[FRIAM] acutely destructive fires in Utah/Grand Canyon

[Steve Smith]

I like this tangential riff into our "theater of the Absurd"

It is equally (similarly) absurd to me that:

 1. We are sentient enough (some of us) to sense and anticipate (sortof)
    that we are muddying our own water hole, shitting our own nest,
    tragedizing our own commons to the point that we might not survive
    the consequences, yet cannot seem to actually push the sisyphean
    rock *up* the hill rather than just wander it around without any
    sense of the gradient?
 2. We imagine we could *ever* do anything more than just bash around in
    pseudo-brownian motion?

I think we need to write a followon to Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" under 
the title "Sisyphus Wandered"?


On 7/16/2025 8:22 AM, glen wrote:

> "Know" is a strong word. But I think at least some of us perceive the 
> *absurd* - "Imagine Sisyphus happy". This sentiment is present in 
> every community I've ever interacted with, from academics to 
> politicians to plumbers. Sans suicide, what option do you have but to 
> keep pushing the rock up the hill?
>
> This is something we "know" that could help a lot of people around us. 
> I have lefty friends who are caught up in the outrage about ICE and 
> Trump, righty friends caught up in Epstein Files and Woke, academic 
> friends caught up in the death of the university (of which Trump is a 
> symptom not a cause), etc. Many of the older ones simply forgot about 
> absurdity. The overwhelming majority of the young ones have never even 
> sensed it, much less perceived or lived it.
>
> An important part of living absurdity, however, is pushing through 
> into a skill, repetition/retrying until you can get into the Flow of 
> some activity. You can't *feel* absurdity without Flow. So another 
> thing "we" know is whatever skill we have hammered out enough that 
> allows us to feel absurdity. So whether it's a knitting circle or wood 
> turning, find and mind-meld with the others doing that. And then reach 
> out in to the milieu and *hook* others into it ... and keep them there 
> long enough to broach the absurd.
>
> On 7/16/25 6:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> What do "we" know that might be of help in remedying what I am 
>> identifying as faults in our mode(s) of "collectivism".  In the 
>> spirit of part-whole conflation/emergence, *can* we, as sentient 
>> beings (maybe with the technical leverage of LLMs, etc)  take a more 
>> conscious part in the collectives we are a part of?  We already do it 
>> by trying to design/engineer/clamp these systems to our presumed 
>> intention, but it does seem that these "best laid plans often go 
>> awry"?   What insights does complex systems science offer us to 
>> obtain another result?
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250716/c640b52b/attachment.html>