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

• annotate

• for: evolutionary biology, big history, DH, Deep Humanity, theories of consciousness, ESP project, Earth Species Project, Michael Levin, animal communication, symbiocene

• title: The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

• author: Joseph LeDoux
• date: Jan. 2023

• doi: 0.1080/09515089.2022.2160311

• ABSTRACT

  • The essence of who we are depends on our brains.
  • They enable us to think, to
    • feel joy and sorrow,
    • communicate through speech,
    • reflect on the moments of our lives, and to
      • anticipate,
      • plan for, and
      • worry about our imagined futures.
  • Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life.
  • By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory,
    • we come to understand both
      • how similar we are to all organisms that have ever lived, and
      • how different we are from even our closest animal relatives.
  • We care about our differences because they are ours. But differences do not make us superior; they simply make us different.

• comment

  • good article to contribute to a narrative of the symbiocene and a shift of humanity to belonging to nature as one species, instead of dominating nature as the apex species
• question
  • @Gyuri, Could indranet search algorithm have made the connection between this article and the symbiocene artilces in my mindplex had I not explicitly made the associations manually through my tags? It needs to be able to do this
• Also interesting to see how this materialistic outlook of consciousness
  • which is similiar to the Earth Species Project work and Michael Levin's work on synthesizing new laboratory life forms to answer evolutionary questions about intelligence
• relates to nonmaterial ideas about consciousness

• for: symbiocene, ecozoic, ecocivilization, eco-civilization, animal communication, inter-species communication, Azi Raskin, Earth Species Project, umwelt

• summary

  • Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
    • https://www.earthspecies.org/
    • cofounder of https://www.humanetech.com/
  • on two main themes:
    • how AI is being used to decode language communication of many different plant and animal species, including inter-fauna, inter-flora and fauna-flora cross communication
    • how AI used to study human languages has detected a universal meaning shape between all languages.

• reference

  • https://www.earthspecies.org/

• for: compassion, care, symbiocene, Me2We, W2W, expanding circle of care
• comment
  • unity requires expanding circles of care:
    • care of self
    • care of family
    • care of ingroup
    • care of outgroup
    • care of other species

• for: umwelt, symbiocene, perspectival knowing
• comment
  • the experience of reality of other living beings

• for: symbiocene,

• question

  • All living beings have values
  • We can't place human values above that of other species
  • how do we put this into practice, for example in the area of food?
    • we harvest and kill other species for food.
    • we are not alone in being a predator of other living beings
    • however, being self-conscious beings aware of the suffering that death causes, are we not in a dilemma, since we have to eat another living being in order to survive?
    • this appears to be an intrinsic dilemma of a self-conscious being
    • eating another living being is equivalent to killing another living being, which is equivalent to taking away its most valued aspect, its life
    • so eating other species is causing suffering to that other species or individual of that species
    • how do we overcome this?

• definition

  • Intrinsic dilemma
    • a dilemma which is unavoidable

• for: symbiocene, human exceptionalism
• question
  • how do we invite them in? if they cannot represent themselves, how do we represent them?
    • does anyone know what' it's like to be a bat?
• remind ourselves of our animal nature
  • mortality salience counters human exceptionalism

• Planetary justice scholarship goes further than global justice
• it:
  • calls for radical or profound changes to justice understandings in the Anthropocene,
  • critiques anthropocentricism,
  • calls for greater engagement with the non-human world
• Comment
  • See Symbiocene
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Symbiocene

!- Anthropocene vs Symbiocene : Key statement -The issue of human dominance is not simply climate change (as bad as that is), it is the whole capitalist development paradigm that is at the dark heart of maldevelopment—that which undermines and destroys the very foundations of all life on earth.

!- Anthropocene : comment - In this essay, the term "Anthropocene" itself is critically questioned as being embedded within the structural thinking of the Anthropocene itself - Hence, a new term that is more expansive than just the human species is proposed - Instead of "a Good Anthropocene", the authors suggest "The Symbiocene" replaces it - It is aligned to the argument William McDonough, founder of Cradle-to-Cradle often makes "less bad is not the same as good" - Albrecht & Van Horn are aligned to the following authors and their work: - Cognitive Scientist, Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield: Losing the Self: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FE5lW5XedNGU%2F&group=world - Physicist Tom Murphy: civilization and the program of control as the root structural problem of our polycrisis https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Ff6yFrh1X6DI%2F&group=world - Buddhist scholar David Loy: On the Emptiness at the heart of the human being that cannot be filled by consumerism & materialism https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world - Korean / German philosopher Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbNkDeUApreo%2F&group=world

!- symbiocene :key attribute - understanding the dangers of cultural evolution to the degree that we can mitigate the dangers emergent from progress traps

!- definition : symbiocene - aspiring to be the next era of humanity - in which governance is based on the interconnectedness of life and all living beings