Alex, this is an incredible synthesis and reminds me of something you told me many moons ago on Tuners about reality or truth being, “a roil between being and becoming” the truth lies in the dialectics of it. Write the book already my dude. You have it whipped. I’ll swoop it up. All the best!!
Yes to the first hour of this discussion, and — because I heard you say you like to challenge your own ideological frameworks… The optimistic future is in matriarchal shared power in the collective multiplicity (rather than the patriarchal hierarchical construct of power over one vs another in the individualistic sense). It’s in the breakdown of empire. It’s in the celebration of our differences. It’s a place in which technology and automation don’t result in loss but rather in an ever-expanding state of abundance — of resources, access, communication, feelings, expression, safety, new experiences. Pining for a past without GPS and fearing a future that arcs toward singularity and loss (because it’s imagined within the confines and through the lens of the status quo structures in place currently) is rather amygdala grey matter of you both, btw. 😉 I think you may lean a little more moderate than you might realize. Or maybe the part of you playing devil’s advocate with your liberal-leaning tendencies may not be fully accounting for (in an intersectional sense) various identities’ acting upon the concept of your (thermodynamic) definition of a liberal path forward in time and the possible resulting permutations. … all with a grain of salt, of course, because we all are nothing and everything, after all. Cheers queers. 🤍🩷🩵🤎🖤❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
Sounds like you guys are just rehashing classical Buddhist psychology: consciousness, perception, feeling, and volition all playing off each other in an endless cycle that produces noise that is perceived as "self". But still the mind with meditation or music or poetry...and see that the feelings, thoughts, moods that arise, are just content, produced by a host of interactive software programs doing what they do...and wham! "emptiness" (sunyata) arises as the knowing that there is no there, there. No self in any of it.
Or use meditation to access jhana/chan/dhyana, where the body (temporarily) stops breathing, and (awareness of) time and space stop, and the thinking mind implodes/stops. In that place there is no thought, not a single thought; but still a crystal clear knowing that one (still is), like dropping down from Windows into vastly simpler machine language.
These concepts are thousands of years old. A well worn, albeit uncommon path.
Perhaps in a section or two, but we cover quite a bit more here than the poetic hand waving of buddhistic explanations. Developing more granular explanations including rhe phenomenology of prediction errors, etc, is pretty important stuff in the development of a view of consciousness. Covering selection pressures running consciousness in the constrained direction, the relieving of selection pressures running the brain in a more undifferentiated (and technically maladaptive) direction, political brain differentiation, etc, and more covered here.
Alex, this is an incredible synthesis and reminds me of something you told me many moons ago on Tuners about reality or truth being, “a roil between being and becoming” the truth lies in the dialectics of it. Write the book already my dude. You have it whipped. I’ll swoop it up. All the best!!
Sam
Nice one!
Yes to the first hour of this discussion, and — because I heard you say you like to challenge your own ideological frameworks… The optimistic future is in matriarchal shared power in the collective multiplicity (rather than the patriarchal hierarchical construct of power over one vs another in the individualistic sense). It’s in the breakdown of empire. It’s in the celebration of our differences. It’s a place in which technology and automation don’t result in loss but rather in an ever-expanding state of abundance — of resources, access, communication, feelings, expression, safety, new experiences. Pining for a past without GPS and fearing a future that arcs toward singularity and loss (because it’s imagined within the confines and through the lens of the status quo structures in place currently) is rather amygdala grey matter of you both, btw. 😉 I think you may lean a little more moderate than you might realize. Or maybe the part of you playing devil’s advocate with your liberal-leaning tendencies may not be fully accounting for (in an intersectional sense) various identities’ acting upon the concept of your (thermodynamic) definition of a liberal path forward in time and the possible resulting permutations. … all with a grain of salt, of course, because we all are nothing and everything, after all. Cheers queers. 🤍🩷🩵🤎🖤❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
Sounds like you guys are just rehashing classical Buddhist psychology: consciousness, perception, feeling, and volition all playing off each other in an endless cycle that produces noise that is perceived as "self". But still the mind with meditation or music or poetry...and see that the feelings, thoughts, moods that arise, are just content, produced by a host of interactive software programs doing what they do...and wham! "emptiness" (sunyata) arises as the knowing that there is no there, there. No self in any of it.
Or use meditation to access jhana/chan/dhyana, where the body (temporarily) stops breathing, and (awareness of) time and space stop, and the thinking mind implodes/stops. In that place there is no thought, not a single thought; but still a crystal clear knowing that one (still is), like dropping down from Windows into vastly simpler machine language.
These concepts are thousands of years old. A well worn, albeit uncommon path.
Perhaps in a section or two, but we cover quite a bit more here than the poetic hand waving of buddhistic explanations. Developing more granular explanations including rhe phenomenology of prediction errors, etc, is pretty important stuff in the development of a view of consciousness. Covering selection pressures running consciousness in the constrained direction, the relieving of selection pressures running the brain in a more undifferentiated (and technically maladaptive) direction, political brain differentiation, etc, and more covered here.
You just made my day!
So beautiful!!
Absolute banger from Whitman. Thank you for pointing this one out!