Are you referring to social complexity – depending on how you want to define that: cities, transmission of ideas and instantaneous communication across barriers of time and geography, etc.?
Or are you referring to a more general move, illusory as it in some ways is, away from constraints of biology?
There is an awful lot here.
I used to think there would someday be a cultural singularity, not at all the one the digital futurists talk about, but now it really seems to me that an awful lot of people really are already in the matrix in a literal sense.
I personally would argue that the escape from biology is illusory.
This has been going on for a long time. It may be what is responsible for all kinds of stresses and strains and psychoses and berserkers committing mass murder, etc. An organism perfectly adapted to the social dynamic of say a small village, a hundred or so, gets progressively more stressed.
What are you lookin’ at?
That is at the most trivial level of what you are talking about.
Basic plumbing: we are primed very much for the visual, hence tv and porn and. Primed to care about what we can see? Try to get people to pay attention to what is happening to the oceans. A nonstarter until now, the wider advent of visual evidence.
(What happens when we no longer trust our own eyes? When a jury doesn’t believe videotape because they have seen a newer version of Zelig that shows Marily Monroe kissing Abraham Lincoln, and cannot find any clues to convince themselves it is not real?)
welcome to be here! Any friend of buhdy’s is a friend of mine. And I think you have found a group with open minds and a willingness to listen and learn. We are also here to make friends and have fun! So enjoy the party!
I’m not sure I can answer your question because I have to figure out what some of those words mean. Are you saying that the capacity of our mind is being limited by the evolution of our brains?
Is your user name a hint? What is the evolutionary sieve?
i would ask where you would put the ‘boundary’ you mention, because if i were to determine where the boundary should be, for the species i belong to, my answer would be simply, “this”, and i’d kinda look around and make a dramatic sweeping motion with my arms.
but, then again, its been suggested i wasnt properly socialized. i have a pesky tendency not to accept the consensus ‘reality’.
i cant even make an intelligent guess of the effects on social systems, because i think i hardly understand them anymore. but if i take a step back and examine the effects on the individual, its entirely too random. if the effects on me, for example, were writ large, i think i’d be pleased with the social sytem that would result. 😉 but ive been told other people arent like me.
but social systems do tend to be adaptive, hence our survival so far. granted, herd-culling and shunning are methods of adaptation…. and id bet my last dollar that, once adapted, a further horizon would be pursued. ill spare my musings on how religion and then industry designed a consensus reality where discontent is inherent.
perhaps my circustances have forced my focus into too narrow a scope to offer any insight into your question. my primary concerns lately have extended only to my front door, and my responsibilities have removed me from much of the unstructured social experience i used to enjoy. or maybe i just dont understand the question the way you do.
i will most certainly bear with you, but i cant promise to be serious. 😉
p.s….i just re-read this in preview. ive outdone myself in the word-count-to-topical-relevance-and-meaningful-content ratio. an all-time low! some sort of apology is probably in order… 😉
what are the implications for creating the future….
when folks become more and more psychologicaly brittle and maladaptive through the assumption of increasingly absolute belief systems….
the more complex the world becomes the less capable we seem to become at engaging it…..
I am headed to bed …..currently working 7 days a week….. thanks….thank you very much…
we are wired to “seek” sensory confirmation of cognitve expectation……
we wanna touch what we sense……
yet my great grandmothers great grandmother knew everyone in her town… everyone….
if you had asked her what life would look like in 50 years she would have told you something like it was…….consonance….
if you ask someone today what the world will be like in 50 years today I doubt that you find the same result…
also I dont think that most folks have any confidence in their assesments of the future fifty years from now….disonance…..
each embodied being seems to have a boundary it experiences as the extent of self…..
it is delivered by the structure of the body embedded in the “world”…sweep of the hands…coevolving…..
it is unique
it is incomplete/reductive/……
yet it is where all of the game is…..
yet each being is inherently empty of independent/fundemental identity….
conciousness as delivered by the body is a reduction of actuality…..
so I have this sense that real bubble of the human condition is pretty similiar….with the usual variation……
perhaps an individual would become increasingly more inaccurate in their perception of their relationship to their civilization….
perhaps their perception of the world its accuracy
and they would over/undercompensate and create increasing unintended consequences…
I dont see us as having mutated or drifted genetically to any extent …
yet our world is so extremely cognitively disonant with my gretagrandmother as to be mythical…..
and i’m tired, but please come back here tomorrow because i love this conversation…
but i will say this: we have, imho, gone beyond our programming or there really is god… otherwise nothing makes sense
but then, what really does make sense? being here? i don’t think so… if we go with the it’s a fluke theory… then it’s all random and yet that seems so overwhelming impossible
no no no… i don’t know much about biology or physics or buddhism for that matter… i’m more of a naturalist… i see things, they make me think of things, i respond
but now… i think it’s time to respond to being sleepy
i think the concept you’re describing was driven home for me when i learned about the nervous system while studying massage therapy.
the human neurological system is tiered to prioritize afferent (incoming) sense information. the primary, largest, and overriding afferent neural pathway is for cold. that’s the reason that cold overrides pain (the eventual numbness is actually sensory overload, which is probably also relevant to your question). hence, our biological evolution is still such that it was when ‘cold’ was the greatest environmental threat we would encounter….or so would one assume by the system’s prioritization. (we dont rely on touch-sense to detect threats like animal/enemy attack, or lack of food, etc)
the space and scope of the ‘evolution’ of our environment…our expanding of horizons and non-biologic adaptation to it…has, indeed, created a level of disconnect between our biologic impulse and our empiric cognitive reality construct.
biologists suggest that the brain’s ability to create what it hasnt already experienced…an ability that is assumed specific to humans….is a result of the change in our diets to fatty proteins when COOPERATION allowed for a hunting rather than scavenging existence. i cant prove or disprove that…just puttin it out there…
and while i agree that ‘consciousness as delivered by the body is a reduction of actuality’, one could also assume that it is an intentional reduction…that consciousness is…well…conscious of the level of self our bodies require for our given bodily circumstance.
and, for the record, im a big fan of unintended consequences in the longview. sure, many of them have been negative…but some have not. and, again, by the long view many initially negative consequences have produced eventual positive results.
the ‘now’ is also extremely cognitively discordant with my grandmother’s worldview, yet it was her generation that imagined a lot of what is a reality today through fiction, imagination, precognition (?)…
got to agree about the “body” coming with embodiment and that is kind of circling in on my curiosity….
my great grandmother came from hungary as a 16 year old woman in the hold of a “cattle boat” as the family story goes…
her world was cognitvely consonant with her grandmothers world…..
my grandmothers world saw an accelerated rate of increase of dynamic complexity due to an increase in science and technology but also due to an exponentialy rising amount of dynamic change…more of us…doing…more complex things…..
by my mothers time the world continued to follow the growth in the genomes ability to engage complexity…..
I am 52 I remember many things and have spoken to each of these women…
have asked them to tell me what their lives were like…..
I know that these women and all of us that have come from women…that would be all of us….have not truely changed significantly at the level of the genetic opportunity space of the individual….evolution of the genome occurs slower than that if I am not mistaken….
correct me if I am wrong….
I dont think the brush of the “body” is significantly diffent than my….well you know…..
yet the rate of change of the arising of dynamic complexity within the cognitive horizon of the regular human being is exploding….
first question…
….sort of
each soul has a distinct capacity at any given moment in its developmental arising
a complexity bandwidth if you will….
so what happens to an agents culture/civilization if the complexity of that agents civilization exceeds the bandwidth of the average agent in that civilization!?!
and my user name….
that points to my perspective of the current location of the human race
in aprocess that has driven its development for at least 3 or 4 million years…
I think…..
speciated. i dont condone the active descpeciation..no way…but if there were still dinosaurs, humans probably wouldnt have survived. who knows what we’ll get next (cut to 73rd virgin, surrounded by torn wrapping paper, uttering, “gee, thanks, another new virus. the last one was soooooo not my size”)
im going to bed with the thought that, without unintended consequences, we may never learn/have learned some very valuable lessons. good night, nice meetin’ ya.
A period of chaos in which evil is able to triumph initially, but in which that triumph only serves to hasten a wakening of a segment of the species that in effect self-selects to lead the next stage of evolution through demonstrating its greater intelligence which is manifested by finally defeating the evil and eventually provokes a new period of enlightenment, thus providing the environment and circumstances to invent the tools to better understand the complexities of which you speak?
Or is it extinction through embracing simplistic stupidity?
We live. And then we die. In between there is no limit, I believe, to our consciousness, except the limits we put on it. Our society may (and usually does) try to put constraints upon how we act, think, believe, but those constraints can and have been broken over and over again in our human history.
It may seem as though we are separate, but we are all made out of the same substance, we are all part of this universe. Where does the skin of my arm end and space of the air begin? We may perceive this as a separation, but it isn’t so.
I do believe we cannot separate mind from our body in this life, nor is it necessary to do so in order to gain an authentic view of existence. What is necessary, I believe, is that we detach from our own egos and realize there is another way of viewing existence than that based on our own narrow, impermanent and fleeting desires and fears. And that is a subjective state, not an objective one.
it’s when we broke from the cycle: plant, tend, harvest, born, live, die… when the circle broke and flattened out into a line moving away from us into infinity
suddenly, we were aware of ourselves… startling and to what end? what does it give us? what do shirts and buttons or cars with tires have to do with survival? it’s one thing to use a stick for a tool to get more food… it’s entirely another to have a home theater…
what i see all around me are life forms living to the brink of what they need to survive
and yet we have exploded past survival into trying to stop death… to matter… to somehow become concrete and last forever
we want meaning… finding food and having children doesn’t count in our purposeful column anymore… picasso didn’t even know where to go with creativity… he had so many ideas… he tore apart everyday objects and explored them on canvas… he could draw a perfect circle and yet that was not enough…
we are trapped by ourselves… having gone beyond our programming… like Hal in 2001… we are the creatures sci fi writers write about… those machines come to life by recognizing self…
and, to my mind, that’s what we are still grappling with… we can’t synch it all up… even though we know all the answers… we just are nowhere close to figuring out the questions to unlock those answers
and when we get there… will that quiet us? i don’t think so…
What happens to the social systems of a species when the cognitive horizon of the “normative” phenotypic individual is exceeded by the genotypes ability to create complexity many orders of magnitude beyond that boundary!?!
What follows is a brief touch on my perception of what some of the outcomes might be…..
Does any of this babble touch, trigger, connect to anything!?!
1 misperception of location 2 misperception of direction and movement 3 misperception of dynamics 4 misperception of elements 5 misperception of opportunity space 6 misperception of action space 7 inability to create outcomes which support positive expectancy with regards to the future 8 an increasing centralization of identity with self as defined by the isolated soma 9 break down of networks of social bonds 10 as aggregation increases the emergence of SOC’s throughout many of the throughputs of the civilization 11 …….
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Author
Unpack.
Are you referring to social complexity – depending on how you want to define that: cities, transmission of ideas and instantaneous communication across barriers of time and geography, etc.?
Or are you referring to a more general move, illusory as it in some ways is, away from constraints of biology?
There is an awful lot here.
I used to think there would someday be a cultural singularity, not at all the one the digital futurists talk about, but now it really seems to me that an awful lot of people really are already in the matrix in a literal sense.
I personally would argue that the escape from biology is illusory.
This has been going on for a long time. It may be what is responsible for all kinds of stresses and strains and psychoses and berserkers committing mass murder, etc. An organism perfectly adapted to the social dynamic of say a small village, a hundred or so, gets progressively more stressed.
What are you lookin’ at?
That is at the most trivial level of what you are talking about.
Basic plumbing: we are primed very much for the visual, hence tv and porn and. Primed to care about what we can see? Try to get people to pay attention to what is happening to the oceans. A nonstarter until now, the wider advent of visual evidence.
(What happens when we no longer trust our own eyes? When a jury doesn’t believe videotape because they have seen a newer version of Zelig that shows Marily Monroe kissing Abraham Lincoln, and cannot find any clues to convince themselves it is not real?)
Babbling on o/t, but anyway, nice to meet you.
welcome to be here! Any friend of buhdy’s is a friend of mine. And I think you have found a group with open minds and a willingness to listen and learn. We are also here to make friends and have fun! So enjoy the party!
I’m not sure I can answer your question because I have to figure out what some of those words mean. Are you saying that the capacity of our mind is being limited by the evolution of our brains?
Is your user name a hint? What is the evolutionary sieve?
i would ask where you would put the ‘boundary’ you mention, because if i were to determine where the boundary should be, for the species i belong to, my answer would be simply, “this”, and i’d kinda look around and make a dramatic sweeping motion with my arms.
but, then again, its been suggested i wasnt properly socialized. i have a pesky tendency not to accept the consensus ‘reality’.
i cant even make an intelligent guess of the effects on social systems, because i think i hardly understand them anymore. but if i take a step back and examine the effects on the individual, its entirely too random. if the effects on me, for example, were writ large, i think i’d be pleased with the social sytem that would result. 😉 but ive been told other people arent like me.
but social systems do tend to be adaptive, hence our survival so far. granted, herd-culling and shunning are methods of adaptation…. and id bet my last dollar that, once adapted, a further horizon would be pursued. ill spare my musings on how religion and then industry designed a consensus reality where discontent is inherent.
perhaps my circustances have forced my focus into too narrow a scope to offer any insight into your question. my primary concerns lately have extended only to my front door, and my responsibilities have removed me from much of the unstructured social experience i used to enjoy. or maybe i just dont understand the question the way you do.
i will most certainly bear with you, but i cant promise to be serious. 😉
p.s….i just re-read this in preview. ive outdone myself in the word-count-to-topical-relevance-and-meaningful-content ratio. an all-time low! some sort of apology is probably in order… 😉
Author
what are the implications for creating the future….
when folks become more and more psychologicaly brittle and maladaptive through the assumption of increasingly absolute belief systems….
the more complex the world becomes the less capable we seem to become at engaging it…..
I am headed to bed …..currently working 7 days a week….. thanks….thank you very much…
Author
we are wired to “seek” sensory confirmation of cognitve expectation……
we wanna touch what we sense……
yet my great grandmothers great grandmother knew everyone in her town… everyone….
if you had asked her what life would look like in 50 years she would have told you something like it was…….consonance….
if you ask someone today what the world will be like in 50 years today I doubt that you find the same result…
also I dont think that most folks have any confidence in their assesments of the future fifty years from now….disonance…..
Author
each embodied being seems to have a boundary it experiences as the extent of self…..
it is delivered by the structure of the body embedded in the “world”…sweep of the hands…coevolving…..
it is unique
it is incomplete/reductive/……
yet it is where all of the game is…..
yet each being is inherently empty of independent/fundemental identity….
conciousness as delivered by the body is a reduction of actuality…..
so I have this sense that real bubble of the human condition is pretty similiar….with the usual variation……
perhaps an individual would become increasingly more inaccurate in their perception of their relationship to their civilization….
perhaps their perception of the world its accuracy
and they would over/undercompensate and create increasing unintended consequences…
I dont see us as having mutated or drifted genetically to any extent …
yet our world is so extremely cognitively disonant with my gretagrandmother as to be mythical…..
and i’m tired, but please come back here tomorrow because i love this conversation…
but i will say this: we have, imho, gone beyond our programming or there really is god… otherwise nothing makes sense
but then, what really does make sense? being here? i don’t think so… if we go with the it’s a fluke theory… then it’s all random and yet that seems so overwhelming impossible
no no no… i don’t know much about biology or physics or buddhism for that matter… i’m more of a naturalist… i see things, they make me think of things, i respond
but now… i think it’s time to respond to being sleepy
Author
and perception is an preconsciously intended reduction of the sensorium……
yang arises from yin and yin arises from yang…….
yet there is that rub that not all negative unintended consequences are the same…..
as melvin has pointed out despeciation of the planet makes some things a little dicey if you ask me……
At this point I live in a completely different world from my next door neighbor. Our commonality gets more tenuous every day.
i think the concept you’re describing was driven home for me when i learned about the nervous system while studying massage therapy.
the human neurological system is tiered to prioritize afferent (incoming) sense information. the primary, largest, and overriding afferent neural pathway is for cold. that’s the reason that cold overrides pain (the eventual numbness is actually sensory overload, which is probably also relevant to your question). hence, our biological evolution is still such that it was when ‘cold’ was the greatest environmental threat we would encounter….or so would one assume by the system’s prioritization. (we dont rely on touch-sense to detect threats like animal/enemy attack, or lack of food, etc)
the space and scope of the ‘evolution’ of our environment…our expanding of horizons and non-biologic adaptation to it…has, indeed, created a level of disconnect between our biologic impulse and our empiric cognitive reality construct.
biologists suggest that the brain’s ability to create what it hasnt already experienced…an ability that is assumed specific to humans….is a result of the change in our diets to fatty proteins when COOPERATION allowed for a hunting rather than scavenging existence. i cant prove or disprove that…just puttin it out there…
and while i agree that ‘consciousness as delivered by the body is a reduction of actuality’, one could also assume that it is an intentional reduction…that consciousness is…well…conscious of the level of self our bodies require for our given bodily circumstance.
and, for the record, im a big fan of unintended consequences in the longview. sure, many of them have been negative…but some have not. and, again, by the long view many initially negative consequences have produced eventual positive results.
the ‘now’ is also extremely cognitively discordant with my grandmother’s worldview, yet it was her generation that imagined a lot of what is a reality today through fiction, imagination, precognition (?)…
Author
some people focus on the “conservative” side of civilization – focus on what seems to have worked…..resist change….
some people focus on the “dissapative” side of civilization – focus on the urecognized opportunity…..risk change……
most people navigate between the two….
I have come to believe in the power of networks of cooperation bonds…..
Author
got to agree about the “body” coming with embodiment and that is kind of circling in on my curiosity….
my great grandmother came from hungary as a 16 year old woman in the hold of a “cattle boat” as the family story goes…
her world was cognitvely consonant with her grandmothers world…..
my grandmothers world saw an accelerated rate of increase of dynamic complexity due to an increase in science and technology but also due to an exponentialy rising amount of dynamic change…more of us…doing…more complex things…..
by my mothers time the world continued to follow the growth in the genomes ability to engage complexity…..
I am 52 I remember many things and have spoken to each of these women…
have asked them to tell me what their lives were like…..
I know that these women and all of us that have come from women…that would be all of us….have not truely changed significantly at the level of the genetic opportunity space of the individual….evolution of the genome occurs slower than that if I am not mistaken….
correct me if I am wrong….
I dont think the brush of the “body” is significantly diffent than my….well you know…..
yet the rate of change of the arising of dynamic complexity within the cognitive horizon of the regular human being is exploding….
Author
and welcome to you
first question…
….sort of
each soul has a distinct capacity at any given moment in its developmental arising
a complexity bandwidth if you will….
so what happens to an agents culture/civilization if the complexity of that agents civilization exceeds the bandwidth of the average agent in that civilization!?!
and my user name….
that points to my perspective of the current location of the human race
in aprocess that has driven its development for at least 3 or 4 million years…
I think…..
what happens when our geniuses create systems too complicated for normal people to run?
I have great faith in “normal” people. It’s a shame they’re educated to think they’re dumb.
speciated. i dont condone the active descpeciation..no way…but if there were still dinosaurs, humans probably wouldnt have survived. who knows what we’ll get next (cut to 73rd virgin, surrounded by torn wrapping paper, uttering, “gee, thanks, another new virus. the last one was soooooo not my size”)
im going to bed with the thought that, without unintended consequences, we may never learn/have learned some very valuable lessons. good night, nice meetin’ ya.
nice to meet you theevolutionarysieve
A period of chaos in which evil is able to triumph initially, but in which that triumph only serves to hasten a wakening of a segment of the species that in effect self-selects to lead the next stage of evolution through demonstrating its greater intelligence which is manifested by finally defeating the evil and eventually provokes a new period of enlightenment, thus providing the environment and circumstances to invent the tools to better understand the complexities of which you speak?
Or is it extinction through embracing simplistic stupidity?
I always get those confused.
I haven’t been able to get on all day!
We live. And then we die. In between there is no limit, I believe, to our consciousness, except the limits we put on it. Our society may (and usually does) try to put constraints upon how we act, think, believe, but those constraints can and have been broken over and over again in our human history.
It may seem as though we are separate, but we are all made out of the same substance, we are all part of this universe. Where does the skin of my arm end and space of the air begin? We may perceive this as a separation, but it isn’t so.
I do believe we cannot separate mind from our body in this life, nor is it necessary to do so in order to gain an authentic view of existence. What is necessary, I believe, is that we detach from our own egos and realize there is another way of viewing existence than that based on our own narrow, impermanent and fleeting desires and fears. And that is a subjective state, not an objective one.
it’s when we broke from the cycle: plant, tend, harvest, born, live, die… when the circle broke and flattened out into a line moving away from us into infinity
suddenly, we were aware of ourselves… startling and to what end? what does it give us? what do shirts and buttons or cars with tires have to do with survival? it’s one thing to use a stick for a tool to get more food… it’s entirely another to have a home theater…
what i see all around me are life forms living to the brink of what they need to survive
and yet we have exploded past survival into trying to stop death… to matter… to somehow become concrete and last forever
we want meaning… finding food and having children doesn’t count in our purposeful column anymore… picasso didn’t even know where to go with creativity… he had so many ideas… he tore apart everyday objects and explored them on canvas… he could draw a perfect circle and yet that was not enough…
we are trapped by ourselves… having gone beyond our programming… like Hal in 2001… we are the creatures sci fi writers write about… those machines come to life by recognizing self…
and, to my mind, that’s what we are still grappling with… we can’t synch it all up… even though we know all the answers… we just are nowhere close to figuring out the questions to unlock those answers
and when we get there… will that quiet us? i don’t think so…
Author
I wiil be on this evening….
Author
What happens to the social systems of a species when the cognitive horizon of the “normative” phenotypic individual is exceeded by the genotypes ability to create complexity many orders of magnitude beyond that boundary!?!
What follows is a brief touch on my perception of what some of the outcomes might be…..
Does any of this babble touch, trigger, connect to anything!?!
1 misperception of location
2 misperception of direction and movement
3 misperception of dynamics
4 misperception of elements
5 misperception of opportunity space
6 misperception of action space
7 inability to create outcomes which support positive expectancy with regards to the future
8 an increasing centralization of identity with self as defined by the isolated soma
9 break down of networks of social bonds
10 as aggregation increases the emergence of SOC’s throughout many of the throughputs of the civilization
11 …….
or…….pie……… 😉