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Steve's comment about dynamic scoping is relevant. A reasonable objective meaning for "apocalypse" will need to specify some sort of scope. We have a steady stream of apocalypses, insects, honey bees, species overall, indigenous people, monoculture collapses, dramatic increases of homeless camps, etc. Shrink the scope to the individual and we get closer to episodic personalities, the new age self-help celebrity culture that leads directly to Trump, run amok. We see people cathartically apocalypsing on camera every day and they've been on camera since (at least) Big Brother launched 2 decades ago. Such melodrama isn't new. To be "presentist" and/or "localist" and assert that *our* melodrama *here* is somehow more apocalyptic than the melodrama of yesteryear or elsewhere seems too self-centered to be credible.

I suppose one could make an argument in the form of renormalizing an infinite number of variables. Let's imagine society is describable by an infinitely long math expression (a right hand side only, not implying an equation), where each term has a coefficient, modifying its contribution to whatever set of composition functions the expression uses (+,⨂,⊙, …). But at any given time or locale only a finite number of the coefficients have non-zero value. Then we can think of an apocalypse (or efflorescence) might be a shift in which coefficients have zero values. Maybe the number of non-zero coefficients shrinks (or grows, respectively). Maybe a discrete event might happen to zero out all the non-zero terms and non-zero another set of zeroed terms. Or maybe non-zero-ness smoothly flows around the coefficients. IDK. But if you think this way, words like "apocalypse" kinda lose their intensity.



On 9/20/20 7:03 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Up until all human life is gone, I think there are still reasonable definitions for apocalyptic even though there will be opportunities for someone all the way down.    We could disagree, I suppose, if some transhuman is created during this period.. was that the apocalypse or the birth?

On 9/20/20 5:16 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> Every Utopia is also a Dystopia...  
> 
> I don't know that I've engaged much in the larger discussions of
> "meaning" here (except in my head and maybe even deleted missives),
> being out of my Pearcean Depth and all, but what *can* we say about
> values (or the quality and sense of what we concern ourselves with?),
> relative or otherwise?   I personally try to scope the subject of my
> "concern" as wide as I know how to, but I also recognize that when
> stressed that tends to shrink back toward a point centered somewhere in
> the dark heart of my ego, and I tend to assume the same happens to
> others as well, with different contexts, inputs, assumptions, etc.
> 
> Here we are, being "Life at the Edge of Chaos" which is, of course a
> ragged, structure-at-all-scales, etc. (fractal) "edge" and as we think
> that we have pushed ourselves right up to that edge, we discover there
> are other dimensions and hair-splittings that let us get closer to, or
> more to the point, resolve a finer edge.  


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