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DaveW<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">How could I have forgotten
Nicholas??? I would have relished reading dozens of books about
his adventures.</div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;"><br>
</div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;">I do believe we are in agreement,
with just enough nuances to suggest some wonderful conversations
if we ever find ourselves in physical proximity again.</div>
</blockquote>
I may be a state/lake over from you in August... WI... I'll ping
you with details as that place-time and I approach one another.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">IMO, human potential is just a
localized, maybe somewhat specialized, expression of Life's
potential and consciousness/intelligence is universal.</div>
</blockquote>
Yes, that is a succinct point I tend to harp on (around?). It may
be entirely confirmation bias if/when/as I feel I have more evidence
for such than ever before... I once believed we were apex, then was
told that was hubristic. Now I am returning to complexity arguments
(IIT-Psi-esque) to recognize in what way we might be (temporarily)
the ultimate locus of complexity (at least across Terra/Sol?). The
argument afoot across this thread is whether the extended phenotype
which is the computronium we are paving the planet with, will
represent a qualitative *jump* in that and whether *it* might polyp
off and leave us behind, no longer needing us as a substrate? <br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">One of the nuances—I think I am
more pessimistic about "groups of humans" being on a
transcendent path. Reading David Graeber makes me think we are
kind of an opposite path; from far more optimal forms of social
organization in the past to the degenerate
power-politics/rapacious-capitalism of today. But would be very
happy to see a brighter side to this coin</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Graeber and Wengrow do show well (IMO) many of the negative
consequences of the *style* of organizations that our abstraction
of "value" (Debt, currency, UoweMes) has yielded. I also agree
superficially with JIm Scott's stories (how to remain ungoverned
and against the grain) do paint a pretty picture of a liminal
transition zone in the "poised realm" of both organizational
complexity of human groups and the development of a sophisticated
extension to our phenotypes. I'm not sure it is that different
in some ways than the picture the JudeoChristian origin stories
paint of the Garden of Eden. You probably have a more
sophisticated understanding of Graeber in this regard? I would
agree that at least in a sense of local (time and context) sense
those modes were relatively optimal. BTW, I think this is roughly
what (your own... meaning LDS) Orson Scott Card was ideating on in
"Folk of the Fringe"? As I remember it, his stories in that
collection did not ideate on re-ascent but rather exploring the
local minima in other directions perhaps (albeit theocraticly
informed).<br>
</p>
<p>In our <a
href="https://www.santafe.edu/research/results/working-papers/symbiotic-intelligence-self-organizing-knowledge-o">1998
paper</a> on <i>Symbiotic Intelligence: Self Organizing
Knowledge on Distributed Networks Driven by Human Interaction</i>,
one of my contributions was the Hobbesian backstory presented in <i>Leviathan</i>
(c17) of collective humanity as a (proto) superorganism. Among
the few Laurels I have to rest on, this is the most relevant to
our discussion unfolding here. Our work was rather premature and
naive but illuminates one salient issue perhaps... that humanity
has been forming a complex multicellular superorganism since the
earliest protoCities and regional cultures emerged.. 10k years or
more years ago (ignoring Atlantean fantasies of course)? </p>
<p>Scott's perspective ?romanticizes? a type of self-organized
proto-superorganisms (colony creature) that humans tend to be able
to create as long as they remain ungrounded (semi-mobile, hard to
pin down, independent of resources which are easy to covet or
hoard). Hobbes declared that before such collectivism, life was
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He was an apologist
for <i>Coercive Sovereign Power</i>, so I don't trust his
motives, but I think he had a point. We do find some amazing
synergy through specialization and stigmergic artifacts
(infrastructure). What we do with it, of course, remains as the <i>Big
Rub</i>?<br>
</p>
<p>The bottom line for me might be: "the only way out is through".
We *have* established a certain style of super-organism (or suite
of overlapping ones) such as nation states, global-scale
religions, multi-national corporations, global movements (QAnon,
Environmentalism, Nazi/Communist/Socialist/??? parties, MAGA-ism,
etc.). Global Supply Chains and Global Monetary Systems and
Energy Distribution Networks, and International Courts, are the
vascular and energetic systems and immune systems of the (beyond)
slime-mold that we have become collectively. A total collapse is
*one* way we might scrub all this back down to the bare metal
(earth) and rebuild a different version according to a different
logic and even body plan and metabolism? Are there any others
which we might find? I personally don't think "drill baby
drill", "burn baby burn", "put the pedal to the metal" are likely
to lead us out any other way than a spectacular crash, although it
does fit the principle of "through". The JudeoChristian
end-times/rapture story *normalizes", even idealizes this?
Billionaire Bunkers and the plebian "prepper" culture are another
expression of this. <br>
</p>
<p>I believe it is inevitable that if we don't find our way
*through* to a self-organized super-organism which leaves behind
the current host of dysfunctions (global military, economic,
social control, etc) we will only have the option of
full-collapse into something “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short” whereupon we have the *option* of reforming different
organizational modes and structures. Maybe Graeber and Scott
have (had) some insight into whether we might find a different
path toward collective human organization which does not follow
the self-limiting patterns we "already tried"? <br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">You mentioned RAH's candy coat of
feminism surrounding a chocolate core of misogyny. I too
detected that in his writing. The only female characters that
seemed somewhat immune were Jubal's three amenuenses, especially
Ann the Fair Witness.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>My cousin, Vonda McIntyre was apparently the prototype for his
character <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_(novel)">Friday</a>
which both flattered her (the Dean of SF acknowledging her) and
appalled her (the image he projected of the <i>ideal</i> woman
onto her). She was (died just a few years ago) a fairly radical
post-gender voice (early works reflected familiar feminism of the
time but explored <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora:_Beyond_Equality">trans/bi/poly
questions</a> not just in gender but perhaps species as well...
the Divers of the <a
href="https://vondanmcintyre.net/the-starfarers-quartet/">Starfarers
</a>quartet for example). Her last completed/published Novel was
The Moon and the Sun (1998?) but told me in her last weeks (4
years ago?) that she had completed the final novel she had been
working on in the (20 year) interim armatured around her pet
theory of how the Minoan culture collapsed in a long slow clacking
of dominoes, "back in the day". I can't tell if it is actually in
the works for publication. </p>
<p>Her younger sister passed of pancreatic cancer as well, one year
before. They both grew up mostly near Hanford WA with their
father as an executive with Westinghouse (soon to bring us
washing-machine sized nuclear power plants to a
village/neighborhood/data-center near you?). She was deeply
ecologically aware but not an eco-freak yet did ask the question
in her last months if that was a correlation with her and her
sister's very similar cancer at a very similar age (approaching
70).</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">I was a member of the Church of
All Worlds, almost from its beginning, circa 1963. When I went
to Macalester in St. Paul, I became a member of the Lady of the
Lakes Nest, circa 1969. It was always interesting to me how CAW
rapidly transformed from the 'free love promiscuity" male
fantasies in <i>Stranger</i> to an organization almost
exclusively characterized by Goddess/Gaia worship.</div>
</blockquote>
I was unaware of CAW in IRL... and here we have a (near charter)
member! Another proto-super-organism or a distributed
organ/organelle? (re)Occupy Mars!<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e9ee5ee7-237f-4c05-b1cb-158bd559a494@app.fastmail.com">
<div style="font-family:Arial;">Just an aside (a deep dark
confession??), preceding my infatuation with the SF heroes I
mentioned, my very first hero was Lex Luthor in the Superman
comics.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>I think Science Fiction and Comics (and Graphic Novels and
Action/Adventure films and ...) feed the (mostly male?) appeal of
*Potency*... This is what seems to drive Authoritarian Followers
(fetishizing the trappings of extreme potency) and Bro Culture
(Fitness unto Fighting Dominance, Wealth unto Financial
Dominance, Personal Power Projection unto Social Dominance,
etc). It is possible the female circumstance of reproduction (at
least as executed in mammals/marsupials) might meet the instinct
for potency in a more organic way? Their potency is reserved for
reproduction and direct nurturing/protection of their progeny?
We men tend to splash ours all over the countryside and one
another (Occupy Mars! Occupy Luna! Occupy LaGrange1,2,3,4,5,
Occupy Kuiper! Occupy Cyberspace!)<br>
</p>
<p>I think <a href="https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass">Robin
Wall Kimmerer </a>makes good biological/ecological arguments
for why our myriad "frontier cultures" (essentially all those
built on colonialism but never matured beyond said "frontier") are
so toxic both to the colonized and to the colonizer (Occupy
Everything!). It being "natural" for some species to thrive in
recently disturbed ecological niches, but also natural for them to
be part of the ultimate "healing" process supporting the return to
whatever homeostatic (homeodynamic/morphodynamic) balance that the
prairie/tundra/forest is good at after the fire or the plowing
under or ... but humans' ability to write our own stories allows
us to maintain the illusion that we are living in the "frontier"
context long after it no longer serves us (or the context). <br>
</p>
<p> So we now (US) own more personal firearms than we have people to
brandish them at one another, and we drive vehicles many times
more capable than we likely need, many have many times more money
flowing/hoarded than those living (semi-comfortably) at
subsistence. 10kWUS vs 5kWEU 2kWCH vs 500W3rd vs 80Wprimitve
extended human metabolisms for example? We fetishize excesses in
all ways while pretending they are necessary to our survival?
Occupy Mars!</p>
<p>BTW it was good to see Greta Thunberg interviewed on DN! with a
much more evolved/mature affect but not diverted from her
intuitive awareness of our collective insanity. I wonder if
Netanyahu's IDF and Mossad will kill her on her boat this time?
Or Musk's clandestinos since she seems to twig him nearly as much
as MacKenzie Scott does? I hear drone executions are 'all the
rage' these days! Occupy Gaza! <br>
</p>
<p>GruRaMumbleStumble,<br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
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