for - earth species project - ESP - Earth Species Project - Aza Raskin - Ernest Becker - Book - The Birth and Death of Meaning

comment - what is it like to be that other organism? - Earth Species Project is trying to shed some light on that using machine learning processes to decode the communication signals of non-human species - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=earth++species+project - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FH9SvPs1cCds%2F&group=world

- In Ernest Becker's book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker provides a summary of the ego from a Freudian perspective that is salient to Nagel's work
    - The ego creates time and humans, occupying a symbolosphere are timebound creatures that create the sense of time to order sensations and perceptions
    - The ego becomes the central reference point for the construct of time
- If the anthropocene is a problem
- and we wish to migrate towards an ecological civilization in which there is greater respect for other species, 
    - a symbiocene
- this means we need to empathize with other species 
- If our species is timebound but the majority of other species are not, 
    - then we must bridge that large gap by somehow experiencing what it's like to be an X ( where X can be a bat or many other species)

reference - interesting adjacencies emerging from reading a review of Ernest Becker's book: The Birth and Death of Meaning - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themortalatheist.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-birth-and-death-of-meaning-ernest-becker&group=world

• Epoche
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

for - quote - self esteem - self - adjacency - enlightenment - epoche - self-esteem - Ernest Becker

quote - The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?”

adjacency - between - Ernest Becker - epoche - self-esteem - enlightenment - Epoche - Epoche - phenomenological reduction - Symbiocene - Thomas Hagel - What's it like to be a Bat? - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency statement - It is fascinating intersection of adjacent ideas that the equivalency of these two questions brings up - These moments are as Gyuri talks about - having a dialogue with my old self - revisiting old ideas from a new perspective in which - more water has flowed under the bridge - The chain of discussions with my old selves began with a reading and physical annotation of Ernest Becker's physical book - The Birth ad Death of Meaning - It triggered a connection with Thomas Hagel's famous book - What's it like to be a bat? - But this connect-the-dot journey was kicked off by this morning's response to a Linked In discussion thread on the Anthropocene I've been having with Glenn Sankatsing of Rescue our Future: - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/glenn-sankatsing-7977711b8_anthropocentrism-paradox-or-theroot-of-activity-7185709152386654208-4E5t?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop - There the discussion focused on whether the Anthropocene is a term that is inherently biased since it is anthropomorphic. - Glenn used the example of a Rabbit's perspective of reality. This begged the question asked by Thomas Nagel. - Reading Becker's book and especially his discussion of human's cultural evolution of the ego construct being responsible for timebinding - creating a framework of time which we are all bound to, - it made me wonder about my perspective of reality vs my cat's perspective. Am I timebound and there are forever living in the present and always have a sense of timelessness? - If so, what are the implications? How do timebound organisms create an equitable symbiocene with other species that live in the eternal now? - What's also interesting is Husserl's phenomenological reductionism - the Epoche that suspends judgment - It raises these questions: - Does the Epoche also break timebinding? - Does it allow us to have a dreamlike experience during waking consciousness? - Does it allow us to enter timelessness and therefore share a similiar state to many other species?. - If we are able to enter such a timeless state, does it increase our empathy towards others fellow species?

reference - Phenomenological reduction - Epoche - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

comment - This kicked off an interesting sequence of thought vectors, directing me to adjacencies in different concept spaces, which ended up here: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themortalatheist.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-birth-and-death-of-meaning-ernest-becker&group=world

for: empathy, self other dualism, symbolosphere, Deep Humanity, DH, othering, What is it like to be a bat?, Thomas Nagel, ingroup outgroup

• title: What is it Like to be a Bat?
• author: Thomas Nagel

• date: Oct 1974

• comment

  • Forget about what it's like to be a bat, what's it like to be another human!
  • This is a paper that can deepen our understanding of what it means to be empathetic and also its opposite, what it means to participate in othering. In the fragmented , polarized world we live in, these are very important explorations.
  • Insofar as the open source Deep Humanity praxis is focused on exploring the depths of our humanity to help facilitate the great transition through the meaning / meta / poly crisis embroiling humanity, knowing what the "other" means is very salient.

NOTE - references - for references to any words used in this annotation which you don't understand, please use the tool in the following link to search all of Stop Reset Go's annotations. Chances are that any words you do not understand are explored in our other annotations. Go to the link below and type the word in the "ANY" field to find the annotator's contextual understanding, salience and use of any words used here

https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true

• for: quote - consciousness, quote - mind body problem, quote - hard problem of consciousness, quote - Thomas Nagel

• quote

  • Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

• comment

  • consciousness is primordial and
  • stable, observable patterns that emerge in our field of consciousness is also primordial
  • the primordiality of these two, awareness and stability of observable patterns WITHIN awareness itself, are the two pillars that constitute the mind-body problem
  • in particular, the pattern of "other consciousnesses" is also another pattern that arises from within consciousness itself
  • The brain is a construction, a synthesized idea that emerges out of a dynamic amalgamation of countless accumulated patterns
  • In this respect, it is no different in quality than other complex constructed ideas we humans create, it only differs by degree and by kind
  • Were we to purely sense a human brain, for instance when a surgeon opens the skull in an operation, without the vast associative network of ideas associated with it, could we even consider how brain and mind are connected except in the most naive way?
  • Language is deeply encoded in every culturally conditioned modern human. Then advanced education in a specific field of knowledge encodes even more esoteric and deeper types of language conditioning.
  • Husserl's idea of phenomenological reduction, or epoche taken to its logical conclusion results in an impossible task, for we cannot severe the deeply entangled nature of meaning that our entire lives of cultural conditioning has enculturated into us.
  • The symbolosphere is now a part of us. We cannot undo such deep conditioning easily. You cannot simply dissociate meaning from the letters and words of your native and learned languages. Indeed, it is this deep symbolic conditioning that spans the decades of our childhood and adolescence that allows us to observe a symbol and effortlessly associate meaning to it.
  • Epoche, no matter how carefully crafted cannot uncondition such deep conditioning
  • It can, however, give us insight of the unconditioned from the perspective of the conditioned consciousness
  • We cannot become feral people even if we wanted to, nor, I suspect, would we want to experience reality permanently in that state
  • This brings up the question of what the process of spiritual enlightenment is designed to achieve
  • Is it a temporary suspension, an incomplete epoche that provides us with sufficient insight to lead to some kind of permanent shift where the insight stays with us and affects our lives in a beneficial way?

.

The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.