- Nov 2021
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link.springer.com link.springer.com
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Detachment, we will have to assume, begins at the beginning, i.e., with the Big Bang. Prior to the Big Bang, all existence (whatever that means) was confined to an infinitely dense, infinitesimally small singularity in which there was no space or time and all four basic forces of nature (as we now understand them) were united into one. The universe was born, space-time emerges, in an explosion of detachment. Without getting too bogged down in the technical details of high-energy physics and cosmology, the take-home lesson is that a logic of detachments-built-upon-detachments is set into motion from... the beginning. It has been theorized that cosmic detachment began with the detachment of gravity from the unity of fundamental forces, resulting in the formation of elementary particles and anti-particles followed by an inflation into space-time triggered by the further detachment of the strong nuclear force. As yet inexplicable asymmetries in the appearance of baryons (matter) versus antibaryons (anti-matter) were a sine qua non for the early persistence of our universe. It is now believed that the possibility of mass was predicated upon the detachment of the particle called the Higgs boson and with that the associated Higgs field. The detachment of the Higgs boson, and thus of mass, then constitutes a horizon for all subsequent material detachments in our universe.Physicists characterize the possibility state space of a simple system in terms of its “degrees of freedom.” For example, a simple atom like hydrogen can respond to a perturbation (such as being hit by a photon) by moving in space along three axes (3), rotating (4), or elevating the energy level of an electron (5). It is thus accorded five degrees of freedom. A simple diatomic molecule, like H2, can also vibrate along its common axis so adds an additional degree of freedom. Detachment is always about the emergence of higher degrees of relative independence.We can already see a reciprocal relationship between detachment and integration. Two atoms each with five degrees of freedom, shed their independent degrees of freedom through integrating, by way of a covalent bond, to form a new entity, the diatomic molecule, with six degrees of freedom. The more degrees of freedom the greater the detachment. As our universe has evolved it has given rise to constituent entities with greater and greater abilities to buffer themselves against “ambient winds” (be that bombardment by radiation or predation by voracious carnivores). Following the same logic, a particle with rest mass that creates a well in space-time is more detached than a particle (like a photon) with no rest mass. A macromolecule, like a protein-based enzyme, whose folding history affects its future actions is more detached than a simpler molecule whose structure is solely determined by thermodynamic necessity (and thus has no history). A major transition in detachment occurred when a system emerged that actively constituted its own boundary (Plessner’s positionality) and actively sustained its ability to do so. We typically associate this level of detachment with what we recognize as “life”.
Detachment theory in Physics
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Plessner included fundaments about biological structure, organization, physiology, ecology, and ethology in his attempt at elaborating a non-dualist, and systematically coherent framework for all forms of life (Plessner 2019).Using positionalilty as a point of departure for elaborating a logic of life, including human life, is in fact tantamount to simultaneously treating the question of integration, or unification, as a point of departure. As Plessner makes clear, it is only with the living state that boundaries become something other than arbitrary and contingent. To the extent that life is defined by anything, it is defined by the dynamic enactment of a distinction between inner and outer, Plessner’s so-called “double aspectivity.” “Positionality” then is the categorical universal and sine qua non of the living state and conceptually defines the boundary between physical phenomena that, for all intents and purposes, are partes extra partes, from those for which some non-trivial level of system unity and integrity has been achieved. Plessner does not specifically take up the language of normativity and yet one can find it to be implicit in his account. The realization of a life, even at the most rudimentary, let’s say the simple, single-celled level, already entails a form of active mediation between reaching outward and enforcing a boundary, that suggests the regulatory enactment of an implicit norm. For Plessner, there is a logic of dialectical building of positional levels upon levels of reflection that culminate in the human level of “excentric positionality” whereby the “shared” (and invariably normative) perspective of the universal Other is always reflexively embodied and reflectively available. Which is to say that Plessner has long since offered a body-mind neutral account in which human-level normativity is located on a natural continuum in which questions of dynamic system integration are at least implicitly fundamental. Where Plessner fell short, I suggest, is in (only) deriving a largely monological account of the emergence of human-level normativity.Footnote 6 The following may be viewed as in part an attempt to offer the complementary perspective, albeit with the full reconciliatory and synthetic engagement to appear in subsequent work.
Plessner's key insight of double aspectivity is the result of the boundary that creates the separation of the inner from the outer. The active mediation between reaching outward and maintaining a boundary suggests the regulatory enactment of an implicit norm.
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What we require is an approach that can bring both of these together in some way. In recent work Arran Gare has made a compelling case for how this involves a renewed acceptance and embrace of speculative thinking (Gare 2018). For physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2015), whose collaborative work over eight years has resulted in a fascinating book entitled The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, bringing together the big picture of the universe as a whole with the micro-level advances of physics, entails no less than a return to the practice of Natural Philosophy proper. In referring to “normativity as a force of nature”, I have thus far only used as a teaser, or perhaps appetizer, the idea that normativity might be able to span the chasm between the bottom up and the top down, and thus serve as a conceptual lynchpin of a renewed speculative natural philosophy. There will be more to come. But it should also be acknowledged that attempting to bring together a top-down with a bottom-up approach, even to also address questions of integration and unification is not entirely new.
Moss articulates normativity as the lynchpin that can provide a necessary and sufficient naturalistic account.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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let's stop let's just stop doing it and let's let's find other ways of measuring quality of life other than being flooded 00:21:22 by this great tide of plastic and metal and electronics 99 of which we simply do not need to live a good life
Stop Reset Go strategy. Stop Button. Could we use the Stop Button to just stop? Is there a way to create a conditional stop button with conditional impacts if thresholds are exceeded?
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this is a fundamental issue of justice and equity so the top one percent uh in 00:09:22 terms of wealth around the world use 15 produce 15 of the greenhouse gas emissions which is twice as much as the bottom 50 percent whose total 00:09:34 emissions are just seven percent of the total so we're looking at uh a very small number of people grabbing the lion's share of natural wealth they claim to be wealth creators they're actually taking 00:09:47 wealth from the rest of us they're saying we're going to have all this atmospheric space for ourselves and incidentally all these other resources all the mahogany and the gold and the 00:09:58 diamonds and the bluefin tuna sushi and whatever else that they're consuming on a massive scale and this is driven by to a very large extent by their remarkable disproportionate use of aviation 00:10:12 there's one set of figures suggesting that the richest one percent are responsible for 50 of the world's aviation emissions but also by their yachts for example the average 00:10:24 um commonal garden super yacht um kept on standby for a billionaire to step onto whenever he wants um produces 7 000 tons of carbon dioxide per year 00:10:38 if we're to meet even the conventional accounting for staying within 1.5 degrees of global heating our maximum emissions per person are around 2.3 00:10:49 tons so one super yacht is what over 3 000 people's worth of emissions this is just grossly outrageously unfair and we should rebel 00:11:01 against the habit of the very rich of taking our natural wealth from us
Stop Reset Go needs to implement a STOP the STEAL! campaign against the elites and luxury producers and also a WEALTH to WELLth program to transition high carbon consumption lifestyle to a low one that helps the wealthy funnel their wealth into climate justice and become carbon heros instead of carbon villains.
See the reports that George Monbiot is referring to:
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um kevin anderson 00:12:43 if you can talk more about this issue both you and george assad raymond and so many other climate activists talking about this issue of wealth 00:12:55 you say per capita is a flawed metric as most polluting industries have been moved to developing nations so it's not reflective of the rich nation's emissions take all of this on 00:13:09 yeah i mean that's a really key issue and i think if i focus in here on the uk where i know it's a place obviously i know much better that what we've done in the uk we've closed down a lot of our industry and then we import the manufactured goods from elsewhere in the 00:13:22 world and then we turn around to those parts of the world and then we blame them for the emissions in manufacturing the goods that we are enjoying and that's everything from our electronic goods to parts for our cars as our clothes so you know the uk is 00:13:35 effectively moved to a bar and banking culture and and and offshore virtually everything else and so we when we looking at our total amount of emissions we have to take account of the carbon footprint of our lifestyles and that 00:13:47 does include the emissions that we associated with things that we import and export i mean you take that into account you tend to find that most wealthy countries have a much larger carbon footprint than when you just look at the energy they use within their 00:14:00 boundaries and i think it's really key again when we think about these issues of equity we we that we take this what's often referred to as a consumption-based accounting method we take that into account because it is unfair to be 00:14:12 penalizing poor parts of the world for them making things to help us have a better quality of life over here and when we do that then the challenges get even more striking in terms of what we have to do and it also also brings out 00:14:25 even further the issues of equity the disparity between the richer parts of the world and the poorer parts of the world but i also think on the equity point it's really worth bringing out that it's not as if everyone in the uk is even 00:14:37 there isn't just one public in the uk there are multiple publics there were those of us who are the wealthy ones in our own country that are responsible for the lion's share of missions within the uk that will be true chain for the u.s for germany for japan australia and so 00:14:50 within all of our countries there are large swathes of the country who are the average and below average consumers and for them the response to climate change is very different from those of us who are in our own countries are responsible for the lion's share of 00:15:03 emissions so i think we have to differentiate not just between countries but even within our countries and my concern there is that who are the people that frame the climate dubai debate they're the climate scientists and the academics they're the 00:15:14 entrepreneurs the business leaders the journalists the barristers they're all the people that are in the very high emitting category so we frame the debate and we never ever frame the debate with equity at its core and with regardless 00:15:26 of our maths or our moral sorry regardless of our moral position the maths tell us if we are to deliver on the commitments then equity has to be a key part of our responses but we never talk about that because we are in that 00:15:38 high emitting group
Kevin points out why a CONSUMPTION-BASED METRIC is more accurate than PER CAPITA metric, as the PER CAPITA metric does not include the embodied carbon emissions of the manufactured goods that consumers purchase. Per Capita metric reflects that the manufacture is responsible, not the consumer, an inaccurate moral indication.
We have also noticed that wealthy and poor exist in ALL countries of the world and the more nuanced terminology we employ based on a Country-Wealth Sector classification matrix as described here:
https://medium.com/@gien_SRG/more-nuanced-terminology-for-post-colonialist-inequality-af2f1609635c
Using this new terminology, Monbiot and Anderson are referring to the North-North and South-North class as all the elites of the world has having the highest personal carbon footprint whilst the North-South and South-South class are the victims.
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So to sum things up what caused life's major evolutionary transitions the answer is cooperation major transitions begin when a group of organisms join forces to better survive and reproduce if cooperation continues long enough a new super organism may Emerge one that can then go [on] to reproduce and evolve as a whole and 00:07:42 The pathway that led [to] animals along with humankind [at] least three major transitions have been identified resulting in four layers of Life within your own body
Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).
Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!
In the deep history of the evolution of the human body, genes, mitochondria, eukaryotes were all once autonomous living entities, each a biological self with its own boundary separating inner from outer. Virus's helped to catalyze their mutualism over deep time.
Now, over billions of years of evolution, they are all integrated together by the extra-cellular matrix and laminin protein into our multi-cellular human body, replicating as one super, super, super organism.
Finally, inscribed language has allowed us to undergo another kind of transition, a major system transition (MST) where human beings now dominate the entire biosphere, for better and for worse.
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in 00:05:44 1998 researchers set up a mini Ecosystem with small mouths protists and single-celled algae the protists could easily swallow individual algal cells But had trouble eating cells that happen to stick together after reproducing in less than just 20 generations the algae evolved multicellular cooperation they form groups of eight tightly connected cells that could not [be] eaten by the protists [a] 00:06:10 similar experiment on single-celled yeast in 2011 Showed that [just] 32 days after multi-celled colonies evolved clear division of labor also evolved giving rise to unique cell types specializing in different tasks these two experiments show us how multi-celled organisms may have first evolved, but what about mitochondria and their permanent merger with eukaryotes In a long-term study ending in 2008 a protist that normally eats Bacteria was seen swallowing a species of algae 00:06:41 Apparently on accident that it was not able to digest Inside the protists the algae was able to grow and reproduce when the protists reproduced as well both daughter cells contained algae after several years and many many generations researchers found that when Bacteria was scarce Protists containing algae were much more likely to survive than those without They avoided starvation by feeding off the waste products the algae produced This was the start of a [Brand-new] relationship 00:07:14 Strikingly similar to what we find between [our] [cells] and the mitochondria [that] live inside
Fascinating experiments that support MET.
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Each new layer of Life is the result of what scientists call a major evolutionary transition? What was the cause of these transitions the answer is? Cooperation a Major Transition starts when free living creatures team up to form a cooperative group in the early stages of cooperation Participants are free to come and go as they [please] [if] a group sticks together long enough however 00:04:51 Division of labor will often evolve different participants begin specializing in different tasks as time goes on Individuals may become so specialized that they can no longer survive on their own [if] the entire group becomes locked into cooperation Depending fully on one another to survive and reproduce a new super organism has been forged and they made your evolutionary transition is complete 00:05:16 From this point on the entire group will evolve together as one Models describing natural situations that might promote the evolution of major transitions have been put forth by scientists such as John Maynard Smith [fior] Sonck Mary stuart West and w d hamilton using these models Researchers have been able to Mimic natural scenarios in the lab Allowing us to directly witness the beginnings of major transitions [evolved]
This is the key to Major Evolutionary Transition - a population of free living individual creatures discover that in teaming up, there is a greater resultant evolutionary fitness, mutualism symbiotic relationship emerges. It becomes so strong over time that the many become a self-replicating one.
The biological self is always defined by a boundary between inner and outer, but in this act of mutualism, the many biological selves join to form a new higher order biological self.
In this way, a multi-cellular species like ours is somewhat like one of those nested Russian dolls.
Indeed, Amanda Robins hypothesizes
https://hyp.is/NyrixELGEeyYWN_d76UNMg/docdrop.org/video/6J-J72GoqhY/
that our species has undergone what she and Peter Nonacs calls Major System Transition (MST). The cultural artifact of inscribed language has made possible a superorganism / supraorganism that has spread across the globe.
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Today we tend to shrug this off as common knowledge, but think how amazing this is you are a Colony
This is a great vid for showing how we are a multi-level being. Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).
Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!
We have genes, that were once autonomous living entities, mitochondria within cells, which at one time were autonomous entities, and cells, which were also once autonomously existent eukaryotes. All three exist in transmuted form that is now integrated into our body.
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two one way to explore these questions is to look at how information has changed due to the human mst and one way that it's changed is the 00:46:59 emergence of a fifth level of information dark information which peter talked about before is info that is generated by abiotic computer software and so this information level is only 00:47:13 possible from inscribed language and the technological innovations that that gave rise to that now can generate this kind of information 00:47:24 and there's two key components to dark information one is that it's produced by computer software with no direct human involvement and the second is that from the processes of 00:47:36 input to generated output can't be replicated or feasibly derived by humans so it's inherently dark even if some of the output were able to apply to real world problems 00:47:49 and so this kind of uh information is gaining traction so unsupervised machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly capable of generating novel algorithms without added human input and 00:48:03 so here are some of the ways that we're currently applying this technology and we it's still in its infancy so we're likely far away from seeing a met where direct information is involved but 00:48:15 this does have the potential for in the future um helping keep humans alive on earth or expanding our niche even further and maybe far down the line seeing something like a 00:48:29 dependence or an inter mutualistic inter-specific mutualism met between biotic life and abiotic technology
It is unexpected to see abiotic cultural artifacts such as dark information be considered in an evolutionary biology context.
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we want to focus on how humans fit into our category goal framework here and we'll use this figure as a roadmap 00:42:18 starting with the center section looking that looks at how events that affect the species and clay level and so what stands out here for humans is our 00:42:28 complex spoken language which greatly enhances our communication and has long been thought of as a met due to leaps in the way that we transmit information between individuals 00:42:40 but this met really wouldn't have been possible without a major competitive transition so the specific regions in the brain that are associated with greater cognition and language ability 00:42:52 and also our larger brain size which is correlated with functionality and our spoken language allows human societies to gather greater amounts of level 3 or learned 00:43:07 information than would ever be possible within any one individual's lifetime and this really turns up the dial on the magnitude at which cultural evolution affects us as a 00:43:19 species and allows us to adapt and construct our environments in different ways cultural innovations are also not dependent on random beneficial mutations but can 00:43:32 arise intentionally and this has major impacts for how quickly and at what level we can affect our ecosystems 00:43:43 so when we come back to the figure and we've layered on complex spoken language now we can look at the level of ecosystem change that's occurred because of this and see if it's enough to bring 00:43:55 us to a major systems transition and here we argue that the answer is no if we would have just stopped at spoken language our global impact would never have reached the level 00:44:07 that it takes to drive an mst but we do argue that this spoken language was actually a facilitating evolutionary transition for events that directly paved the way 00:44:19 for an mst so human spoken language is a facilitating transition for symbolic representation of instructional information so the met and the mechd that make up 00:44:33 complex spoken language are actually a fit for being able to write things down and being able to write things down onto abiotic mediums allows us to increase the amount of information that 00:44:47 we can store the accuracy of the stored information and the efficiency of transmission and this has an especially high impact for oblique transmission because 00:44:59 being able to inscribe information can potentially immortalize it and then individuals far in the future can build upon it and so being able to build upon 00:45:12 uh generations of information through symbolic representation of language is really a key for the expansion of technological innovations that have expanded the realized niche of humans so 00:45:25 we have spread across every continent made major impacts on most ecosystems and a part of what has allowed us to do this is the technology that we've designed uh based upon large amounts of 00:45:39 inscribed language and some of these technologies actually allow us to manipulate or avoid the processes of natural selection and some of the those examples are listed here 00:45:53 and so when we go back to our figure and layer on the potential to inscribe language and then re-look at ecosystem level changes we think that here due to due to the 00:46:06 technological innovations and global expansion that's come with being the only species to store this much level three information that the answer is now yes 00:46:19 and when an mst occurs the context in which this entire cycle takes place completely shifts because now the global ecosystem is playing by a modified set of rules that are 00:46:33 set forth by the mst so this brings us to the question are humans the last mst or are there other mets and mechs forthcoming that will drive a new 00:46:45 major systems transition
Robin argues that spoken language alone, while a MET does not constitute a MST because spoken language could not have resulted in the global spread of ideas that made our current globalized modernity possible. However, it is a Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET) which paved the way for inscribed language which did enable the global spread of technology.
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our fourth point is that for something like eukaryotes and others where there is no immediate major system 00:25:30 transition we're really sort of saying is that they perhaps are critical to such a transition but not at the time necessarily that they have evolved so in essence we want to amp we want to bring in a new 00:25:43 term which we call facilitating evolutionary transition so it makes it is part of a major system transition but it clearly needs other 00:25:55 evolutionary events to go along with it and the final sort of point is that there are perhaps catalysts that are involved in this process and one of the major catalysts that may 00:26:12 have had effects throughout evolutionary history are viruses so viruses may have been key actors to help the transition from 00:26:23 rna to dna they may have uh produced or helped produce the nucleus in eukaryotes and we'll talk about a little bit later about the key role that viral genes play 00:26:36 in making sexual reproduction possible and even in placental mammals the evolution of a placenta so without viral genes being moved across 00:26:47 horizontally species some of these major transitions could never have happened so now we have sort of the complete integrated process of of our diagram and again the question 00:27:02 that we're really focusing on oftentimes is that last one yes when how and why do we get to a major system transition and how do nets mechs uh 00:27:15 fets and catalysts all play a role in these various transitions
Viruses have played a key role in a number of different METs. This is an important insight that can contextualize the covid-19 pandemic.
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you are looking at major 00:12:17 evolutionary transitions so one can start with the idea that initially what has to happen is individuals kind of have to tolerate each other so in other words competitors 00:12:31 have to be willing to form into those simple groups and those groups have to have some kind of benefit for their existence and continuance then berkshire said well the next step 00:12:44 in this transition is what can go from formation to maintenance so if you go from a simple group to society again there are there are rules there are maybe individuals that belong to certain 00:12:56 societies and rather than sort of a fission fusion kind of uh coming together going apart these societies maintain themselves these groups maintain themselves over 00:13:08 longer periods of time and there are more benefits and there may in fact be more conflicts that have to be worked out to keep the societies to maintain the societies 00:13:19 finally there would be the step into this group transformation again what what what kuala and strassmann might have called organismality so now that the groups subsume their kind of 00:13:32 individual goals into a collective goal for all of them and again the idea here is that that that one has to happen is conflict has to be somehow managed and reduced 00:13:44 such that the groups can actually transform into this coherent whole single individual and some of the key points in in in burke's sort of 00:13:55 pathway to to to transformation is that the first two steps are can truly be bidirectional in other words uh societies can go back to being simple groups and simple groups can go 00:14:10 back to being competitive just competitors so in other words those aren't sort of absorbing states but the argument is that once once you sort of get to that group transformation that last blue arrow you 00:14:23 have transformed in a way that it is hard or impossible to really go backwards and what burke argued is that that process those those various steps and 00:14:34 particularly that last transformative step is strongly driven often by inclusive fitness kin selection so in other words going back to that continuum 00:14:46 of the types of groups that they can form fraternal groups are much more likely to to transform into these higher level organisms than 00:14:58 uh egalitarian groups
The transition from competing individuals to a coherent unity is a fascinating journey.
Applied to human society at a time of the Anthropocene, these principles of evolutionary biology may be salient to apply to the superorganism/supra-organism of humanity undergoing a process of rapid whole system change.
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so what kuller and strasman then basically were trying to kind of in a way define or look at was how you transition from being a group 00:11:28 to an actual individual organism so at what point at what point do the individuals sort of meld into something that you would call just one individual what they call 00:11:41 organismality
The shift from individual to unified group due to evolutionary fitness bestowed by fitness emerges a new stable replicable unit and marks a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET).
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we could look at at these sort of transitions in a sort of a two-dimensional uh graph in a sense and so we can start out and say okay groups can have more or 00:09:22 less conflict within them and groups can have more or less cooperation occurring within them and so if they are 00:09:34 down here in the left hand lower quadrant you basically are looking at more or less individuals so competitors so conflict not so much cooperation 00:09:48 if you move to the right hand side you start to form simple groups again individuals may come together to reap certain benefits and these benefits can be as simple as sort of 00:10:01 a selfish herd reducing predator risk predation risk and so on so not necessarily a lot of overt cooperation not necessarily a lot of 00:10:14 conflict going on then as you move to the upper left-hand quadrant you have groups that are now societies in other words there there might be rules as to who belongs 00:10:27 to the group uh there might be more cooperation within that within that group but also more conflict in the sense that the cooperation is producing benefits 00:10:38 and there may be conflicts over who is required to actually produce the benefits and how those benefits are actually shared within that group and then finally 00:10:49 uh if you can reduce that conflict uh such that everyone everyone more or less cooperates and doesn't doesn't there's the in any senses conflict with each other you can 00:11:02 actually turn the group into or the society into a coherent uh single organism at which point you may go back and start the whole process again
Situatedness of modern human societies within this two dimensional graph is interesting. Although the images shown are of multi-cellular organisms, it can equally apply to smaller living units such as autonomously living genes, mitochondria or eukaryotes.
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and in that uh i would sort of say that that dave queller and jones strassmann again sort of approached this these problems as to how you transition across social groups and 00:08:18 their emphasis or at least they put an emphasis on the idea of that one way you can look at groups is you can look at their relative similarity or genetic similarity 00:08:32 so groups can range from being you know entirely fraternal in which place we're looking at genetic clones all the way out to what might be called egalitarian 00:08:44 with unrelated individuals or even individuals from from from different species so in essence groups can be placed somewhere along this continuum of 00:08:56 similarity of identity from again completely identical to very very different fraternal to egalitarian
The radical collaboration that is required during the climate crisis is on the egalitarian end of the spectrum.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I think the reason that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept of "we are all connected inside of it" is because the societies that actually deeply adopt this idea are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration, deepen their level of expression, deepen their level of understanding for each other. 00:16:40 This is the reason that this idea pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions. And I hope through this talk you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it's actually something that is just literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation of matter, energy, and life.
This is a good alignment showing that at the deepest level, the fundamental aspiration and values of science and religion are the same: interconnectedness.
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Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.
The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.
Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.
CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)
This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)
We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.
Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.
Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.
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Like, the world I came to is exactly the same as the world that I left. But what you wouldn't have understood is that every breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives after you - lives that you would never see, lives that we are all a part of today. And it's worth thinking that maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even within the scope of our understanding.
This is a profound observation that shows how our collective species death over deep history shapes the universe. From a first person experience of reality, however, does it makes us feel that the universe is intimate? The universe is a grand dance and we are part of that dance. Ernest Becker's Mortality Salience looms large. How do we feel meaningful in the face of our mortality? How do we alleviate the perennial meaning crisis?
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That's a picture of it in the background. And this organism has the special trick that we call "photosynthesis," the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. And over the course of billions of years, so starting from two and a half billion years ago, little by little these bacteria spread across the planet 00:07:08 and converted all that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. And it was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas, then they had to saturate the oxygen that the earth would absorb, and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere. So you see, just after about 900 million years ago, oxygen starts to build up in the atmosphere. And about 600 million years ago, something really amazing happens. 00:07:35 The ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere. And it sounds like a small deal, like we talked about the ozone a couple decades ago, but it actually turns out that before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really able to sustain complex, multicellular life. We had single-celled organisms, we had a couple of simple, multicellular organisms, but we didn't really have anything like you or me. 00:07:59 And shortly after the ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex multicellular life. There was a Cambrian explosion of life in the seas. And the first plants got onto land. In fact, there was actually no life on land ahead of that. Another way to see this is, this is kind of a chart of pretty much most of the animals that you guys are familiar with. 00:08:24 And right at the bottom in time is the formation of the ozone layer. Like nothing that you are familiar with today could exist without the contributions of these tiny organisms over those billions of years. And where are they now? Well actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants of the cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants. And they're now called chloroplasts. 00:08:49 So this is a zoom-in of a plant leaf - and we probably ate some of these guys today - where tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped - contributing photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half of our lungs on earth. And in this way, our breaths are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored by the in-breath of a plant,
This would be nice to turn into a science lesson or to represent this in an experiential, participatory Deep Humanity BEing Journey. To do this, it would be important to elucidate the series of steps leading from one stated result to the next, showing how scientific methodology works to link the series of interconnected ideas together. Especially important is the science that glues everything together over deep time.
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And it's this process, the gravitational dance of 100,000 galaxies swirling together, 00:05:25 which drive the process of galaxies colliding, which drive massive star formation, which drive the process of creating the iron that courses through each one of our veins with every heartbeat.
For a deeper explanation outside of the TED Talk format, it would be enlightening to unpack a bit of the science behind how astronomers come to these conclusions.
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today I'm here to describe that everything really is connected, 00:02:02 and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct, understandable way. And I am going to do that with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind.
These three are excellent candidates for multimedia Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey.
It is relevant to introduce another concept that provides insights into another aspect required for engaging a non-scientific audience, and that is language.
The audience is important! BEing Journeys must take that into consideration. We can bias the presentation by implicit assumptions. How can we take those implicit assumptions into consideration and thereby expand the audience?
For a non-scientific audience, these arguments may not be so compelling. In this case, it is important to demonstrate how science can lead us to make such astounding predictions of times and space not directly observable to normative human perception.
Tags
- science and religion
- Laniakea
- MET
- Deep Humanity
- GCC
- MST
- deep time
- DH
- Stop Reset Go
- Major Evolutionary Transition
- What it's like to be a bat
- Stuart West
- Cumulative Cultural Evolution
- big history
- mortality salience
- peter nonacs
- Major System Transition
- BEing Journey
- connectedness
- Gene culture coevolution
- Thomas Nagel
- Ernest Becker
- meaning crisis
- Amanda Robins
- CCE
- colliding galaxies
- SRG
- palette of being
- iron from stars
- we are all connected
Annotators
URL
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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What Morton means by “the end of the world” is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no “world” anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them. Part of the work of confronting strange strangeness is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair. “Somewhere, a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead,” Morton writes, in “Being Ecological,” from 2018. “You stop reading this book and look around you. You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.” It’s a winsome and terrifying idea. Learning to see oneself as an object among objects is destabilizing—like learning “to navigate through a bad dream.” In many ways, Morton’s project is not philosophical but therapeutic. They have been trying to prepare themselves for the seismic shifts that are coming as the world we thought we knew transforms.
We are suffering through a meaning crisis due to the huge impacts humanity has had on the planet. As a result, destabilization is happening exponentially as nature blows back to us.Morton's brutal honesty doesn't leave us with many places to hide. We have to confront what we have collectively created.
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In “Dark Ecology,” Morton writes that we must cultivate a “spirituality of care” toward the objects of the world—not just the likable parts but the frightening ones. Morton suggests that, instead of burying nuclear waste, we might store it aboveground, in a visible place, where we can learn to take more responsibility for it—perhaps even building an aesthetically interesting enclosure. The kind of care Morton envisions is as interested in piles of sulfur as in trees; it is concerned with both polar bears and circuit boards. Morton wants us to care for plutonium. At a minimum, Morton thinks that this kind of caring could cure us of the idea that we are in control; it might show us that we are part of a vast network of interpenetrating entities that come to know one another without dispelling their mystery. At a maximum, Morton seems to feel that this omnidirectional, uncanny form of care could help save the world.
dark ecology is an honesty to looking at the role industrialization has terraformed our planet.
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Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
Object Oriented Ontology - Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. ... There is no "outside" - just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
This needs to be harmonized with Stop Reset Go (SRG) complimentary Human Inner Transformation (HIT) and Social Outer Transformation (SOT) strategy.
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The next day, I assumed we would begin our quest to find signs of hyperobjects in and around the city of Houston
This would make an excellent Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey
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www.annualreviews.org www.annualreviews.org
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Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible for as much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twice the emissions of the poorest 50% (2).
Even more recent research adds to this:
See the annotated Oxfam report: Linked In from the author: https://hyp.is/RGd61D_IEeyaWyPmSL8tXw/www.linkedin.com/posts/timgore_inequality-parisagreement-emissionsgap-activity-6862352517032943616-OHL- Annotations on full report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__
and the annotated Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/KKhrLj_bEeywAIuGCjROAg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/ https://hyp.is/zo0VbD_bEeydJf_xcudslg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/
This suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. The COP meetings are focused on nation states. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.
Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,
A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it to accelerate transition.
Anderson has contextualized the scale of such an impact in his other presentations but not here. A recent example is the temporary emission decreases due to covid 19. A 6.6% global decrease was determined from this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3#:~:text=After%20rising%20steadily%20for%20decades,on%20daily%20fossil%20fuel%20emissions. with the US contributing 13% due to lockdown impacts on vehicular travel (both air and ground). After the pandemic ends, experts expect a strong rebound effect.
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A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.
The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, human inner transformation (HIT) approaches and cultural methodologies.
Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
The sleeping giant of billions of potential change actors remains dormant. How do we awaken them and mobilize them. If we can do this, it can constitute the emergence of a third unidentified actor in system change.
The Stop Reset Go (SRG) initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity (DH) as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview advocated by Meadows. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.
There are a number of strategic demographics that can be targeted in methodical evidence-based ways. Each of these is a leverage point and can bring about social tipping points.
A number of 2021 reports characterize the outsized impact of the top 1% and top 10% of humanity. Unless their luxury, high ecological footprint behavior is reeled in, humanity won't stand a chance. Annotation of Oxfam report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__ Annotation of Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotorcool.org%2Fhc-posts%2Frelease-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles%2F&group=__world__
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Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).
This is indeed a problematic feature of human evolution. It has given rise to what Timothy Morton refers to as "hyperobjects", objects of such vastness in space and time that it defeats human mechanisms of perception at local scale: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://hyp.is/xROjpD_jEey4a6-Urbh4_Q/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way within the context of Deep Humanity open source praxis BEing journeys.
As in the New Yorker interview with Morton, we can take Deep Humanity participants on BEing journeys, walkabouts to identify hyperobjects.
Hyperobjects are also cognitive and highly abstract in nature. This is a clue to another idea that could be enlightening to understanding the problematic context of appreciating hyperobjects such as climate change, and that is the idea of Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt:
"Uexküll was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). He argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, 'self-in-world' subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,[9] phenomenal world,[10] self-world,[10] environment[11] - lit. German environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which would be the living being's surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the human observer. Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. By studying how the senses of various organisms like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms work, he was able to build theories of how they experience the world. Because all organisms perceive and react to sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that they were to be considered as living subjects. This argument was the basis for his biological theory in which the characteristics of biological existence ("life") could not simply be described as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had to be described as subject and a part of a sign system.
The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The Umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Giorgio Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,
"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."[12]
Thus, for the tick, the Umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairiness of mammals." ( From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll)
The human umwelt limits us to a relatively small range of sensed signs. CO2 particles is not one of them. We rely on scientific narratives but these are far removed from direct sensing, into the field of conceptualization and abstraction. We have evolved to respond to danger that is sensed, less so to danger that is conceptualized.
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Perspectives that emphasize lifestyles and consumption help to foreground the fundamental inequalities and injustices in the drivers of climate change (see Section 5.1). There are large variations in emissions between different lifestyles even within similar social groups and geographic regions (not least those with high income versus those without) (2, 129)—and yet, there has so far been a pervasive failure to direct mitigation efforts toward high emitters and emission-intensive practices (156, 158, 162). Confronting such variation and inequality requires demand management practices that target high-carbon lifestyles without disproportionately impacting more vulnerable communities. Such tailored approaches could lead to more effective mitigation policies by focusing on high-emission practices (e.g., frequent flying by wealthier groups). Furthermore, participatory and practice-oriented policy processes, where these involve citizens questioning how to bring about more system-wide change, can engender critique of the very power dynamics and patterns of influence that facilitate unsustainable lifestyles.
See the annotated Oxfam report: Linked In from the author: https://hyp.is/RGd61D_IEeyaWyPmSL8tXw/www.linkedin.com/posts/timgore_inequality-parisagreement-emissionsgap-activity-6862352517032943616-OHL- Annotations on full report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__
and the annotated Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/KKhrLj_bEeywAIuGCjROAg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/ https://hyp.is/zo0VbD_bEeydJf_xcudslg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/
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Ultimately, high-carbon lifestyles arise from both individual actions and systemic conditions of everyday life.
Individual behavior and systemic conditions are entangled. We cannot say one is not important but the other is. System transformation is required on both sides simultaneously. Positive changes in one will create pressure in the other to change. We can leverage these positive feedback effects for system transformation.
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For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across disparate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example, mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academia from high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student recruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge, policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation of high-carbon practices.
A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localization https://medium.com/@joseramos_30450/the-cosmo-local-reader-invitation-to-participate-dbcb6248f54b
In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.
Graduated relocalization that begins to replace auto transportation with pedestrian and bike traffic can result in huge decarbonization impacts. This relocalization movement is also an economic reconfiguration, echoing what community economist Michael Shuman refers to as the movement from Wall Street to Main Street - decentralizing centralizing organizations when feasible, and creating more community wealth while decarbonizing unnecessarily long supply chains.
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Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).
New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.
As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.
The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/
We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.
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As the emerging field of energy humanities (168) is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies are deeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169). Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offer a “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).
Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.
Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.
Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization
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Critical to historical and ongoing carbon lock-in has been the pervasive failure in industrial, modern societies to imagine desirable ways of living that are neither wedded to the carbon economy nor dependent on narratives of progress reliant on perpetual economic growth (see Section 4.1). This scarcity of plausible imaginaries underpins many of the factors discussed in this article and persists for a number of interconnected reasons.
It is critical to create stories and narratives of what an ecologically regenerative society living within planetary boundaries looks like at a local level that we are familiar with. We need enliven and enact futures studies and backcast to our current reality.
Imaginative storytelling by the artists is critical at this time so that we can imagine and not be so afraid of what a transformed future looks like. Indeed, if we do it right, it can be FAR BETTER than our current unbalanced civilization.
Tags
- top 1 %
- habitual high carbon behavior
- community economics
- ecocivilization narrative
- low carbon lifestyles
- wealth to wellth
- social tipping points
- Uexkull
- Deep Humanity
- inner transformation
- social imaginaries
- carbon inequality
- human inner transformation
- energy humanities
- 1 percent
- consumption emissions
- oxfam
- timothy morton
- individual lifestyle change
- system change
- wall street to main street
- low carbon narratives
- leverage points
- relocalize
- cosmo-local
- low carbon futures
- umwelt
- eco-civilization
- social imaginary
- cosmolocal
- positive feedbacks
- BEing journey
- 2000 watt society
- cosmolocalism
- hot or cool
- social tipping point
- hyperobjects
- low carbon imaginaries
- michael shuman
- petrocultures
- low carbon stories
- planetary boundaries
- petrocultural
- carbonscape
- unsustainable lifestyle
- doughnut economics
- Stop Reset Go
- luxury emissions
- relocalization
Annotators
URL
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hotorcool.org hotorcool.org
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This report is an essential companion for policymakers working at the intersection of society and climate change.”
Policy alone may not be sufficient to change this deeply ingrained luxury lifestyle. It may require deep and meaningful education of one's deeper humanity leading to a shift in worldviews and value systems that deprioritize materially luxurious lifestyles for using that wealth to redistribute to build the future wellbeing ecocivilization. Transform the wealthy into the heros of the transition. Shaming them and labeling them as victims will only create distance. Rather, the most constructive approach is a positive one that shifts our own perspective from holding them as villains to heros.
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Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”
This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.
Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.
A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.
The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.
Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.
We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html
Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.
Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:
"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."
But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.
To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.
Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.
Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.
At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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New report out today reveals the #inequality that is pushing the 1.5C goal of the #ParisAgreement out of reach without urgent action. Together with colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute, we estimate the carbon footprints of the richest 1% in 2030 are set to be 30 times higher than the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5C goal. The footprints of the richest 10% in 2030 are set to be nearly 10 times that level, while those of the poorest half of the global population will remain far below it. In absolute terms, the emissions of the richest 10% alone are set to nearly amount to the global total in 2030 compatible with the 1.5C goal, while those of the remaining 90% are set to only just exceed it. The richest 1% are set for an increasing share of global total emissions, reaching 16% by 2030. Evidently it is not the consumption of most of the people on the planet that is driving the global #emissionsgap - but rather that of the richest minority.
This Oxfam commissioned study points to how elites hold the rest of humanity hostage: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-set-be-30-times-15degc-limit-2030.
What policy changes will governments enact? Can law against high carbon consumption be drafted into existence based on the premise that such extreme high carbon lifestyle actually constitutes crimes against humanity?
Civil society must act as well. Individual’s must undergo a paradigm shift of the whole idea of luxury. It must be completely decoupled from its high carbon footprint. Carbon offsets are no good. Planting trees is yet another simplistic, one dimensional, reductionist solution....destroy an ancient forest and replace it with invasive monoculture tree crops. It is a false equivalency that enables the continuation of a high carbon lifestyle.
Cultural change is required at this stage. This is an opportunity to educate the wealthy and give them a last opportunity to STOP their high carbon emission behavior, RESET it to low carbon redemptive behavior, and help civilization GO at the greatest speed possible towards a wellbeing ecocivilization.
Another recent report from theNot or Cool Institute validates these findings:
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-carbon-footprint-luxury-lifestyle-study/
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oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com
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2021 has heralded the dawn of a new form of hyper-carbon-intensive luxury travel, space tourism, in which hundreds of tonnes of carbon can be burned in just a ten-minute flight for around four passengers.28
These should be identified.
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Gösling and Humpe found that no more than 1% of the world population likely accounts for half of aviation emissions.30
Wow! Will carbon neutral fuels be greenwashing or real solutions? Will carbon neutral SpaceX flights be greenwashing, or real carbon neutrality?
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Earlier studies also established the major contribution to carbon footprints of the rich and famous from flights, especially via private jets. Gösling’s study constructed aviation emissions estimates based on tracking the international travel of celebrities via their social media postings. Footprints – from aviation alone – were found to be in excess of a thousand tonnes per year.27
It's not surprising that yachts and private jets, the symbols of elite luxury.are culprits. Large and multiple mansions must be accounted for somewhere as well.
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The fact that these countries are still not on track to reach the 1.5⁰C per capita level by 2030, and have still not delivered the minimal commitment to mobilize $100bn per year in international climate finance by 2020, is a double indictment of their moral and legal failure in view of the equity principle at the heart of the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement.
The facts reflect the truth that developed economies are essentially unwilling to cede their way of life. The people of these economies want to cling to their high carbon way of life.
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The extreme difference between the expected carbon footprints of a small minority of the world’s population in 2030 and the global average level needed to keep the Paris Agreement’s 1.5⁰C goal alive is not tenable. Maintaining such high carbon footprints among the world’s richest people either requires far deeper emissions cuts by the rest of the world’s population, or it entails global heating in excess of 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels. There is no other alternative.
Humanity and the entire biosphere should not be made to suffer for the whims of 1% of the population. National commitments are very difficult to negotiate. We must really begin to target High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI), for they may hold the fate of humanity in their hands.
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Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32
Hence, High Net Worth Individual Divestment (HNWID) is definitely an important future strategy.
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Between 2015 and 2030, the richest 1% are set to reduce their per capita consumption emissions by just 5%, compared with the 97% cuts needed to align with the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5⁰C goal
This sentence seems contradictory to what Figure 3 shows, an increase of 1% of emissions for the top 1%. Either way, while we need a 97% reduction, their emissions are set to go up!
It should be noted that Figure 3 shows that the top 10% are slightly decreasing their emissions from 34% in 2015 to 32% in 2030. THIS is a drop of approximately 5%. Perhaps this is what they are referring to.
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4 In absolute terms, we find that despite the small total emissions cuts globally from 2015 to 2030, the total emissions associated with the richest 1% are set to continue to increase (see Figure 2). Notably, we also estimate that the total emissions associated with 90% of the global population combined will only just exceed the total global 1.5⁰C-compatible emissions level in 2030, while the total emissions associated with the consumption of just the richest 10% of the world population alone will nearly amount to that level. Figure 2: Total consumption emissions 1990–2030 of global income groups and the 2030 1.5⁰C-compatible total global emissions level Source: IEEP and SEI analysis This growth in the absolute emissions linked to the richest 1% also translates into a continued growth in their share of total global emissions, which we estimate will continue to grow from 13% in 1990 to 15% in 2015 and is set to reach over 16% by 2030 (see Figure 3).17 This continued increase is a reflection of the fact that in countries that are home to most of the world’s richest 1%, the carbon intensity of the economy is not set to improve sufficiently to offset the expected increase in income and consumption of those countries’ richest citizens.
This figure reveals that between now and 2030, the top 11% (top 1% added to the next tier down, the top 10%) are responsible for roughly 50% of all carbon emissions. Hence, strategies for decarbonizing the top 11% are very strategic.
Note that the carbon emissions of the 1% are actually INCREASING while everyone else is suppose to be decreasing by 97%!
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Wilk and Barros drew on 82 databases of public records to document billionaires’ houses, vehicles, aircraft and yachts. Applying carbon coefficients, they found billionaire carbon footprints easily run to thousands of tonnes per year, with superyachts the biggest contributor, each adding around 7,000 tonnes per year, for example.26
This is a good study on the consumption and carbon footprint of the elites.
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Figure 6: Changing geographic source of emissions of world’s richest 1% 2015–2030
China and India will have the largest growth of elites between 2015 and 2030. Therefore, strategic, culturally appropriate interventions need to be applied to this elite demographic.
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- Oct 2021
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link.springer.com link.springer.com
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The fact that a natural bacterial chromosome could be successfully replaced by an artifactual chromosome only further testifies to the irreducible importance of a naturally integrated unit, the bacterial cell, as the prior condition of possibility for any molecular configuration, natural or artificial, to be a chromosome.Footnote 2
Need clarification.
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Both more fundamental than the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and more expansive in scope, the problem of integration/unification is also central to the problem of the origin(s) of life.
Could anthropological and philosophical linguistics be included in this trans-disciplinary analysis? I think language also plays a central role, as we are already sophisticated language users by the time we consider the possibility of raising this kind of question.
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Granted, how a natural entity can have interiority, i.e., subjectivity, is a hard problem, but if the question of integration and unification is not identical to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Chalmers 1995) it is also inseparable from it and surely a presupposition of the very possibility of interiority. Nor would even an understanding of how subjectivity could be resident to a single cell tell us how consciousness could become an integrated unity across many cells. If we assume consciousness is a physically based phenomenon, and that it draws upon the activity of various parts of the brain, let alone constituent cells, then we must face our deficits in understanding how the experience of a unified consciousness is realized at the level of an integration of some cells but not others albeit in the absence of evident, non-arbitrary, physical boundaries.
This is a very salient point. The experience of consciousness of a (multicellular) human being is the experience of a biological superorganism. While normativity may apply to the both single and multi-cellular beings by extension, we cannot infer from that alone that our experience of consciousness has an analog at the cellular level.
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In so doing we claim to have made an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalist framework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new (post-individualist) point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel’s proclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature.
The claim then, is that normativity is an interpretation of Hegel's "Geist".
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medium.com medium.com
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A common good (CG) process begins with an initiator proposing the production of a common good. Then, during the predefined lifetime of the process, funders who care about this common good may pledge funds for its production, being reassured that their money will only be used retroactively, had the common good been eventually produced — no risk taken. Executors who wish to produce the common good may do so, being reassured that they will be compensated by the pledged funds had they been successful. And profit-seeking investors may buy a portion of the potential reward from executors (in the form of per-executor tokens that are made redeemable against the future reward had they been successful), and by that provide them with liquid funding for operation. Finally, if and when executors achieve the desired outcome, as decreed by a predefined judge, the pledged funds are released as a reward to the successful executors and the investors who bought their tokens. If no success has been reached after some predefined limit of time, the funds go back to the funders who provided them. Executors and investors only see profit, and funders only spend it, if and only when the common good is produced.
A trustless conditional reward model for production of common goods.
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In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.
A proposal to use decentralized blockchain to make large scale coordination possible.
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Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.
Pith articulation of the central problem of central, hierarchical human governance systems.
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ndpr.nd.edu ndpr.nd.edu
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While I think that there is something to embrace and retain in the idea of a bio-logic of the conditions of possibility of a normatively oriented form of life and even in the concept of a transcendental we, I have argued in a number of places that the only empirically, theoretically and phenomenologically adequate way for achieving something along these lines is by focusing, not on the idea of the individual, but rather on the emergence by 'natural detachment' of the normatively integrated hominin group.[6]
Moss states the point at which he disagrees with Plessner.
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Its life out of its center enters into a relationship to it; the reflexive character of the centrally represented body is given to itself. Although the living being on this level is also absorbed in the here/now, lives out of the center, it has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself -- and this makes it an I. (pp. 269-70)
The "I" is born when the living being has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It notices itself.
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The human sphere is defined by a jump from centric positionality to that further level of detachment that uniquely allows for that purchase upon its center that Plessner calls "excentric positionality." The human "I" which is the unique result of excentric positionality becomes the constant companion of human positional positing. It preserves, and inhabits its centered lived body, while also constituting its excentric detachment from its center by way of its reflexive awareness of its posited center.
Plessner introduces the next level up, the being with excentric positionality, essentially the self-conscious human being.
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Plessner tells us that from its center the animal positions itself -- it gains mastery of its own lived body, "it is a system that refers back to itself, a self, but it does not experience-itself" (p. 267).
frontality
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Next I will focus on and explore what Plessner's method has to offer with respect to its account of the origins and basis of normativity (or "Spirit").
Is Moss equating Plessner's "normativity" to Hegel's "spirit"?
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The closed and centric positionality of the animal is characterized first and foremost by the immanent constitution of a self. While not occupying any definitive space, it is spatial inasmuch as it constitutes the non-relativizable "here" of the organism. Double aspectivity is defined for the animal with respect to a separation, and at the same time non-separation, between its core, its here, its self and its whole body of which the core is part. Thus the living thing whose organization exhibits a closed form is not only a self that 'has', but a special kind of self, a reflexive self or an itself. We may speak of a living thing of this kind as being present to the living thing that it is, as, by virtue of its set-apartness from this living thing, forming (not yet 'having', which is why it is not yet an 'I'!) an unshakeable point in this living thing in relation to which it reflexively lives as one thing. In the irreducible oscillation between being inside and being outside that distinguishes the positionality of the closed organism on the ground of simply being the body itself lies the boundary for the referentiality of the thing back to itself. (pp. 220-21) One can anticipate the movement of Plessner's dialectical logic in setting up the conditions for his anthropology. The animal has a self-presence but not a reflective access to it. The animal has achieved a distance to its own body (one might say a "detachment") but does not have a perspective on having such distance. It enjoys a qualitatively new level of agency in its relationship to its surround but it is still fully absorbed in its here and now. The animal is conscious inasmuch as it has awareness of that which it stands in opposition to and reacts to from out of its center (albeit without being able to thematize that relationship). Plessner refers to this as the animal's "frontality."
Here, Moss helps clarify the word "detachment" as the living organism achieving some kind of distance from its own body, but does not have a perspective of it. Importantly, Plessner holds that the animal is conscious, but not self-conscious. Plessner's term for this type of consciousness is "frontality".
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Plessner's distinction between plant and animal is both an enabling pathway towards his anthropology but also quite distinctive and worthy of consideration in itself. Contrary to the mainstream legacies of botany and zoology, but consistent with the logic he is developing, plants and animals for Plessner are a priori life-categories or modals of the organic based upon filling alternative organizational possibility spaces that follow from the dialectics of positionality and not in the first instance about the distinction between autotrophy and heterotrophy. Accordingly, certain heterotrophic species such as corals, hydroids, bryozoan and ascidians are classed by Plessner into the plant category. In broad terms, the plant-animal distinction is defined by the difference between "open" and "closed" positionalities, a distinction which has much to do with levels of mediation. One may think of this as two alternative basic strategies for achieving the aforementioned balance between assimilative and resistive moments immanent in any form of positionality. "A form is open if the organism in all of its expressions of life is immediately incorporated into its surroundings and constitutes a non-self-sufficient segment of the life cycle corresponding to it" (p. 203). An open form of positionality, we can say, doesn't require mediation by way of a posited center and the consequence of this is realized throughout the morphology, physiology and growth patterns of the plant. Morphologically this is manifested in the tendency of the organism to develop externally and expansively in a way that is directly turned toward its surroundings. It is characteristic of this kind of development that it does not have the need to form centers of any kind. The tissues responsible for mechanical solidarity, nutrition, and stimulus conduction are not anatomically or functionally concentrated in particular organs but rather permeate the organism from its outermost to it innermost layers. The absence of any central organs tying together or representing the whole body means that individuality of the individual plant does not itself appear as constitutive but rather as an external moment of its form associated with the singularity of the physical entity; in many cases the parts remain highly self-sufficient in relation to each other (graftings, cuttings). This led a great botanist to go so far as to call plants 'divididuals'. (pp. 203-204)
This is an interesting classification of "open" and "closed", depending on whether the living organism has uniform functionality or specialized, and centralized structures respectively.
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Even at the level of a simple organism, the dialectics of double aspectivity suggests the emergence of a non-empirical, enactively posited center or core, the predecessor, for Plessner of the possibility of consciousness.
This is the key statement - that this center or core is the predecessor of consciousness.
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Plessner finds in the dynamics of double aspectivity the constitution of a kind of self. Living entities develop which means they both lead away into something new and yet persist as what they are. It is in their constant becoming Other that they become themselves and constitute and sustain a "form-idea." Plessner's early concept of development, is capacious enough (unlike some more recent formulations that presume multi-cellularity) to characterize even single celled life-forms.
From Plessner's perspective, even a cell has a constitution of a self.
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For Plessner, the living boundary is both a liminal zone that mediates between organism and the outer medium, itself being neither, and yet also an enactively self-defining and enforcing circumference and outer-limit. The organism moves outward in the expansion and assimilation of its liminal zone and moves inward, taking the outer within, re-establishing itself and reasserting its perimeter. The living boundary already introduces a subject-object status that prefigures for Plessner the overcoming of dualisms between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority. The living boundary is an on-going enactment of an exteriority that it defines and yet also reaches into and assimilates and of an interiority that is both sustained and transformed. The motive force of the dynamic living state is this double aspectivity of its existence and the dialectical tension which drives it forward.
Plessner defines the interiority and exteriority condition of a living organism, giving a biological context for the hard problem of consciousness.
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Pace Dilthey, Plessner's "Levels" is not about interpreting historical contingencies, nor about the more familiar evolutionary sedimentation of frozen accidents, but rather is about looking to establish transcendental conditions (or categories) of biotic possibility that he refers to as "modals of the organic." As with Hegel he challenges us with a proposed logic of life always mobilized by dialectical tensions, albeit not on the basis of any form of idealism and bereft of a Hollywood ending. For Plessner, that which is both the sine qua non of the living state and that generative 'principle' from which organic modals can be derived is the on-going performance of a self-positioning boundary, and it is highly unlikely that anybody has ever thought as deeply about the implications of what this means.
"Modals of the organic" are the levels at which emergent qualities at the higher level cannot be explained from the lower level, and give rise to the highest constitutive level, human consciousness.
Tags
- self-consciousness
- double aspectivity
- self evolution
- interiority
- hominin group
- precursor of consciousness
- Plessner classification
- modals of the organic
- exteriority
- living boundary
- frontality
- hegel
- closed positionality
- self consciousness
- spirit
- open positionality
- excentric positionality
- hard problem of consciousness
- normativity
- self reflexive
- dualism
- Birth of I
- self-reflexive self
- centric positionality
- detachment
Annotators
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DAOstack imagines thousands of organizations and applications utilizing the stack in the near future. And the intention is not just to serve each use case individually. It’s easy to imagine how, with a scalable solution for decentralized governance in place, decision-making can become more frictionless not only within collectives but also between collectives.Indeed, this is the broader vision of DAOstack. The platform is designed to underpin an entire ecosystem of decentralized organizations — a community of interoperable DAOs, able to share talent, ideas, and learnings with one another. DAOs will even be able to act as members of other DAOs, creating a fluid “DAO mesh” or “internet of work” in which collectives of collectives are commonplace, and in which any given individual might participate in dozens of different DAOs.
This is an idealof stigmergic collaboration, to move away from azero sum game and towards a positive sum game.
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Imagine tens or hundreds of millions of people participating in this kind of collaborative economy — one in which no one wields a disproportionate amount of power, all are rewarded in proportion to the value they contribute, and everyone is incentivized to act in alignment with the common good.
The aim of stigmergic collaboration.
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To create DAOs resilient to corruption, DAOstack’s first governance templates implement voting rights using a system called Reputation. Reputation is a score assigned to each user that represents that user’s voter power. Each DAO has a separate ledger of Reputation scores, and so Reputation cannot be directly transferred from peer to peer. Rather, it is distributed through the passing of proposals inside the DAO.Indirect transfers of Reputation that cannot be completely prevented, such as a user transferring selling control of their account, are discouraged by a DAO’s ability to slash Reputation: if DAO voters find that an account has indirectly transferred its voting power, the DAO can pass a proposal to set that account’s Reputation score to zero.
The selling of one’s personal account is an achilles heel of individual reputation scores. Bad actors could approach individuals and entice or coerce them, thereby reputation becomes misrepresented.
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When the originators of DAOstack set about to architect solutions for decentralized governance, they recognized that given the complexity of the problem, the best solutions would emerge only over time, especially since needs would vary across use cases.So, first and foremost, they designed DAOstack to be not a fixed offering in decentralized governance, but rather a sandbox for ongoing experimentation, in which bits and pieces of governance infrastructure can be easily mixed and matched for each organization, like LEGO building blocks or WordPress templates.
An evolutionary approach is optimal.
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Perhaps the biggest one is inefficiency. If you give everyone a voice, things can get very noisy very quickly, like an annoying neighborhood association meeting, multiplied by a thousand. The more you distribute decision-making power throughout an organization, the more you risk either taxing everyone’s attention with a sea of decision-making or creating gridlock among decision-makers — or both.So, if you’re going to coordinate a crowd effectively, you need technology not just for making proposals and tallying votes, but also for managing the collective attention. You need ways to determine who can make proposals and how. You need ways to determine which proposals should actually get the attention of the voters — sort of like means of voting on what to vote on. And you need ways to determine who should be involved in each decision, according to reputation or subject-matter credibility.
This is a critical requirement to make decentralized governance practical.
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One major problem with top-down hierarchies is that they contain concentrated points of failure, since individuals are subject to bias and have limited bandwidth. The interests of the powerful few are often misaligned with those of the less powerful many, leaving the decision-makers frequently incentivized to act against the common good.
An emergent property of top down hierarchies.
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agrowingculture.medium.com agrowingculture.medium.com
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And at the end of the day, Gates is not accountable to governments or to communities. He was not elected, and there is no mechanism for him to be recalled, challenged, or held responsible for faulty policies. He could suddenly decide that he was no longer interested in supporting agriculture in Africa. In that case, the new food system Gates is importing to the African continent would collapse. Political and economic systems are being drastically altered, all at the whim of one person, one foundation.In fact, the differences between this situation — powerful individuals and institutions deciding to mess with the social, political, and economic realities of countries — and the earlier form of colonialism are thin. It’s still advertised as “good intent” and the desire to “civilize” an “uncivilized” people. The only difference is that neocolonialism is quieter and more covert. By design, it provokes less outrage. But the essential power structures remain the same.
Concentrating power to one individual is dangerous. Large portions of the food security of African nations should not be so vulnerable to corporatism.
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The fact that someone is a billionaire doesn’t make them more capable of solving any of our problems. In fact, the pursuit of that amount of wealth means that they were able to ignore — and in fact directly profit off of — the exploitation and violation of rights that is required to get there.
This is an astute observation about the destructive journey towards wealth concentration...it often leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. It would make a good subject for a book.
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espite the foundation’s claims to be investing “within” Africa, The Nation “examined 30,000 charitable grants the foundation has awarded over the past two decades and found that more than 88 percent of the donations — $63 billion — have gone to recipients in the wealthiest, whitest nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries.”African groups received only 5 percent of their total funding for NGOs.By withholding critical funding from African institutions, Gates ensures that any technologies developed are owned externally to the continent, keeping power consolidated in Global North institutions.
The money trail speaks for itself.
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These corporate “solutions” end up driving more poverty. Whereas farmers previously relied on their own locally-adapted seeds and natural fertilizers, they are forced to continuously purchase inputs from agribusiness corporations. The expensive chemicals needed to grow these “improved” seeds deplete the soil. As a result, they have to purchase more and more chemicals over time to compensate for the degradation. This is not development — it’s a vicious cycle that grows corporate profits by trapping farmers in debt.
Cultivating dependency, not just food crops!
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It’s a laughably misguided claim, considering that we currently produce enough food to feed as many as 1.5x the world’s population
Citation would be useful.
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To do so, they promote “improved” seeds and chemical fertilizers.
This is an entry gate for high tech - biotechnology via genetic manipulation and chemical industry via fertilizers.
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The idea of development suggests that communities of Color are impoverished because of some inherent failing, rather than as a result of having their resources pillaged. Development narratives imply that they don’t have the skills, technology, or education to fix things for themselves.
Development, one could conclude, is therefore a disguise for institutionalized racism.
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Powerful Global North governments, corporations, and individuals today don’t need to resort to explicit violence — invasion, seizure, genocide, and enslavement — in order to control other countries. Instead, they can use structural violence — leveraging aid, market access, and philanthropic interventions in order to force lower-income countries to do what they want.
Economic dependency of the Global South on the Global North is exactly what happens when exploitation of the wolf is disguised under the sheep’s clothing. A case in point is Unilever, the multinational food conglomerate based in the global north. Unilever is spending a significant amount of capital to circularize their entire supply chain. That is laudable. Yet, at the same time, they see Africa is their future growth market. Who benefits from that economic growth? ,,,, a small group of wealthy shareholders in the Global North or Global South. It is important to realize that capitalism has levelled the playing field. Economic exploitation, wealth concentration and extractionism is now democratically open to all!
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Typically, what they want is more control over markets. The initial interventions end up creating debt for lower-income countries (because they give more power to Global North corporations). That debt ultimately becomes the most deadly form of leverage, giving Global North governments the justification for more interventions and allowing them to shape economic and trade policy in the way they see fit.In short, colonialism never ended. It just changed form.
The weaponization of economic leverage points means control can be gotten without spilling blood. Why is Africa perpetually poor in spite of its enormous wealth? Look no further than the wealth of management tier individuals of the Global North mining resource companies.
Tags
- neo-colonialism
- Bill gates
- african food security
- Food security
- Gates foundation
- Debt trap
- Billionaire
- structural inewuality
- Gates Foundation
- gates foundation
- indtitutionalized racism
- Wealth concentration
- Rockerfeller founation
- dependency
- white saviorism
- Neo-colonialism
- Accountability
- global morth
- vicious cycle
- Economic exploitation
- economic exploitation
- Development
Annotators
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www.csmonitor.com www.csmonitor.com
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A recent survey found that only 14% of people they surveyed in the United States talk about climate change. A previous Yale study found that 35% either discuss it occasionally or hear somebody else talk about it. Those are low for something that over 70% of people are worried about.
Conversation is not happening! There is a leverage point in holding open conversations where we understand each other’s language of different cultural groups. Finding common ground, the common human denominators (CHD) between polarized groups is the lynchpin.
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For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”
We often talk about the same things, share the same values, have the same common human denominators, but couched in different language. It is critical to get to the root of what we have in common in order to establish meaningful dialogue.
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Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe stresses the need for finding shared values, rather than trying to change someone’s mind, as a basis for productive conversations
What first appears as difference may actually emerge from consciousnesses that have more in common than one first realizes. Finding the common ground, what we refer to as the common human denominators (CHD) within the open source Deep Humanity praxis becomes the critical climate change communication leverage point for establishing genuine communication channels between politically polarized groups.
This is aligned to the Stop Reset Go project and its open source offshoot, Deep Humanity praxis that seeks conversations and personal and collective journeys to appreciate Common Human Denominators that are salient for all participants. It also underscores the value of integrating with the Indieverse Knowledge system, with its focus on symathessy embedded directly into its codebase.
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I was speaking in Iowa, and I was asked, “How do you talk to people in Iowa about polar bears?” I said, “You don’t; you talk to them about corn.” If we begin a conversation with someone with something we already agree on, then the subtext is: “You care about this, and I care too. We have this in common.”
This stresses the importance of applying Deep Humanity wisely by finding the most compelling, salient and meaningful common human denominators appropriate for each conversational context. Which group are we interacting with? What are the major landmarks embedded in THEIR salience landscape?
The BEing journeys we craft will only be meaningful and impactful if they are appropriately matched to the cultural context.
The whole mind- body understanding of how we cognitively construct our reality, via Deep Humanity BEing journeys, can help shift our priorities.
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What are the biggest barriers to action – for countries or communities or individuals – on climate change? And how do we get past those?It’s psychological distance and solution aversion. We don’t think it matters to us. We think it’s a problem distant in space or time or relevance. And we don’t think there’s anything viable or practical we can do at the scale required.
Deep Humanity, as an open praxis available to any human being to both use and contribute to is a leverage point that, by awakening us to our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeing, can shift our self-perspective from scarcity and poverty mentality, to hsving super powers that emerge from the lived experience of our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeings. The Stop Reset Go linkage between human inner transformation (HIT) and social outer transformation (SOT) are criticsl to recognizing our social transformative potential.
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I am frequently shamed for not doing enough. Some of that comes from the right side of the [political] spectrum, but increasingly a larger share of that shaming comes from people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are so worried and anxious about climate impacts that their response is to find anyone who isn’t doing precisely what they think they should be doing and shame them.
Love, or recognizing the other person in the other tribe as sacred, is going to connect with that person because we are, after all, all of us are human INTERbeings, and love is the affective variable that connects us while shame is a variable that DISconnects us. Love is , in fact, one of our most powerful common human denominators.
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When we practice active hope, when we look at what people are doing, and we share those stories with others and talk about what we can do together, then we realize that the boulder is already at the top of the hill and is rolling down in the right direction, and has millions of hands on it. It’s just not going fast enough.
This statement is right on. It has now become a question about the RATE of system change we can achieve to avoid a degraded future. The faster we act, the less degraded it will become.
Tags
- indieverse
- common denominators
- HIT
- CHD
- polarization
- symathessy
- effective climate communication
- human interbeing
- Common human denominators
- Katherine Hayhoe
- Shaming
- Climate communication
- inner transformation
- Depolarization
- Deep humanity
- paradigm shift
- human inner transformation
- climate change communication
- stop rest go
- SOT
- climate change conversations
- common human denominator
- BEing journeys
- climate conversation
- inner shift
- deep humanity
- Social outer transformation
- katherine hayhoe
- Rate of decarbonization
- Human interbeing
- climate communication
- climate delay
Annotators
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bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
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Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
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As the emerging field of energy humanities (168)is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies aredeeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169).Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offera “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).
Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.
Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives must address both simultaneously.
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For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across dis-parate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example,mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academiafrom high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student re-cruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge,policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation ofhigh-carbon practices.
A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.
In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.
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For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social sig-nificance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobil-ity (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumptionhave led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patternsof domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoortemperature control (163).
New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.
The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/
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Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance andimportance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitiveshortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and respondingto climate change (152),including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physicallyremote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview(153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangiblethreat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does notpresent itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events.
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way wiithin the context of Deep Humanity BEing journeys.
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A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and withthe potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many ofthe topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highlydiverse cultural foundations.
The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, inner transformation approaches and cultural methodologies. Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
The Stop Reset Go initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.
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Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyonddominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of trans-formation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It isconceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the En-abler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The veryearly signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequentlyelaborated in the latter part of the discussion.
This passage pays homage to Donella Meadows, who identified the shift in mindset or paradigm that supports the system as the top leverage point. If we can shift this mindset in sufficient number of people, it can shift the thinking of the Enabler Cluster identified in the paper. A social tipping point strategy can be adopted to help this to happen quickly. This strategy is being developed by Stop Reset Go and other civil society actors.
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Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible foras much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twicethe emissions of the poorest 50% (2).
this suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.
Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,
A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it accelerate transition.
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10% per annum
Anderson has contextualized the scale of such an impact in his other presentations but not here. A recent example is the temporary emission decreases due to covid 19. A 6.6% global decrease was determined from this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3#:~:text=After%20rising%20steadily%20for%20decades,on%20daily%20fossil%20fuel%20emissions. with the US contributing 13% due to lockdown impacts on vehicular travel (both air and ground). After the pandemic ends, experts expect a strong rebound effect.
Tags
- cosmolocal
- 2000 watt society
- affluenza
- social tipping points
- ostrich and phoenix cluster
- Deep Humanity
- carbonscapes
- climate change pyschology
- petrocultures
- social imaginaries
- bottom-up
- carbon inequality
- energy humanities
- human inner transformation
- petrocultural
- 10% per annum drop
- carbonscape
- climate education
- richest 10%
- carbon emission decarbonization
- doughnut economics
- BEing journeys
- top emitting class
- Stop Reset Go
- leverage points
- cosmo-local
- richest 1%
- decarbonization rate
- social imaginary
- carbon emissions of the wealthy
Annotators
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goertzel.org goertzel.org
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With the aid of the concept of opposing pairs of magnetic poles, we can clearly contribute in a significant way to our expression and understanding of basic relationships in the overall magnetic field. We are proposing to look at soma and significance in a similar way. That is to say, we regard them as two aspects introduced at an arbitrary conceptual cut in the flow of the field of reality as a whole. These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality.
When Bohm writes "These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality", it reveals the true nature of words. Their only ever revealing aspects of the whole. They are NOT the whole.Hence, as linguistic animals, we are constantly dissecting parts of the whole of reality.
Deep Humanity open-source praxis linguistic BEing journeys can be designed to reveal this ubiquitious aspectualizing nature of language to help us all better understand what we are as linguistic beings.
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www.apmreports.org www.apmreports.org
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To date, there is no single accounting of how much money flowed from the slave economy into coffers of American higher education. But Wilder says most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery. He suspects that many institutions are reluctant to examine this past. "There's not a lot of upside for them. You know these aren't great fundraising stories," Wilder says. Some people say that institutions must do more than make apologies and rename buildings. They insist that scholarships and other forms of monetary reparations are due. And others argue that whatever colleges and universities are doing to acknowledge their slave-holding past — a campus memorial to slaves, for example — is motivated by public relations and does nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality. Brown University was the first to confront its ties to slavery in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to investigate. "What better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth, and to tell the full story?" she says.
This is important research to do so as not to conveniently forget the past. If all were equal today, that would have happened as the proper outcome of proactive, widespread and impactful recognition of the injustice of the past. Inequality has persisted, transmuted into structural inequality, especially manifesting in economic legacy of inherited wealth. It could be interpreted as unconducive for fundraising, but so can opaqueness of a proactive strategy.
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"The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."
In this way, the past seeps into the present. This is a literal example of the legacy of structural inequality.
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At the University of Virginia — founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson — slaves cooked and cleaned for the sons of the Southern gentry.
As a species, as we progress ethically to more inclusive social norms, those considered the enlightened leaders of their time, like Jefferson can be seen from two contrasting perspectives, the norms of their time and the norms of our times.
As we judge others in the past for failures to recognize unjust social norms prevalent in their time, so too will we be judged by our descendants for social norms they will recognize as unjust, but which we collectively haven’t yet.
How long it takes to shake off the shackles that prevent the recognition of the dignity of each and every human INTERbeing. Each living person of modernity owes his or her existence to all our ancestors, whose social dynamics, for better or worse, shaped the world we inhabit today.
As we evolve, we are engaged in a constant cultural evolutionary process, as we incrementally recognize unjust social norms and attempt to stop their further indulgence, reset our behavior and go towards new, more just ones.
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Local file Local file
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In so doing we claim to havemade an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalistframework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new (post-individualist)point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel’sproclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature.
Key insight
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- Sep 2021
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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This is the other huge important theme, which is that technology alone does not lead to a better world. It can only lead to a better world in the context of good moral and social systems. One thing that I do deeply believe is that our scientific and material technology has raced ahead of our moral and social technology. We need some catch-up growth in moral and social technology.
There is another even greater theme this article has not touched on, progress traps. Climate change is a direct result of the unintended consequences of progress, a pretty major impact.
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there's a fact of the matter right this minute about whether your high school 00:22:51 sweetheart is thinking about you you just can't tell but the universe knows that fact is there
This is the existential reality of humans, that we only know that which is in our own limited sensory bubble. We have zero access to that which lay beyond. Only a fool would argue there is nothing happening out there if we don’t sense it, and yet we have no way to prove it. This is an intrinsic epistemological disconnect with reality that makes each of us feel an intrinsic sense of alienation. Why is our consciousness constrained in this profound way?
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Annotators
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www.statista.com www.statista.com
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45.8 percent of global household wealth is in the hands of just 1.1 percent of the world's population. Those 56 million individuals control a mind-boggling $191.6 trillion, as can be seen on the following pyramid.Below that, 583 million people own $163.9 trillion, 39.1 percent of global wealth, despite accounting for just 11.1 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant and it shows how 2.9 billion people (55 percent of the world's population) share a combined wealth of $5.5 trillion which is just 1.3 percent of total wealth.
combine this with Oxfam's 2020 report on carbon emissions and we have the real driver's of carbon emissions, the wealthy. COP26 addresses nation states, not individuals. We need to focus on individuals as well.
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www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
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Global air traffic is expected to double to 8.2 billion passengers in 2037, according to IATA, which predicts that aviation's 2019 emissions peak of around 900 million metric tons of CO2 will be exceeded within the next two to three years.At the same time, the window to cut the world's reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes to the climate is closing rapidly. The International Energy Agency forecasts that aviation's share of global carbon emissions will increase to 3.5% by 2030 from just over 2.5% in 2019 in the absence of efforts to further decarbonize.
SRG education campaign for air travellers ( mostly middle class and rich) to do their part and minimize air travel until the breakthrough technologies are here. Temporary abstinence or voluntary lotto system.
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www.lboro.ac.uk www.lboro.ac.uk
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Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.
Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.
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there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.
The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.
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while the super-rich may move through through world cities, their cosmopolitan practices and lifestyles rarely break out of the exclusive transnational spaces which stand at the intersecting points of particular corporate, capital, technological, information and cultural lines of flow.
The elites move in a world of their own. Embedded within the deteriorating spaces all around them, their privileged and exclusive spaces are like self-constructed lotus blossoms floating on a sea of muck, which their lifestyles have disproportionately helped create in the first place. The geographic juxtapostion of these two spaces is stark, as illustrated in images such as those of Cape Town’s elite neighborhoods nextdoor to crowded townships. Wealth and privilege live side by side poverty.
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Given the fact that super-rich consumption is preoccupied with the importance of sign rather than use values, it is the space as much as the commodity that is consumed by the super-rich.
This is an important observation that can be used to develop a transformative strategy. There is a culturally-constructed, positive, psychological affect associated with being in these spaces. How can these be deconstructed?
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Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'
Formal, sharply defined terminology to describe this class for academic writing.
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it is apparent that the global elite must be regarded as transnational to the extent that they share similar global lifestyles. For Short and Kim (1999) the lifestyles of global managers present perhaps the clearest evidence that the shared consumption of similar goods and images is resulting in the creation of global lifestyles. Moving from city to city, the global managerial class characteristically occupies a series of corporate spaces designed for the international business traveller: international airports, business hotels, executive clubs, corporate health suites, restaurants and so on. The mobility of global managers is, however, eclipsed by that of the global super-rich. They are able to move easily from nation to nation by executive jet (rather than travelling by business class); they stay only in five-star hotels; they are able to access exclusive clubs and restaurants, they frequent ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, and collect the objet d'arts which can only be obtained in the most exclusive shops and auction houses. In short, their space-time routines centre on a globally-diffuse set of spaces regarded as 'the right places to see and be seen'. It is the nature of these spaces that we explore in our next section.
The Deep Humanity challenge then, is to achieve an education program for these super-elites that shift aspirations from the extremely high carbon footprint lifestyle to a more frugal, within-planetary- boundary one. Without the context of a dedicated trans-disciplinary Human Inner Transformation (HIT) protocol, a scalable approach may prove challenging.
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The preceding discussion has begun to suggest that the global super-rich need to be conceptualised as a truly cosmopolitan faction of the global elite.
Good description: cosmopolitan faction of the global elite. It is a shadow side of the word cosmopolitan and one we can potentially associate with neoliberalism / neocapitalism.
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the global elite (i.e. both global managers and the global super-rich) must be regarded as transnational for three main reasons, as Sklair (1997) outlines.
Mapping out where they are is a useful exercise in order to identify the wealthy communities they may live in. Of course, citizens who live long enough in an city, town or community get to know where the affluent parts of town are.
Of course many of the super elite live in exclusive homes far away from population centers. Wealth buys geographic exclusivity snd seclusion from prying eyes.
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Nonetheless, as Sklair (1997) identifies, the super-rich play an important symbolic role in the perpetuation of global capitalism, showing that it creates the possibility of a form of consumption based on profligacy and seemingly infinite choice. We might not all chose to emulate the lifestyles of the super-rich, but we all we would all like to have the choice to consume conspicuously.
It is this psychological bait of infinite choice that is appealing and aspiring to all classes. Media that celebrates the lifestyles of the rich and famous condition everyone to look in the same consumptive direction. As professor Kevin Anderson advocates, focusing our climate emergency efforts on the elites and super-elites is a worthwhile leverage point. A 2020 Oxfam report validates Anderson’s claim. The top 1% emit twice as much carbon (14% emissions) as the bottom 50% (7% emissions): https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-percent-more-double-emissions-poorest-half-humanity
Oxfam takes the approach of appealing to Top down actors for policy change. Stop Reset Go advocates attacking the problem simultaneously withe a bottom up approach of citizens empathetically approaching the wealthy through a reachout campaign to help educate and transform their attitudes. Make what they can do with their wealth to uplift others and the planet aspirational, especially with the twin climate and i equality crisis. They may feel guilty about being a microcause of the current crisis but they should be encouraged to deal with the present rather than be haunted by the past.
Tags
- Luxury
- Inequality
- Transnational lifestyle
- Spaces of flow
- global elite
- Prestige
- Exclusive transnational spaces
- misguided aspirations
- slow subjects
- New cosmopolitans
- jetse lifestyle
- Cosmopolitan faction
- aspirations of wealth
- Glamour zone
- jetsetter
- rich
- to ic capitalism
- Global lifestyles
- overconsumption
- Fast subjects
- rich and famous
- cosmopolitan lifestyle
- instsntgram lifestyle
- excessive consumption
- jetset
- Shifting elitism
- high carbon lifestyle
- exposing the harm of elitism
- globsl elites
- luxury consumption
- Cosmopolitan practices
- Transnational spaces
- luxury spaces
- Power inequality
- elites
- Map of the rich
Annotators
URL
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Machinoia, Machine of Multiple Me: Integrating with Past,Future and Alternative Selves
Perform sentiment analysis on text corpus or media of a person and use AI to develop avatar who can represent that person.
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