[FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...

[Steve Smith]

I don't know if we are converging in our acceptance/dismissal of "the
myth of individuality" or not, but for the moment I am hallucinating
convergence. 

I think the distinction we are arriving at *might* be that *every
snowflake is unique* but that this is true in the very same way that
*every stone is unique* and *every tree is unique*.   I think the point
you are making is that that (intrinsic?!) uniqueness should not be
conflated with specialness?  

The pinon closest to the bedroom in my house which I sat under and
climbed in regularly for most of my elementary school years *was* quite
special *to me*, up to and including feeling guilty/uncomfortable when I
let my father talk me into trimming one of the lower branches to open up
a larger canopy to sit under.   I could have "groomed the hell out of"
the tree, maybe even nailed up a platform and made a treehouse in it,
but I was (for better or worse) hyper-aware of the details that made it
unique.   My imagination/memory includes (I think) many of it's details
including some of the larger roots humping up out of the ground and the
places I needed to avoid gripping whilst climbing to avoid getting pitch
on my hands.

I believe that Musk's delusion includes the ideation that by moving
himself (and ~1M other individual peoples) to the surface of Mars
(and/or distributed through the asteroid belt) will allow the "forcing
culture" to change enough to match some libertarian-utopian vision he
holds.  

I *think* when you debunk the specialness of the individual you are
saying that the uniquenesses (specific construction of any given
snowflake) is mostly irrelevant in many/most contexts.  

My nephew is a budding materials scientist with a particular background
in crystallography (his father is a minerologist) and he recently walked
me through, in particular, some of the idiosyncrasies of quartz crystals
and the myriad uses those specifics can yield various useful properties
(in industry).   I went looking for the basis of Kurt Vonnegut's Ice-9
only to find that we are up to 18 distinct crystalline forms...  and of
course (in the spirit of the individual/unique) those don't include the
combinatorics implied by contaminants (or intentional dopants, etc.)
which I assume are the basis of the plenitude (effective infinitude?) of
snowflakes individuals.  

Individual human beings in the context of groups larger than Dunbar#
pretty much get their meaning through their utility which reflects a
combination of their affordances and their circumstances as much as the
long-term relationships (2,...n-wise) they have with other individuals
(not to mention domesticated/wild/familiar animals, edifices, plants, etc.)



 of On 3/29/21 3:11 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Aha! Yeah, we probably do share it. But 2 points in space can be in the same state *without* having a common driver. I.e. inter-subjectivity does not imply communication. En garde! So you may share the same sentiment with an alien consciousness near Sirius. And, although it sounds like I'm just joking, I'm actually trying to say something serious, which is that individuali[ty|sm] carries something like a "locality arrogance" ... the impression that one blob in the pervading field(s) is somehow special or unique, different from all the other blobs. Maybe our modern problem of celebrity and institutional bloat is a function of a finite and fairly small set of possible states of being? And now that we're up to 8B people, each of us is guaranteed to share state with some N others? And anyone who thinks they're somehow special or unique is simply ignorant of those who share their state? If we experience a massive die off, those of us that survive will again be true individuals?
>
> Or, even if the space of states is actual infinite, perhaps there's only a small number of forcing cultures and we'd *have* to fly out to Sirius in order to get out of those overwhelming flows.
>
> On 3/29/21 12:27 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I think I *share* the sentiment you present here, though through other
>> mechanisms (than psi) to dissolve the (illusory/delusional) boundaries
>> between self/other or more aptly self/whole.   You are apparently
>> more-better at (or at least more committed to your version of) this than
>> I am which I envy/aspire.
>>
>> I suppose all I'm teasing at here is the apparent paradox of (for
>> example) the "two" of us, trying to serialize things about our "inner
>> states" to "communicate" between two "individuals".    In the abstract,
>> I accept the premise that what I consider to be an "individual" (e.g.
>> me, you, 400+ people reading or hitting delete on this message) is more
>> a locus or cluster or relative concentration  in a high dimensional
>> field.    Maybe the only answer is to ingest a quantum of the right
>> mushroom...   or fast/dehydrate until I meet Joseph or Brigham across a
>> campfire in an arroyo...  or meditate until my spirit leaves my body and
>> apprehends the cosmos directly...   
>>
>> We two "illusory individuals" *appear* (from the perspective of illusory
>> individuals) to be communicating (poorly or otherwise).... 
>