[FRIAM] Alien Crash Site, Complexity, Future Fossils and Jim Rutt Podcasts

[Merle Lefkoff]

I looked at the Consilience Project.  Following the thread.  Noticed a few
friends on the Board who should know better.  Old school dichotomous
thinking.  Heads in the sand where the future is concerned.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 5:55 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> I'm glad you brought up the Consilience Project again.   I have not
> hardly but scratched their "veneer" and have my own warning signals,
> including how smooth some of their stuff goes down *my* gullet.   Almost
> as if it were crafted for the likes of me?  And given the topic of their
> discussion (all I've read so far is their "End of Propoganda" and some
> meta-info about them), it feels a little too reflexive?    I am
> interested if not intrigued and very resistant to being "hooked" by what
> seems like pretty sophisticated arguments.    The MIU pedigree is a
> little disturbing... I have a couple of links back into them, one that
> when taken with the right amount of salt is somewhat supportive while
> the other makes me want to run for the hills.   "fevered gaze of
> zealotry" fits the latter.
>
> I haven't extracted enough of their examples of "human sovereignty" to
> know if it is actually an anthropocentric arrogance or not, but I'm
> looking for it.   I think the one place I saw it, I would have expected
> something more like "toxicly deluded individualism" as a judgement, but
> I really haven't given this work a fraction of what you apparently have.
>
> Like many of the frayed threads that is FriAM, I wonder who else is
> following this and not chiming in with some useful parallax?
>
> I wanted to read your "my Pyrrhonian tendencies" as "Pyrrhic" but
> nevertheless, thanks for a new word!
>
>
> > My jury is still out. But this is similar to my evaluation of the
> > Consilience Project, in particular this concept of "human sovereignty":
> >
> > https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
> > https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
> >
> https://highexistence.com/jordan-greenhall-humanity-global-collapse-survive/
> >
> >
> > And I can't put my finger on precisely what's unsettling about it. It
> > is similar to Rogan's dissonance, where with so much Rogan "content",
> > you can easily cherry pick both good and bad stuff. But at least with
> > Rogan, in spite of frequent bouts of arrogance, he's really just some
> > dude yapping with people. Stein, Hall, Shmachtenberger, et al [⥀] have
> > something akin to the fevered gaze of zealotry. I get this feeling
> > from all the Eastern mystic-friendly people (present company excluded
> > of course, Dave & Kim). What started my worry was Shmachtenberger's
> > (apparent) alma mater: https://www.miu.edu/.
> >
> > But backing out of my Pyrrhonian tendencies, my real worry is their
> > idealism, seemingly fueled by eschatological thinking. Putting so much
> > emphasis on concepts like "human sovereignty" seems anthropocentric
> > and a bit arrogant to me. It's directly in the transhumanist
> > tradition, I guess, but more utopian and less Blade
> > Runner/Neuromancer. The stylistic difference coheres a little bit when
> > comparing their feverish narrative(s) with posts by Robin Hanson or
> > Eliezer Yudkowski.
> >
> > I don't know. I'd appreciate any opinions offered here.
> >
> >
> > [⥀] Rutt is of a different category. His affinity for anti-Woke
> > rhetoric, constant F-bombs, and Weinstein-style alt-right ideas makes
> > me worry there's also an affinity with the right's obsession with the
> > anti-vaxx "bodily sovereignty" and maybe even the whackadoodle
> > "sovereign citizens" thing. Both Rutt and Weinstein are listed as
> > advisors: https://consilienceproject.org/team/ But I'm obviously OK
> > with cafeteria style idea farming. Even a broken clock's right twice
> > per day, right? [[⥁]]
> >
> >
> > [[⥁]] Of course NOT! Clocks are mechanisms, maybe even the canonical
> > mechanism. And, as a mechanism, a stopped clock cannot be a clock at
> > all. So "stopped clock" is self-contradictory ... from which,
> > classicaly, we can derive any theorem at all. So stopped clocks are
> > either always right or never right, which means they can't be right 2
> > times per day. Pffft.
> >
> > On 2/16/22 10:32, Steve Smith wrote:
> >>
> >> I kinda gave up on Rutt...  he's not exactly Joe Rogan, but there was
> >> something in his PlanB stuff that left me feeling like he was
> >> snookering me (all of us), even if he himself didn't know it? Maybe
> >> reading too much Rebecca Solnitt has made me hypersensitive to
> >> (other's not my own) mansplaining.
> >>
> >
>
>
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @merle110
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