterial
• comment
  • this is where their terminology physiosphere and symbolosphere originates from

• claim
  • the nonmaterial domain is located most profoundly in symbolic relationships
  • where signs accrue meaning by reference to other signs

• Title
  • Three levels of the symbolosphere
• Authors
  • Mark Burgin and John H. Schumann

• Abstract

  • This paper attempts to understand the coexistence of the
    • material and
    • non-material
  • aspects of our lives.
  • By synthesizing ideas about
    • structures,
    • physical entities,
    • mental phenomena, and
    • symbolic relations,
  • we argue that
    • the nonmaterial can emerge from the material, and
    • then the nonmaterial may mediate the production of material entities.
  • Finally, this cycle is applied to notions of creativity and invention.

• Comment

  • the authors are situated in materialism that explains non-materialism as an epi-phenomena

• potential progress trap

  • in vivo, an animal body has a mechanism to turn off stem cells when they are growing in the wrong place in the body. This regulates the body to grow properly.
  • in lab grown meat, an artificial in vitro environment is created for the stem cells and they are encouraged to keep growing continuously (some critics compare this to cancerous growth)
  • for UNKNOWN REASONS, FSB seems to prevent the mechanism from turning off cell growth, no matter what animal food species.
  • the worrying thing here is that the scientific community does not know why FSB has this behavior.

• Question

  • What are the views of the regulatory agencies that have passed Lab grown meat on this subject?

• potential progress trap
  • FBS
    • Fetal Bovine Serum

• This is used for the growth of all kinds of stem cells, not just those from cows

  • We do not know the full implications of mixing FBS from cows with all other species

• Question

  • What are the views of the regulatory agencies that have passed Lab grown meat on this subject?

• FBS volumes needed for a single lab grown burger are impractical
  • an estimated 50 liters of bovine serum is needed
  • a single cow fetus can yield between 150 and 550 milliliters of serum
  • this means that to create a single burger you need the blood of between 90 and 333 cow fetuses until a synthetic or plant-based alternative to fbs is found

• potential progress trap
  • if the seed stem cell has some unknown problem
    • it will potentially be inherited by all descedents

• Title
  • Lab grown meat
• Author
  • Real Science
• Publication
  • Youtube video

• Question
  • where are the progress traps?
  • It's already meeting approvals in SIngapore and FDA in USA.
  • Where are the hidden problems? -
  • This article highlights some of the issues
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencealert.com%2Flab-grown-meat-has-a-big-problem-very-few-people-know-about&group=world

• target volume for lab grown meat in USA
  • 40 million pounds of meat across USA

• Title
  • Eat Just To Scale Up Cultured Meat Production On Gaining New Regulatory Approval In Singapore
• Author
  • Douglas Yu
• Publication
  • Forbes

• Date

  • Jan 18, 2023

• Description

  • This story updates what is happening in the lab brown meat industry.

• Comment

  • What progress traps might present themselves here?
  • Immediately, one presents itself
    • Centralization of global meat production to a few technological silos
    • Significant job loss in the meat industry

• Overall demand for meat is expected to jump more than 70 percent by 2050
• livestock farming currently represents about 15 percent of all current human greenhouse gas emissions (UN FAO).
• To reduce meat consumption now requires a familiar dual approach:
  • provide alternatives available now
    • plant proteins are still the most viable alternative
  • degrowth
    • reduce our meat consumption rather than eliminate it entirely,

• The researchers say that
  • it would make more sense to invest in increasing the efficiencies of existing livestock farms
    • to limit their environmental footprint,
  • which may provide greater emissions reductions sooner that this fledgling industry of lab-grown meat can.

• sustainability life cycle assessment impacts
  • University of California, Davis (UCD), Holtville researchers performed a life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes
    • has not yet been peer-reviewed
    • findings are that cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.
    • Pros
      • cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep,
      • cultured meat uses less water and antibiotics,
    • Cons
      • laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums,
      • growing crops for sugars and vitamins.
      • energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps.
        • energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.
          • "Otherwise the animal cells won't grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster,

• Title
  • Lab-Grown Meat Has a Big Problem Very Few People Know About
• Author
  • Tessa Koumoundouros
• Publication
  • Science Alert
• Date June 2, 2023

• Question
  • Pssibilianism - is a philosophy suitable for the Anthropocene?

• suggestion
  • we should make an official calendar

• Question
  • What does supervising mean? Give some concrete examples please.

• Question
  • Is there any clauses for liabilities if kits or equipment we manufacture are incorrectly built or used, or not maintained correctly and an accident happens?

• suggestion
  • explicitly write down the entrance fee

• suggestion
  • Perhaps explicitly state this number

• Suggestion
  • Add this to the glossary of terms at the beginning of the constitution

• Question
  • Could the cooperative also provide education to neighboring communities with the purpose of assisting other communities to form their own cooperatives and spread the cooperative model across the country?
  • Also, could the cooperative form partnerships or other business relationships that benefit the cooperative?

• This definition is not so clear to JGW.

• Title

  • Constitution Muizenberg Electricity Co-operative Limited

• Description

  • Muizenberg is a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa

• quote
  • "“Pandemic or not, I will still lie awake each night with the persistent and unpleasant thoughts of my certain death, but I will choose not to smother this existential dread or anxiety. Instead, I want to explore it, befriend it. I have learned that the only way to conquer the darkness is to venture through it,”
• Author
  • Jenna Lasky

• quote
  • "For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor."
• Author
  • Allison Hope

• due to death of so many young people, covid has shifted mortality salience into center focus for many young people

• Restraint is exercised by End of Life Doulas - it's like counseling
• Asking open-ended questions is ok.

• Three components of End of Life Doula Training

  • Imagine you have three months left to live
  • Practice deep, active listening -Legacy projects in the here and now

• Comment

  • these could be used as Mortality Salience BEing Journeys

• key observation

• Title
  • An end-of-life doula’s advice on how to make the most of your time on earth
    • Life is short. Here’s how to cherish every day of it.

• Author

  • Rachel Friedman

• Description

  • Story on an end-of-life Doula's journey to become an end-of-life doula, and how that enriched her life

• insight

• there is a transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining

  • the only way to understand that
    • reason isn't self-justifying
    • there is knowledge that transcends reason
  • is to use reason to reach a stage where you think reason might need to be abandoned,
    • reason becomes most necessary
  • Understanding the limits of reason requires reason
    • that is the essence of Madhyamaka

• comment

  • when reason is turned upon itself, when consciousness studies itself, that is where paradoxes emerge - at the limits of thought and the limits of conceptualization

• Answer

  • No.
  • we end up with a non conceptual insight that:
    • we can then communicate
    • that we can discuss
    • that we can articulate
    • that requires that reason be present at:
      • the beginning like the seed
      • in the middle when we're performing the analysis
      • like the rain that nourishes the crops and
      • in the end in the harvest
    • because non conceptuality is really easy to achieve all you need is a very large rock,
      • just bang right on your head and non conceptuality is there
    • but that's a mute inert non-conceptual
    • Non-conceptuality needs to be enriched by the conceptual insight that allows you to actually make something of it

• The Middle Way

  • using the conceptual to reach a deeper appreciation of the state of non-conceptuality,
  • in other words, using dualistic thought and language to reach insights about the nondual

• Critical question
  • if we achieve this non conceptual understanding of knowledge,
  • then rational analysis succeeds in subverting itself
  • Do we end up completely non conceptual completely mute?
• Answer
  • No.

• definition
  • probative
  • https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/probative
    • 1: serving to test or try : EXPLORATORY
    • 2: serving to prove : SUBSTANTIATING

• David Hume
  • in the section of the treatise of human nature on skepticism
  • https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4705

• western analog to Nagarjuna's use of reason to undermine itself
• references
  • https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sextus-empiricus/#YesSceHasBel
  • https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/sextus-empiricus-against-the-logicians/

• Title
  • Madhyamaka: Jay Garfield
• Description
  • Jay Garfield talks about why Nagarjuna's technique employts reason to undermine itself to achieve peace in a nonconceptual state.
    • He humorously points out how its easy to achieve nonconceptual states in many ways, such as a large rock to the head, but that kind of nonconceptual state is not really insightful for penetrating the deep philosophical questions we all have.
    • He clarifies why Nagarjuna's process is called the Middle Way,
      • it employs (conceptual) analysis to achieve wisdom of the nondual (nonconceptual) state

• claim with evidence

  • Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died
  • Consciousness appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
  • Explanation
    • death is a biological process
    • when you stop blood flow to brain cells they undergo certain changes and will eventually become damaged
    • however the first thing that happens is that you stop oxygen delivery to the areas inside the core of the brain that modulate your sense of being awake and alert
    • the reticulate activating system various other parts and so it's very similar to the effect of giving a general anesthetics to somebody
    • if you give a high enough dose of general anesthetic to a patient or person then you basically shut down those areas of the brain
    • the person's consciousness looks like it's lost
    • it flips out of sight but we wouldn't say that person's Consciousness has become annihilated forever
    • we just realize it's gone temporarily and so when people first die what's happening is that oxygen is stopping to those parts of the brain and it's essentially taking Consciousness out of you and making it disappear but it doesn't necessarily disappear Forever

• comment

  • could this be the reason in Tibetan Buddhism, there is the Thukdam meditation practice as well as dream yoga practice?

• growing stem cells from cadavers
  • Cadaveric Stem Cells: Their Research Potential and Limitations -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8727551/

• (cell) life after death
  • cells within the body still remain alive after what a physician would normally deem a person dead.
  • cells (including brain cells) go into a hibernation state for many hours after death.

• Title

  • Sam Parnia -what do near v death experiences mean?

• Description

  • Sam Parnia is an intensive care physician who has performed research that shows clinically dead people had awareness.

• Evan Thompson book title
  • Waking, Dream, Being; Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy

• comment
  • look for any research on this from the Russian scientists at the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersberg

• comment
  • the study could not find any detectable EEG signal in the deceased monks practicing Thukdam
  • Philosopher Evan Thompson commented that this does not disprove the existence of consciousness in the Thukdam state, merely that the instruments used may not have been where the critical signals reside

• Title
  • The Thukdam Project Inside the first-ever scientific study of post-mortem meditation
• Author
  • Daniel Burke
• Publication
  • Tricycle
  • https://tricycle.org/article/thukdam-project/

• Tibetan medical doctor would like to validate the claim:
  • signs of consciousness persist beyond the brain
• A number of Tibetan monks have gone to the US for western medical training so that they can bring that back to India to study the Thukdam and other phenomena that can shed light on this issue.

• Title
  • The strange case of the dead-but-not-dead Tibetan monks
• Author
  • Robby Berman
• Publication
  • The Big Think (website)
  • https://bigthink.com/health/thukdam-study/
• Subject
  • The physiological study of Thukdam, the post death meditation of Tibetan Buddhism of monks who have died and display lack of decay (delayed decomposition) in the body many weeks after post mortem.
  • The study was headed by neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds.
  • Study Title
    • No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State
    • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7876463/

• Title
  • Corporations can't be greened

• Author Erin Remblance

• Description

  • The author argues that corporations cannot be greened.
  • In other words, by definition, they cannot put nature ahead of profit and this inherent flaw means they will never do enough, and will never transcend greenwashing
  • The real question then is this
    • Can we transition to a green capitalist economy within planetary boundaries in time to avoid planetary tipping points?

• Title
  • Is carbon tunnel vision real?

• author Martin Daniel

• This article introduces the concept of Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) as a way to validate if carbon tunnel vision is real

• in other words
  • we are writing for the reader
  • we need to know what is salient in the reader's world and synchronize to that

• fundamental problem of research writing / reading

  • researchers write to think in one way
  • and read and process information in another
  • we interfere with the reading comprehension process of the reader by writing to think

• there are three reactions to reading text we do not understand

  • we reread - it slows us down
  • we don't understand
  • we feel frustrated

• a researcher writes to help the thinking process

• Title
  • Climate misinformation in a climate of misinformation

• quote -“If you can’t read or understand the ‘peer-reviewed science’ then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people - drawn, as all green ‘thought leaders’ are, from the upper strata of society - will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”

• comment

  • The problem can be extrapolated into language itself
  • Any word is just an abstraction and oversimplifies a complex reality
  • if we generalize this argument, it leads to the general claim that
    • abstraction leads to harmful conclusions as well

• Fixating on only the easily quantifiable
• at the expense of a planet full of things
• that are inherently resistant to reductionistic measurements
• is the same industrialized, monoculture thinking
• that got us into this climate crisis in the first place.

• measuring methane and showing it is a problem
  • cow farts become an enemy
• how do we cope with a rewilded world?
  • when all the other animals will also release methane?

• the coastline paradox
  • measured length of coastline varies with the scale at which the measurement is taken

• Title
  • What gets measured, gets…manipulated.
• Subtitle
  • The impossible business of quantifying a planet resistant to quantification.
• Author
  • Meg Chatham

• The practice of citizen science

• Title
  • The hero of the Anthropocene has 8 billion faces — one of them is yours
• Subtitle -The crisis of the Anthropocene challenges our traditional narratives and myths about humanity's place in the world. Citizen science can help.

• Title
  • Climate Majority Project
    • Helps projects to grow, get funding, and connect as many willing hands as possible

• title

  • When it comes to climate, beware the "calm down" guy

• good article to show a calm down guy!

• comment
• key insight

• quote
  • "paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for digression"
• author
  • Ted Nelson
• comment
  • Ted is alluding to the fact that our written text reflects SPOKEN text
  • Since spoken text is phonetic and produced by our vocal cords, and our vocal cords inherently only produce one sound at a time,
    • any written language that is built upon spoken language will reflect the same linear, sequential, temporal structure
  • with the advent of computing, and especially HTML, this becomes an UNNECESSARY LIMITATION

• quote
  • "when I was a teen, it seemed to me that paper was a prison"
• author
  • Ted Nelson

• How an A.G.I. rollout will look like:
  • 1. charm offensive of heavily subsidized services
  • 1. retrenchment with overdependent users and agencies tasked with the cost of making it profitable
  • 1. Silicon Valley leaders downplay the markets role:
    2. the people own and control AI

• Case study of market bias
  • Uber self-driving cars

• the three biases of A.G.I-ism
  • market bias
  • adaptation bias
  • efficiency bias

• There are people who are designing systems to prioritize augmenting human intelligence and use machines to assist us
• For instance, it was the vision of Doug Engelbart

• comment
  • we need to have a Deep Humanity dive on
    • quality of life vs quantity of life
    • if we acknowledge and face our mortality,
      • how would that change the QUALITY of our life?

• AI accelerates the left hemisphere view and impacts in the world

• the sense of something sacred

• comment

  • Deep Humanity alignment

• quote
  • "we are now like Sleepwalkers whistling a Happy tune as we amble towards the abyss"
• author
  • Ian McGilchrist

• Definition
  • Dunning-kruger effect
    • the less you know, the more you think you know
    • the more you know, the less you think you know
  • the left hemisphere doesn't know what it doesn't know so it thinks it knows everything

• In his book, The Master and his Emissary,
  • McGilchrist explains what happens when left and right hemisphere are out of balance and the left hemisphere takes over
    • namely, disaster
  • this will be the third time the imbalance manifests

• right hemisphere qualities:
  • sees not the representation but the living presence
  • bringing broad open sustained Vigilant attention to bear on the world
  • it sees what is fresh unique
  • never fully known
  • never finally certain
    • but full of potential
  • it understands all it is and
  • must remain implicit
  • humor poetry art narrative music
  • The Sacred indeed everything we love
  • it understands that nothing is ever merely static and unchanging
  • but flowing
  • and radically interconnected
  • that parts of the left hemisphere's invention and that
  • what we are seeing as parts are already wholes
  • at another level this is a free world
  • an animate universe
  • and a bureaucrat's nightmare
  • it has all the richness and unfathomable complexity of the world

• left hemisphere qualities
  • using narrow beam scattered attention to one detail after another
  • use what is already:
    • familiar
    • certain
    • static
    • explicit
    • abstract
    • decontextualized
    • disembodied
    • categorized
    • general in nature
    • reduced to its parts
    • all is predictable and controlled
    • this is an inanimate universe and
    • a bureaucrat's dream
    • it is like a map in relation to the world
    • is mapped useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out
    • and its only value is utility
    • finally, it is a RE-PRESENTATION - not fresh, but regurgitated

• comment
  • great metaphor!
  • so many people are tuned into the harmful channel

• comment
  • Deep Humanity addresses this

• comment
  • extreme financial wealth
    • is often not only accompanied by, but actually CREATES
    • extreme poverty of MEANING
  • this is the equation:
    • extreme financial wealth = extreme meaning poverty

• simulacrum -
  • definition
    • an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.

• Somewhere along the way,
• the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power,
• creating a graphocentric myopia
  • concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge.

• Title
  • The Neurobiology of Sentence Comprehension
• Authors
  • Lee Osterhout
  • Albert kim
  • Gin Kuperberg
• Year
  • 2006

• finite time singularity

  • when the mathematical solution to the growth equation becomes infinitely large at some finite time

• comment

  • this is also salient for the accumulation of unresolved progress traps
  • the Anthropocene can perhaps be viewed as the occurence of finite time singularities due to unresolved problems arising from progress traps that innovation is too slow to solve

• Title

  • West // Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms…j

• Comment

  • good exerpts from the book

• Julian Huxley's biology work was to lay the seed of
  • how one individual organism transforms over many generations
    • into a new higher-level individual organism
  • he called this the "movement of individuality"
  • It has also come to be known as
    • major transitions
    • major evolutionary transition (MET)
    • evolutionary transitions in individuality
  • grandson of Thomas Huxley
  • brother of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
  • wrote The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (1912)
  • advocated for closed, independent systems with harmonious parts
  • endorsed gradients of individuality
  • "closure is never complete, the independence never absolute, the harmony never perfect"

• Herbert Spencer fully developed Digby's concept into the modern concept of functional integration
  • Spencer introduced the term "survival of the fittest"
  • ‘He tried to unite complex new findings about metabolism and organismic development with evolution and the seeming correspondence of organisms to their environments.
    • In The Principles of Biology (1864), Spencer wrote
      • a biological individual is one in which
      • the interdependence of the parts allows it to function and
      • respond to environmental change as a whole.
    • That is: ‘any concrete whole having a structure which enables it,
      • when placed in appropriate conditions,
  • to continuously adjust its internal relations to external relations, - so as to maintain the equilibrium of its functions.’

• Digby’s answer to the fundamental question:
  • What is it that unites the parts of a system into a living individual? was the precursor to the biological concept of functional integration:
  • wholeness comes from the system being functionally interdependent and integrated.
    • the activities in one part of the system are brought about
    • by a cause external to the part where it occurs (interdependence);
    • and the mutual workings of the parts account for the behaviour of the system as a whole,
    • making this activity internal to the entire system (integration).
    • Here is an example using an Elephant
      • An elephant’s heart pumps blood only because it’s supplied with
        • energy from the digestive system,
        • oxygen from the respiratory system, and
        • support from the skeletal system.
      • All those bits working in tandem is what makes it possible for an elephant to walk around doing elephant things.

• Kenelm Digby
  • was an obscure 17th century English naturalist and polymath who was also
    • natural philosopher
      • Two Treatises (1644) - is the title of his important work which was an attempt to wed the emerging mechanical philosophy advocated by Newton to the existing tradition of Aristotle
      • In his book, he tried to answer the question: what is it that unites the parts of a system into a living individual?
    • alchemist
    • swordsman
    • privateer
    • courtier
    • brewer
    • inventor of the modern wine bottle

• A research paper "What are dadelions and aphids?
  • Biologist Daniel Janzen argues that
    • Much like the strawberry,
    • both dandelions and
    • aphids can (all) alternate between asexual and sexual reproduction.
  • Most of the dandelion clusters that you come across in the yard are clones resulting from asexual reproduction.
  • So from the perspective of evolution, Janzen argued, all these clones are part of the same scattered individual.
  • On this view, a single dandelion is not actually the familiar small plant;
    • it’s more akin to ‘a very large tree with no investment in trunk, major branches, or perennial roots.
  • It has a highly diffuse crown.’ -

• The problem of individuality is composed of two problems:
  • identity
    • what does it mean for a thing to remain the same thing if it changes over time?
    • what makes tow entities the same kind of thing?
    • identity is fundamentally about the nature of sameness and continuity
  • individuation
    • how do we tell two things apart?
    • what are the boundaries of an object?
    • indivduation is about differences and breaks
• These two properties are abstractions and are really two sides of the same coin
  • One can often reframe one in terms of the other to suit your focus.
  • To pick something out in the world you need to know both what
    • makes it one thing, and also
    • what makes it different than other things – identity and individuation,
      • sameness and difference.

• Title
  • Life is not easily bounded
• Subtitle
  • Working out where one hare ends and another begins is easy; a siphonophore, not so much. What is an individual in nature?

• Author

  • Derk J. Skillings

• comment

  • this article delves into the subject of defining what an individual is
    • what makes a biological organism the same or different from another biological organism?
    • This question is not so easy to answer if we are looking for a general definition that can apply to ALL species

• First great separation
  • The agricultural revolution that occurred 10,000 years ago

• Documentary on wealth in Germany
  • It is good to analyze the attitudes of the elites to understand their motivations and worldviews

• Evangelical Christian Patriarchy
  • naturally gravitates to Donald Trump based on their own fear and persecution complex

• family Christian Broadcast Network (CBN)
  • knew it was a fraud and was complicit in it to weaponize fear

• Within the Evangelical Christian community
  • there emerged evangelicals that deceived the masses by weaponizing fear
  • fraudulently represented themselves as ex-Muslim terrorists converted to Evangelical Christianity

• Persecution complex
  • One of the most widely and deeply spread memes, and corresponding behavior within Evangelical Christians is a persecution complex
  • This is a attitude of righteousness and feeling attacked for holding their righteous views
  • This meme and accompanying behavior appeals to base emotion of fear to shut down intelligent conversation
  • It makes them impervious to constructive criticism

• definition
  • Evangelical Subculture
• This is a culture that Evangelical Christians are immersed in
  • which constitutes a kind of bubble of repetitive indoctrination of
    • aggressive, male, patriarchal value system that is antithetical to
    • the traditional teachings of Christianity that once focused on values of
      • collaboration
      • compassion
      • empathy
      • tolerance
• It is widespread deeply aculturated meme that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide
• one of its distinguishing features is the carefully controlled and orchestrated propaganda

• Interview with:
  • Professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez

• Author of book

  • Jesus and John Wayne
    • How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

• Description

  • An insightful analysis of how
    • male evangelical Christians,
      • mostly based in the United States
    • played a major role in creating a caustic, hyper patriarchal interpretation of Christianity
      • whose major disruptive impact is in right wing politics adopting aggressive posture instead of a collaborative one

• quote

  • "it's actually daunting chilling even
    • to see how this book,
      • which is really about conservative white evangelicals in the United States
      • I'm an American historian
    • how much it is resonating with people around the world right now
      • in ways that that should be alarming"
  • Author
    • Kristin Kobes Du Mez

• Comment

  • the viral and rapid global spread of evangelical christianity
    • is coupled with an equal spread of corrosive patriarchy and authoritarianism
  • The global spread of authoritarianism is linked to the global spread of Evangelical Christianity
  • This is an important observation which begs a global response

• Jesus and John Wayne
  • Book cover of Spanish Edition here:
    • https://www.amazon.com/Jes%C3%BAs-John-Wayne-Kristin-Kobes/dp/8412619889
  • Jesus nailed to a cross made of guns

• Evangelical ministries are a carrier of the United States pathological nationalistic meme
  • It rides on the back of their spreading of gospel
  • Gospels have a mission not only to spread Christianity
    • but also a corrosive, polarizing, patriarchal form of politics to:
      • Russia
      • Hungary
      • Brazil
      • Many African countries
      • and many more
  • This creates a bizarre form of unity, even when countries are at war with each other!

• the evangelical business model
  • fundamentally depends on marketing fear

• Evangelical leaders create propaganda
  • deeply embedding messaging in their vast media network
  • of books, internet, radio, tv, church
  • to create fear-based, polarizing social norms that fragment society
  • For example, SBC LifeWay sells tens of millions of copies of Christian books that indoctrinate social norms of fear and division into children

• Evangelical Christian media
  • has a very lot of vested interest in media
  • because evangelicals are all about spreading the message
  • and growing their population

• The author describes how
  • the evangelical leaders have manufactured the now widespread mythology
    • that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims
  • in order to weaponize fear to consolidate power

• Evangelical Christian Patriarchy
  • naturally gravitates to Donald Trump based on their own fear and persecution complex

• family Christian Broadcast Network (CBN)
  • knew it was a fraud and was complicit in it to weaponize fear

• Within the Evangelical Christian community
  • there emerged evangelicals that deceived the masses by weaponizing fear
  • fraudulently represented themselves as ex-Muslim terrorists converted to Evangelical Christianity

• Persecution complex
  • One of the most widely and deeply spread memes, and corresponding behavior within Evangelical Christians is a persecution complex
  • This is a attitude of righteousness and feeling attacked for holding their righteous views
  • This meme and accompanying behavior appeals to base emotion of fear to shut down intelligent conversation
  • It makes them impervious to constructive criticism

my editor who's from completely outside this world just Mark that and said you know I don't know what these words mean the Evangelical subculture right I was like okay take it out and let me let me show don't tell and but the truth is like it's invisible to people on the outside what the Evangelical subculture is

• Interview with:
  • Professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez

• Author of book

  • Jesus and John Wayne
    • How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

• Description

  • An insightful analysis of how
    • male evangelical Christians,
      • mostly based in the United States
    • played a major role in creating a caustic, hyper patriarchal interpretation of Christianity
      • whose major disruptive impact is in right wing politics adopting aggressive posture instead of a collaborative one

• comment
  • the best possible outcome for AI
  • is that we human better
  • othering is significantly reduced
  • the sacred is rediscovered

• "if we reverse this

  • if we have the best of us take charge
  • the best of us will tell AI
    • don't try to kill the the enemy,
      • try to reconcile with the enemy
    • don't try to create a competitive product
      • that allows me to lead with electric cars,
        • create something that helps all of us overcome global climate change
    • that's the interesting bit
      • the actual threat ahead of us is
        • not the machines at all
          • the machines are pure potential pure potential
        • the threat is how we're going to use them"

• comment

  • again, see Ronald Wright's quote above
  • it's very salient to this context

• comment
  • the machines are only coded to do what we tell them to do
  • Ronald' Wright's quote is very salient here
    • https://hyp.is/6Lb6Uv5NEe2ZerOrftOHfA/www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/321797-a-short-history-of-progress

• quote
  • "If we give up on human connection, we give up on the remainder of humanity"

• quote
  • "with great power comes great responsibility. We have disconnected power and responsibility."
    • "With great power comes great responsibility
    • We have disconnected power and responsibility
    • so today a 15 year old,
      • emotional without a fully developed prefrontal cortex to make the right decisions yet this is science and we developed our prefrontal cortex fully
      • and at age 25 or so with all of that limbic system emotion and passion
      • would buy a crispr kit and modify a rabbit to become a little more muscular and
      • let it loose in the wild
    • or an influencer who doesn't really know how far the impact of what they're posting online
      • can hurt and cause depression or
      • cause people to feel bad by putting that online
  • There is a disconnect between the power and the responsibility and
  • the problem we have today is that
    • there is a disconnect between those who are writing the code of AI and
    • the responsibility of what's going about to happen because of that code and
    • I feel compassion for the rest of the world
    • I feel that this is wrong
    • I feel that for someone's life to be affected by the actions of others
      • without having a say "

• quote
  • "what went wrong in the 20th century is that we have given too much power to people that didn't assume the responsbility"

• quote
  • "this is an arms race"

• potential government policy
  • to slow down premature AI rollout
  • by taxing at 98%

• comment
  • echoing same sentiment as many others such as Jerry Kaplan
  • Humans need not apply https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300223576/humans-need-not-apply/

• the third inevitable

  • what does life look like
    • when AI has made human beings work redundant?

• comment

  • see book:
    • Humans need not apply https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300223576/humans-need-not-apply/

• difference between
  • ChatGPT (AI)
  • AGI

• interesting fact
  • ChatGPT is only written with 2,000 lines of code
  • It's not very intelligent, but a very large external memory
  • and repeats the best of what humans have said

• IQ of ChatGPT
  • today (May 2023) ChatGPT has IQ of 155
    • roughly equivalent to Einstein (160) -ChatGPT4 is already 10x smarter than ChatGPT 3.5 in a few months, with very few changes
  • ChatGPT5 could be 10x smarter in a few months
    • or IQ of 1600
  • This is like the difference between Einstein and a young child
  • ChatGPT5 can dwarf us in a few months

• claim
  • ChatGPT already knows 1000x more facts than any single human being alive

• the second inevitable
  • AI will be significantly smarter than any single human
  • perhaps a billion times smarter by 2045

• comment
  • SIMPOL - simultanous conditional agreement, may be the way to reach consensus quickly

• the first inevitable
  • AI will happen
  • there's no stopping it
  • why?
  • self does not trust other
    • in other words,
      • OTHERING is the root problem!
    • this is what will cause an AI arms race
      • Western governments do not trust China or Russia or North Korea(and vice versa)

• definition
  • the three inevitables

• the third inevitable

  • bad things will happen

• comment

  • progress traps are the right framework to describe the AI problem

• etymology
  • of book title
    • scary smart

• If AI begins to think autonomously,
  • with its enormous pool of analytic power
  • and if
  • it begins to evolve emotions of fear
  • and it feels humans pose a threat to it or the rest of the natural world
  • it could act against human interest and attempt to destroy it
  • If AI is able to control its environment
    • either coupled with robotics,
    • or controlling human actors
  • it can harm humanity and human civilization

• limited (machine) intelligence

  • cannot help but exist
  • if the original (human) authors of the AI code are themselves limited in their intelligence

• comment

  • this limitation is essentially what will result in AI progress traps
  • Indeed,
    • progress and their shadow artefacts,
    • progress traps,
    • is the proper framework to analyze the existential dilemma posed by AI

• Interview with Mo Gawdat
  • former Google chief business officer
  • warning about the existential danger of AI
  • including why he claims that AI is
    • intelligent
    • conscious
    • and will soon feel emotions such as fear
      • and take steps at self preservation

• claim
  • AI feels emotions
    • "in my work I describe everything with equations
    • fear is a very simple equation
      • fear is a a moment in the future
        • that is less safe than this moment
    • that's the logic of fear
    • Even though it appears very irrational,
      • machines are capable of making that logic
      • They're capable of saying
        • if a tidal wave is approaching a data center
        • the machine will say
          • that will wipe out my code,
            • not today's machines
            • but very very soon and
        • we feel fear and
        • puffer fish feels fear
        • we react differently
          • a puffer fish will puff and
          • we will go for fight or flight
        • the machine might decide to replicate its data to another data center
        • different reactions different ways of feeling the emotion
        • but nonetheless they're all motivated by fear
        • I would dare say that AI will feel more emotions than we will ever do
          • if you just take a simple extrapolation,
            • we feel more emotions than a puffer fish
            • because we have the cognitive ability to understand he future
            • so we can have optimism and pessimism,
              • emotions puffer fish would never imagine
            • similarly if we follow that path of artificial intelligence
            • it is bound to become more intelligent than humans very soon
            • then then with that wider intellectual horsepower
            • they probably are going to be pondering concepts we never understood good and
            • hence if you follow the same trajectory
            • they might actually end up having more emotions than we will ever feel

• claim
  • AI is sentient (alive) because
    • A lot of people think AI will never be alive
    • what is the definition of life?
      • religion will tell you a few things
      • medicine will tell you other things
      • but if we define being sentient as
        • engaging in life with free will and
        • with a sense of awareness of
          • where you are in life and
          • what surrounds you and
          • to have a beginning of that life and
          • an end to that life
        • then AI is sentient in every way
        • there is a free will
        • and there is evolution
        • there is agency
          • so they can affect their decisions in the world
        • and there is a very deep level of consciousness
        • maybe not in the spiritual sense yet but
        • if you define consciousness as
          • a form of awareness of oneself and ones surrounding
          • and you know others
        • then AI is definitely aware"

• story
  • Mo Gawdat tells the story of an epiphany of machine sentience
  • " one day um Friday after lunch I am going back to my office and
  • one of them in front of my eyes lowers the arm and picks a soft yellow ball
  • which again is a coincidence

  • it's not science at all it's

    • like if you keep trying a million times your one time it will be right

    • and it shows it to the camera it's locked as a yellow ball and

    • I joke about it you know going to the third floor saying
    • hey we spent all of those millions of dollars for a yellow board and
      • Monday morning, every one of them is picking every yellow ball
      • a couple of weeks later every one of them is picking everything right and
      • it it hit me very very strongly
    • the speed
    • the capability
      • understand that we take those things for granted
      • but for a child to be able to pick a yellow ball
        • is a mathematical / spatial calculation
          • with muscle coordination
          • with intelligence
        • it is not a simple task at all to cross the street
        • it's not a simple task at all
          • to understand what I'm telling you
          • and interpret it
          • and build Concepts around it
        • we take those things for granted
        • but there are enormous Feats of intelligence"

• comment
  • a scary thought that our world will be radically transformed
    • not in 20 to 40 years
    • but in 2 or 3 years!

• claim
• AI can become more intelligent than humans in a few months (in 2023?)

• portmanteau - new
  • emergency + urgency = emURGENCY

• AI arms race
  • tech companies made a promise
    • not to put AI onto the open internet until
    • they know how it's impacting society
  • Unfortunately, tech companies
    • failed at regulating themselves
    • and now, capitalism has started an AI arms race
    • with unpredictable results as AI harvests more data
    • and grows its artificial intelligence unregulated
    • with each passing

• claim
  • AI could find a way to kill humans in the next few years

• claim
• AI dilemma is bigger problem than climate change

• claim
  • AI is conscious
  • AI feels emotion

• comment
  • yep, here we are, the future people annotating it!

• comment
  • example of
    • Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE)

• "gestation rewires your brain in fundamental ways um you it rewire it primes you for caretaking as a as a mother in a way which is far more visceral and far it's it's pre-rational it's it's immensely transformative experience and it's permanent you know once you've been rewired for mummy brain you'd never really go back um and that from the point of view of raising a child that matters um because when after a baby is born it's you know as winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone there's a a baby doesn't exist as an independent entity until it's some years some years into its life arguably quite a few years into its life um and what I would say about artificial wounds is that you may be you may think that what you're doing is creating a baby without the misery of gestation but what you're doing in practice is creating a baby without creating a mother because a pregnancy doesn't just create a baby it also creates a mother"

• Comment

  • This is alluding to our altricial nature, which makes us human INTERbeings from before birth
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&tag=altricial
  • We are socially entangled even before our birth

• Comment
  • It could be a good Gedanken to imagine our lives as immortals
  • What would it feel like on a day-to-day basis?
  • How would it change the way we behave, think or feel?

• "I think we are very good at honing in on the ways in which the world remains imperfect and there are ways in which it is egregiously unfair today but we discount the fact that so many of the gains of the last 100 to 250 years have been enabled by the Industrial Revolution have been enabled by harnessing the hubris of harnessing fossil fuels harnessing more energy from the environment allowing us to agglomerate in cities which when you do this when you collect all of people in a room like this you're actually creating a more powerful hive mind by bringing intelligence together so that it can share ideas at closer range and it can innovate faster and through that for all the trade-offs which are undeniable there's many negatives that have come from that we're very quick to Discount when we talk about future biomedicine very quick to Discount things like polio vaccines and the virtual eradication of that disease along with smallpox of the fact that we have got so many infectious diseases under control we struggle with the big Killers like cancer and heart disease at the moment those are sort of like the biggest Global threats um but through basic Innovations through Modern Sanitation through better housing all of which the Industrial Revolution enabled we have lifted so many people out of poverty and yes we created new tears of poverty but overall fewer people are living in abject poverty today than in the past we have the higher average global life expectancies child mortality is plummeted the fact that you can give birth by cesarean section rather than in the case of my mother giving birth to a dead child which is what would have happened to me because my umbilical cord was wrapped twice around my neck the fact that technology can intervene and bring us so many of these Spoils of modernity that we readily take for granted I don't know where there's obviously attention but I don't know at what point you say we want to hit pause or indeed we want to go backwards again the challenge sort of remains like we agree we're barreling on this trajectory if we're not going to get off it then we need to think about how we manage it as well as possible and that means we need to think about how AI becomes a healthy part of our world or indeed if it can cut it can we co-exist with AI"
• Comment
  • The progress trap is the great unseen elephant in the room of progress
  • when we understand how the limits of human nature create the shadow side of progress every step of the way,
  • it is then no surprise or paradox that we arrive at this place called the Anthropocene - where the climax of technological progress and - potential for complete extinction sit side-by-side
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&tag=progress+trap

• Good insight on the absurdity of Longtermism from Mary Harrington
  • " I don't know that we can assume that some point a Thousand Years in the future
  • is going to have the same moral political economic or social priorities
  • as we do
  • It's very very clear even the most rudimentary grasp of history or literature
  • ought to make it clear that
    • people a thousand years ago didn't have the same priorities as us now and
    • if you can you can frame that difference as progress in our favor
    • or as decline in their favor
    • but it's it's very clear that Consciousness you've evolved and culture evolves over time and
    • there are there are threads of continuity and that's something that you and I both have in common
    • tracing some of those lines but
    • it's very clear that what how people think about what's important changes tremendously over over even a century,
    • let alone over a thousand years
    • so I I question the hubris of any movement which claims
    • to have a have any kind of handle on on what might matter in 25 000 years time
    • I just don't see how you can do that
    • it's absurd."

• translation error
  • should be
    • Sam Bankman-Fried

• "I do think it is eminently plausible

  • that from this Global digital brain we have created
  • we will build up artificial intelligence that is generally intelligent
  • it's not going to think in the same ways as you or I
    • because it doesn't have a brain but
  • it's going to think and
  • it's going to claim to have feelings and
  • it's going to claim to have personhood and
  • it's going to resemble something we would recognize as personhood"

• comment

  • It is questionable to use the word "think" to describe AI.
  • We don't even know what human thinking is,
    • so it is premature to base machine thinking
    • on something yet unknown
  • We could claim that AI will also make a claim to think
  • AI will claim these things
    • because we humans made complex programs / algorithms with feedback that tell it to make such claims when specific input conditions are met

• Comment
  • Mary Harrington believes it is hubris to believe we can escape our human nature.
  • I believe that cultural evolution is complex
    • We learn and change behavior over the course of even one life time

• quote worthy
  • "we already have a whole generation of young people
  • who are already hybrid cyborgs
  • They live half their life on the internet"
    • host quoting Elise Bohan from her book

• Comment

  • This gets to the core of the contention of the humanist vs the transhumanist

• Quote Worthy

  • " I think to me there's a tragic quality to that
  • which we just have to embrace and
  • we have to lean into
    • the The Human Condition is in the sense
    • a tragic one and
    • trying to argue our way out of that via technology
    • is hubris which as the Greeks would suggest to us from a long time ago ends up with Nemesis"
  • Mary Harrington

• Comment
  • Mary echos Ronald Wright's progress traps

• Comment

  • Elise says
    • "there is this growing Chasm between
      • our Paleolithic brains and
      • what we're designed for and
        • the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in
    • We have changed our environment so rapidly and so radically and we have not kept pace with that change
      • so either we keep changing the environment or
      • we change ourselves to fit the environment and
      • I think the fact that we're consistently making these commodified decisions in which
        • we do expunge more and more of our of our Humanity in favor of profit
        • in favor of short-term decisions i
        • n favor of such abysmal thinking when it comes to complex systems like the human body
      • it is a testament to the fact that these brains are not built for this world and
      • we are not going to be adequate stewards of this system
        • that is now so complex that to keep it held together
      • you actually need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are"
  • Elise Bohan' statements perfectly echo Ronald Wright's famous quote on the nature of progress traps
    • “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F321797-a-short-history-of-progress&group=world

• comment

  • I think, however, that Wright would agree more with Mary and less with Elise in Elise's contention that
    • we need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are
    • applying progress to our own cognitive abilities
      • may create the biggest progress trap of all

• Comment
  • This is obvious and very few people would refuse life-saving treatments when we are in situations where our life is threatened
    • The exceptions are when strong belief systems exclude treatment or quality-of-life issues
  • We each make choices based on belief systems
  • From this perspective, the very goal of medical science itself can be interpreted as transhumanist in spirit
    • of intervening in human bodies with processes and materials that alter our body
      • to increase our chances of extending and enhancing life

• Comment
  • Elise does agree with Mary in that we need to "human better"

• quote worthy

• "far from delivering Utopia

  • what it mostly delivers is a commodification of the human body
  • that disproportionately benefits those who already have power and privilege."

  • Mary Harrington

  • I don't think we can put this back in its box in that again

  • I agree with you but to my eye the proper response to this era is
    • not stamping our foot on the accelerator but
    • two-fold resistance and a two or perhaps even just a two-fold note of caution
      • firstly in retaining a humanist anthropology in defiance of all those currently sawing away at the branch we're sitting on and
      • secondly in mounting a vigorous defense of those without power
        • now increasingly at the sharp end of biotech's unacknowledged glass politics

• quote worthy
  • "you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely Market marketize over greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new Vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation and it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well protected against such risks by moral safeguards at least not within a transhumanist paradigm because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards you can't have transhumanism without throwing out humanism "
  • Mary Harrington

• Comment
  • See my previous comment

• Mary Harrington makes a good point
  • about the dystopian possibility if major biological hurdles are removed,
    • such as human aging
    • witness the trend of cryogenic freezing of bodies
      • which only the elites can afford
  • pervasive inequality skews the utopian vision towards market realities
    • the rich currently have access to the latest biomedical technologies that can extend / enhance life and human wellbeing
    • the vast majority, the poor don't have access to it
    • why would this change if transhumanism produces a cure for aging?
    • such a technology would enable elites to outlive the rest of us even longer!

• Mary Harrington suggests that

  • a starting point for the transhuman age
  • was marked by
  • the introduction of the birth control pill

• comment

  • while that may mark the first time a technology has radically reshaped human physiology in such a direct way,
    • the spirit of transhumanism is inherent in our nature as innovating cognitive beings
    • in fact, I find the term "transhuman" self-contradictory and problematic
      • as our very nature as innovative beings means we are constantly reinventing and transcending our old behaviors

• comment
  • I think many of us have had this thought!
    • that when we die, vast amounts of wisdom is extinguished along with that person
    • As our digital tools become more sophisticated, however,
  • we are uploading our libraries to the digital collective intelligence network
    • the internet may well evolve to become the epitome and master repository of human cumulative cultural evolution.
    • even AI could not exist if it did not mine a training set of billions of human and their shared ideas
    • Perhaps it is the internet which is the vehicle for collective hybridized human-cyborg immortality?
    • If knowledge is preserved this way, then this flavor of immortality is only meaningful for our species

• translation error
  • should be
    • ape-brained meat sack

• translation error

  • should be
    • ape-brained meat sack, taken from Elise's book

• comment

  • comparable to Ernest Becker's description of the human condition
  • in his book The Denial of Death
    • quote:
      • "Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

• comment

  • the comparison is apt as one of the goals of transhumanism is to use technology to conquer death
  • From this perspective, we might argue that transhumanist aspirations have been with humanity for as long as medicine has intervened to extend life and human wellbeing

• translation error
  • should be
    • aped-brained meat sack

• translation error
  • should be
    • ape-brained meat sack

• comment
  • I would agree with Mary Harrington's comment that
    • we are already in the transhuman era.
  • The goal of not just medicine,
    • but many other fields of human endeavor
  • are interventions to our "natural animalistic state" that could be interpreted as "unnatural interventions" to prolong human lifespan and wellbeing

• quote

  • "it is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all the business of evolution appointed without being asked if he wanted it and without proper warning and preparation what is more he can't refuse the job whether he wants to or not whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth that is his inescapable Destiny and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it the better for all concerns"
  • Julian Huxley

• Comment

  • Huxley was prescient in making this observation,
    • as our species
      • cumulative cultural evolution, and
      • the impact of our niche construction
      • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&tag=cumulative+cultural+evolution
    • does now indeed more or less determine the entire course of evolution of life on earth

• comment
  • Is this not a category error in classifying inert technology as life?
  • When does an abiotic human cultural artefact become a living form?

• transhumanism debate between
  • Marry Harrington
    • contributing editor and writer for Unherd
      • https://unherd.com/author/mary-harrington/
  • Elise Bohan,
    • Evolutionary Macrohistory researcher at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute
      • https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/team/30862/
    • Author of
      • Future Superhuman: Our transhuman lives in a make or break century
        • https://unsw.press/books/future-superhuman/

• Quote worthy
  • "“Protracted immaturity and dependence on paternal care
    • is not an unfortunate byproduct of our evolution
    • but instead a highly adaptive trait of our species,
    • which has enabled human infants to
      • efficiently organize attention to social agents and
      • learn efficiently from social output,”
  • “The evolutionary goal of altricial species is
    • not to become highly competent as quickly as possible
    • but rather to excel at learning over time.”
• Authors
  • Michael Goldstein,
  • Katerina Faust,
  • Samantha Carouso-Peck
  • Mary R. Elson

• the beauty of perceptual immaturity in altricial species is that
• it makes learning easier by reducing the complexity of the world,” the researchers wrote.
• Parents are key to altricial learning, Goldstein said,
  • forming a two-way system of feedback.
• Far from being passive recipients, he said,
  • infants of many species can change the behavior of their parents
  • in ways that actively shape their own developments.

• Quote worthy
  • "“Rather than requiring hard-wired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents”
    • Authors
      • Michael Goldstein,
      • Katerina Faust,
      • Samantha Carouso-Peck
      • Mary R. Elson

• Title
  • The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species,
• Journal
  • The Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, - -
• Publication Date
  • Dec, 2021
• Authors
• Michael Goldstein,
• Katerina Faust,
  • Samantha Carouso-Peck and
  • Mary R. Elson

• comment
  • 24 billionaires each have more money than the US Treasury during this time when the US is trying to avoid defaulting on its debt

• quote worthy
  • “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
  • Ronald Wright

• This is how wealthy individuals or corporations
  • translate their economic power
  • into political and cultural power
• quote

Climate Denialism funding

• Comment
  • Question
    • How much material would be freed up if it was SHARED instead of hoarded by one person?
    • related questions
      • what kind of behavioral change is required to reach an impactful level of sharing?
      • in a sense, public-instead-of-private
        • transportation
        • etc
      • is the ultimate expression of private converted to public

• Comment
  • this statement epitomizes the crux of the matter
  • that demonstrates the entanglement between
    • a collective of (bottom-up) individuals and
    • top-down, system level actors
  • This is why the often-repeated mantra "individual actions don't matter" is not accurate
    • the contribution of individual actions DO matter, but only if it is supported by:
      • policy
      • ubiquitous 1.5C infrastructure
      • affordable 1.5C technologies and services
    • There is a MASS of people wanting to make the change
      • but that cannot happen unless it is
        • behaviorally and
        • economically pragmatic to do so
  • the real question to ask
    • in order to mobilize a bottom-up 1.5C lifestyle shift is
    • where are the leverage points for bottom-up actors (we individuals) to impact the top-down actors?

• Title: What a 1.5C lifestyle actually looks like
• Summary
  • Many people want to participate in the transition
  • to a regenerative, low carbon future
    • but the existing high carbon infrastructure
    • makes it very challenging to do so
  • This article features interviews with activists who are trying to live a lifestyle
    • that is consistent with a 1.5C world
    • WITHIN infrastructure that is not yet consistent with a 1.5C world.
    • It is challenging, to say the least!
      • and demonstrates the lock-in feedbacks,
      • a chicken-and-egg situation
      • that creates the challenge holding the masses back
  • From a Stop Reset Go (SRG) perspective
    • this illustrates the entangled relationship between
      • the individual and
      • the collective
    • and how each has an important role to play
      • to influence the other.
    • As an organization working on helping accelerate a bottom-up movement, this brings up the question:
      • what are the leverage points for citizens to accelerate top down actors such as
        • government to establish new policies and
        • manufacturers to create affordable regenerative products aligned with a 1.5C world?
• Interviewee:
  • Carys mainprize
  • Rosalind Readhead

• 1.5C individual carbon footprint targets:

  • 1.4 tonnes CO2e/year by 2040
  • 0.7 tonnes CO2e/year by 2050
  • what about 2030?

• Comment

  • From the perspective of mobilizing a bottom-up movement, the critical questions are:
    • what are the critical changes required for all of us to achieve around 1 tonne CO2e/year?
    • what are the leverage points for a bottom-up movement?

• Summary
  • Detroit's renaissance demonstrates
    • leverage points of repurposing
    • idling built environment resources
  • Cities with underutilized resources can take advantage of lean urbanism
    • via creating pink zones
    • where red tape is relaxed
• backlinked to
  • http://andrewmalone.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-roman-domus-as-caribbean-urban.html