[FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...

[Steve Smith]

Marcus wrote:
> Is there reason to believe that Musk is interested in a libertarian-utopian vision? 

His acutely evident excess narcissistic hubris?

I'm sure it is yet another example of my "imputation" tendency.   I
"impute" his motives to include a fiction that his vision lives in a
techno-utopian fantasy land where others with his (presumed) acute
technical perspective/acumen can self-select to become the successful
hyper-individual exploiters of a "frontier" (like the one his presumed
Dutch Afrikanner ancestors found in So. Africa a few centuries ago, and
the American Frontiersman version found here in North America) without
too much (any) interference from bureaucracies, etc.   Musk's ability to
*navigate* the existing bureaucracies (with a combination of financial
leverage, popular support, and belligerent ignorance of the relevance of
rules to his context) is (IMO) represents something "unique" to him.  
Msr. Bezos and Ssr Branson seem to want to play in the same domain, but
despite Bezos significantly greater *financial* wealth (until this
year), he has not even begun (by some measure) to compete.

>      If specialness is a rare instance of unique, it seems reasonable to take what he's said in public at face value:  That by having humans on both planets, "humanity" can be saved from disaster.   That's like a Noah's Ark type argument that would suggest that people are more interchangeable.   There's no need to keep the copies.

He makes that argument as a way of convincing others to pitch in or get
out of his way... but I still suspect him of an acutely narcissistic
desire to create a polyp of humanity built in his own self-image.   I
don't know if Noah aspired to be the captain of a post-deluvian
paradise,   I think he is at least characterized in the Biblical
descriptions as a "loyal channeler of Yahweh's will"?

This is not to say that *my* narcissistic hubristic techno-utopian
fantasies don't get tweaked by most of Musk's techno-developments.  
Flying cars, underground ballistic transport, space-flight, colonizing
mars, neural link/lace, what's NOT to like about all that (as a
techno-utopian)?   My alternate anarcho-primitivist pretty much finds
*all* of that something NOT TO LIKE... but that is *my* inner battle.  
I'm happy for those of you who don't live with those loud shouting
matches erupting in your head/heart.

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
> Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 2:47 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...
>
> 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)....
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