• for: hard problem of consciousness

• for: Michael Levin, Michel Bitbol, Karl Friston, Chris Fields

• comment

  • Recommend adding Michel Bitbol to the next talk between these researchers.

• reference

  • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbzPu_USZ-0o%2F&group=world

• for: progress trap, progress trap - REP, progress trap - Renewable Energy Prosumerism

-progress trap - commercialization - exclusion - instrumentation - projectification - Responsibilization and overburdening - Hidden systemic repurcussions

• for: acronym, acronym - REP, Renewable Energy Prosumerism

• acronym: REP

  • Renewable Energy Prosumerism

• annotate

• annotate

• for: Indyweb test
• title:Sweden Poised to Miss the Long-Term Climate Target It Pioneered
• comment
  • for an indyweb test on mapping thought vectors in idea space
  • various perspectives on this thread

• for: open source - science, open science, sci-hub

• for: example, example - human umwelt

• example: human umwelt

• for: question, question - hard problem of consciousness, question - Micheal Levin - Michel Bitbol

• question

  • What would Michel Bitbol think of what Michael Levin claims here?
  • What does Michel Bitbol think about Michael Levin's research and the hard problem of consciousness?

• for: scientific revolution, incremental science, science - epoche

• quote

  • So whatever problem you have in your knowledge, and suddenly you think, oh, that doesn't fit, there is a problem, and so on, what do you do?
  • You stop projecting your attention onto the set of theoretical object you have, and you come back where you are.
  • Where are you? In the laboratory observing dots on the screen.
  • And then you think, is my picture adequate to the dots I'm seeing now in the screen?
  • That's what occurs at each scientific revolution.
  • Suddenly, if things, scientists say, poof, finished, all this theory,
  • I have to think everything again from what is given to me.
• author: Michel Bitbol

• for: key insight, science - key insight, science - epoche

• key insight

• quote
  • Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on, what they turn out to be is just inferences that we do from marks on the screens of our apparatuses in the laboratory essentially.
• author: Michel Bitbot

• for: quote, quote - Michel Bitbol, quote - science - epoche, quote - science - aware spot, aware spot

• quote

  • The missing element in science is precisely the realization that all these objects are seen from somewhere.
  • So, from somewhere in a very elusive sense, namely, from this famous aware spot, but also, in a very concrete sense,
    • all these things are seen from our everyday world, the life world.

• for: epoche - Jean Paul Satre, epoche, question, question - epoche - symbolosphere, Jean-Paul Satre - Nausea
• paraphrase
  • Jean-Paul Satre
    • The Transcendence of the Ego
    • Nausea (book)
  • both the subject and object are cocreated and emerge simultaneously
• definition start
  • Bitbol calls this "symmetrical effort"
• definition end
  • it takes symmetrical effort to
    • extract invariance from experience (objectification and object permanence)
    • stabilize an experiencing pole (construction of self)
  • when some event causes
• example: epoche
  • reading a book on history
  • you suddenly realize there is no past, no medieval events, just black marks on paper (or on a screen)
• question
  • Is realizing the epoche the same as realizing the symbolosphere?

• for epoche - enlightenment, epoche - ease of performing
• comment
  • the epoche is easy to perform
  • whereas it appears from the philosophical considerations difficult to perform
  • is it analogous to enlightenment, where the perception of it's difficulty is what makes it difficult?

• for: epoche, quote, quote - epoche, quote - Michel Bitbol

• quote

  • when you have lost the world by the epoche, you can conquer it anew in a universal self-examination.
  • What does it mean? It just means that when you analyze what is left after the epoche, you see all the processes by which we tend to reconstruct our belief in and extend in the world
• author: Michel Bitbol

• for: adjacency, adjacency - epoche - enlightenment, epoche, question, question - epoche and enlightenment

• adjacency between

  • epoche
  • enlightenment
• adjacency statment:
• question
  • Is epoche the same as an enlightenment experience?
  • Did Husserl develop any techniques or trainings in epoche?

• for: adjacency, adjacency - epoche - Buddhist meditation

• paraphrase

• adjacency between
  • epoche
  • Buddhist meditation
• adjacency statement
  • Epoche is derived from the Greek and means suspension, cessation.
  • Epoche is the practice of suspending verbal judgment and comes from the Stoics and the Greek thinkers such as Pyrrho, who learned it from his travels in India accompanying Alexander the Great
  • Epoche in phenomenology also suspends pre-verbal judgments and results in a radical self-transformation

• for: quote, quote - Michel Bilbot, quote - circularity of materialism, scientific materialism - circularity

• quote

  • He (Galileo) concealed the origin of this knowledge by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct.

• author: Michel Bilbot

• comment

  • This is a very pith observation. It illustrates the circularity inherent in panpsychic scientific theory.
  • In a sense, we are putting the cart before the horse by using theory, which is the nowhere's intellectual byproduct, to derive the life of the nowhere.

• for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

• quote

  • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
• author: Michel Bitbol

• for: adjacency, adjacency - Husserl - Buddhism
• adjacency between
  • Husserl's transcendental and phenomenology
  • Buddhist philosophy and practice
• adjacency statement
  • Husserl was influenced by reading, then writing the preface to the German translation of the 1924 Sutt Pitaka

• for: experience replaces objects, nondual replaces dual, Heidegger, situatedness

• comment

  • there is a parallel between objective reality and the private experience
    • visual field
      • vanishing point indicates presence of the seer
    • interior, first person experience
      • situatedness indicates presence of experience being had from somewhere (specific) - situatedness

• definition start

  • this is called by Heidegger and Husserl the transcendental deduction
• definition end

• for: visual field, visual field - clues of a seer, nondual, non-dual, nonduality, non-duality, science - blind spot, science - subject
• question
  • does the visual field reveal anything about the eye?
• answer: yes
  • vanishing points indicate that the world is being seen from one perspective.

• for: blind spots, science - blind spots, aware spot, Wittgenstein, Nishada Kitaro, Douglas Harding, BEing journey, finger pointing to the moon, the man with no head

• paraphrase

  • blind spot by vacancy
    • ie. black area in visual field.
    • contrast with the rest of the visual field
    • easy to see
• further research start
  • pure blind spot
    • I did not understand
• further research end
  • aware spot
    • Douglas Harding ( Man without a head) exercise
    • Wittgenstein also commented on this
      • Nothing in your visual field leads you to infer that it is seen by an eye
      • BEing journey
        • point finger to objects in your visual field
        • then point to yourself
        • what do you see? There's no object there
        • it is empty but is the source of awareness
    • Nishada Kitaro
      • As soon as you adopt the stance of objective knowledge, the knower doesn't enter the visual field

• for: quote, quote - Nietzsche, duality, nonduality, nondual, non-duality, non-dual

• quote

  • The creator wanted to look away from himself. That's why he created the world

• author: Nietzsche, Zarathustra

• comment

  • Bitbol's work is to invert this and explore how we can become aware of the blind spot of science that creates the objective world to study, whilst ignoring the subject..

• for: Edmund Husserl, the Mother of Knowledge, nondual, nonduality, non-dual, non-duality, the ground of existence
• definition: the mother of knowledge
  • the dynamics of lived embodied experience
• author: Edmond Husserl

• for: nondual, nonduality, ground of existence, transcendental, Kant - transcendental, non-duality, non-dual, quote, quote - Michel Bitbol, quote - nonduality, quote - transcendental

• quote

  • What can you say about the transcendental?
  • Can you speak of it?
  • Can you use words to describe it?
  • Can you characterize the condition of possibility of it?
  • And Kant says no.
  • This, namely, the transcendental, cannot be further analyzed or answered because it is of such condition that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects.
  • So, the transcendental itself cannot be an object of thought.
• author: Michel Bitbol
• comment
  • Michel Bitbol explains Kant's definition of transcendental that makes sense to me for the first time!
  • It is really quite similiar to the defintion of the nondual.

• for: carbon inequality

• comment
  • Johan Rockstrom does not believe that a Marshall plan is feasible. He cites the rapid pace of development in India and China as a reason a Marshall plan would not work.
  • To unpack this further, China and India were both countries on the other side of (white) colonialism and now are trying to catch up. Whereas historical, white colonialism marginalized both non-white, indigenous populations as well as nature, now these countries are marginalizing nature.
  • To determine whether a Marshall plan by these large emitting countries would be feasible or not depends on the answer to another question:
    • Can these countries pivot to a Marshall plan of a disruptive rate of 15% ?
  • We must remember, as Kevin Anderson reminds us, it is uneven. Only a small minority of the population must undergo radical decarbonization rates, namely the small minority of high carbon, elite emitters.
  • What would a global Marshall plan even look like? We don't know - because the conversation is being discouraged. That's the point Kevin Anderson is making.

• for: quote, quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - Kevin Anderson - Marshall plan, discussion - Johan Rockstrom / Kevin Anderson, perspectival knowing

• quote

  • Our choice to fail over the last 30 years has brought us to this position.
  • And a way out of that, a way out of the Marshall Plan, is to say we can have these negative emissions
  • I think we need to say that, okay that's one way out of it – if they work.
  • Another way out of it is the Marshall Plan.
  • And so we need to open that that dialogue up. but we've... in effect, I think the IAMs have closed that dialogue,.
  • Which is one of the reasons, going back to... It would be interesting to see other parts of the world looking at this, because, I would have a guess,
    • when we say 'that's not feasible', many people elsewhere in the world are saying 'well of course it's feasible, we've been doing... we've been living like that for years!'

• comment

  • In rebuttal to Johan's perspective on Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs),
    • Kevin is addressing the issue of perspectival knowing, and
    • its implications on what solutions we entertain as a global society.
  • The example he cites is Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) illustrates two major perspectives:
    • Johan includes NETs as he see's that without them, the transition goes from manageable to unmanageable
    • Kevin questions the inclusion of the NETs as potentially shutting down discussion about what Johan would consider an unmanageable situation
  • Kevin brings up a valid point for inclusion of other voices, especially those indigenous ones who are still institutionally marginalized not only in economic and cultural spaces, but also academic and intellectual ones.
  • The decolonization of academia takes on a concrete form here. Both the global and local south have lived under severe economic repression for centuries. Anderson's contention is that making do with less is something that billions of people have had to contend with for centuries as a social norm forced upon them by colonialist then post colonialist institutions.
  • Inclusivity of a greater diversity of voices does play an important role in shaping the future direction of humanity.
  • We should be having an open discussion about a Marshall plan and should not be afraid to go there.
    • We had it in WWII, which, while more direct threat, is not as great as the threat of climate change on all life on earth in a slightly greater time scale.
  • The global and local south has a lot to teach the global and local north. For this great transition of humanity to occur likely simultaneously requires
    • radical amounts of resource transfer from the global / local north to the global / local south,and
    • radical degrowth

• for: quote, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - Johan Rockstrom - NET

• stats

• quote
  • We're increasing emissions today between 1 and 2% per year.
  • Now, to reduce emissions even in the global model runs we have, with optimistic I mean, overly optimistic negative emission technologies – assume mitigation pathways, as you know, between 5 and 7% per year.
  • So that is three times revolution pace, at the current modeling runs.
  • If you take away negative emission technologies, you would exceed 10% very rapidly.
  • You would be more the 10 to 15%.
  • I would call that... That's not revolution, that is a complete disruption of the global economy.
  • It's like a pace that is beyond... I mean then you need to bulldoze down coal-fired plants, basically.
  • You would be in a complete global Marshall Plan. It's a war zone agenda.

• for: quote, quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - silence - activism for the status quo, Stop Oil

• quote

  • There is a risk that we end up being activists for the status quo by being silent

• comment

  • I would agree with Kevin. Silence is making a statement, it's not neutral
  • the "activists" are doing the dirty work of critiquing the top down actors

• for: scientist activism, idling resources - scientist activism, leverage point - scientist activism
• comment
  • Both Johan and Kevin provide personal stories of how few scientists are out there doing societal engagement.
  • Hence, this is truly a idling resource that needs a space that will attract them to engage in impactful ways.
  • This is where citizens and communities can provide the support that scientists need to take on their societal responsibilities at this time

• for: leverage points, quote, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - motivating the silent majority, climate change - priority, social tipping point
• quote
  • In a normal distribution,
    • from over here you have the denialists and
    • over here you have the environmental activists.
  • But in between you have a lot of different types of people.
  • And the majority are actually
    • we know this from opinion polls
  • very supportive of science.
  • They're very supportive of and concerned about climate change.
  • They want climate action.
  • It's just that they live their normal lives, they have many preoccupations in life.They have
    • children,
    • health,
    • school,
    • financing,
    • incomes.
  • You know, many, many things to be worried about.
  • But that's the question:
    • how do we get this majority, the silent majority, to join us?
  • I don't think that the way to make them join us is to
    • scare them and
    • fight with the denialists.
  • I think the way to make them join is to show that this pathway can get a better life.
• author: Johan Rockstrom

• date: Sept., 2023

• comment

  • in other words
  • the silent majority does not yet hold climate change activism to be sufficiently high on their list of priorities yet to warrant the necessary scale of action

• for: Johan Rockstrom - wellbeing economy, wellbeing economy, green growth, degrowth, question, question - Johan Rockstrom - green growth or degrowth?
• question
  • Does Johan Rockstrom advocate for a green economy or degrowth?
  • He would seem to be arguing for green growth as degrowth, if not done extremely carefully, can result in a drop in wellbeing.
  • How does he see this taking place when the elites perceive that they have the most (at least materially) to give up? Is there a contradiction here?

• for: leverage points - top-down actors
• comment
  • they are top-down leverage points

• for: climate science - citizen engagement, johan rockstrom - advocacy for citizen engagement, scientist - activism
• comment
  • supporting the previous comment, Johan Rockstrom see's scientists having a much more active role engaging with the public.

• for: quote, quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - academic support for bottom-up actors, bottom-up actors - academic support

• quote

  • We have been happy to engage with CEOs, with the senior policy makers, with the 'Davos set'.
  • We've been happy to engage with them – across, generally, the sort of more senior climate change academics. But they haven't delivered for 30 years.
  • But what we haven't... Who we very seldom engage with – the balance, to me, is wrong – with citizenry groups.
  • We haven't engaged... with the climate parliament group. Our support has been biased towards a group who are very much in favor of the status quo.

• comment

• Kevin is tuning into a potential idling capacity and leverage point that academic community has by-and-large missed.
  • Academic support of bottom-up and citizen groups could yield the kind of top-down and bottom-up partnership that could really accelerate climate policy action

• for: top-down and bottom-up partnerships, top-down and bottom-up climate action
• comment
  • as the polycrisis accelerates, this is only going to get worse so we have to find a new, nonlinear way for politicians to actually work in partnership with bottom-up actors

• for: Swedish climate report, cidtizen action, bottom-up climate action, top-down and bottom-up partnership

• future research

  • study the Swedish parliament climate policy model and citizen's roles in achieving it and see if it can be replicated in all countries

• question

  • is there anyone studying this with the object of scaling to other countries?

• for: quote, quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - bottom-up and top-down partnership, IPCC AR6 WGIII demand side reduction and bottom-up actions
• quote
  • I hope that there will be some sort of partnership between bottom-up and top-down that will provide guidance to leaders to put the right things in place.
• author: Kevin Anderson

• date: Sept., 2023

• comment

  • The last IPCC report, AR6, WGIII described the important role that bottom-up, societal actors can play
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Freport.ipcc.ch%2Far6wg3%2Fpdf%2FIPCC_AR6_WGIII_FinalDraft_Chapter05.pdf&group=world

• for: bottom-up action, top-down and bottom-up, TPF
• comment
  • Kevin Anderson makes a good point. He agrees with Johan that a parliament of 8 billion people is not realistic. However, small vociferous and strategic bottom-up groups are needed to prod the top-down actors into action.
  • He makes the observation that the elite actors, the so called "Davos set" have effectively delayed any real climate action for the past 3 decades and if left to them alone, will do the same thing.
  • Anderson hopes for some kind of partnership between top-down and bottom-up actors to provide guidance to leaders to choose the most appropriate policy.
  • In fact, the last IPCC report actually reports on the important role of bottom-up action from societal actors

• for: Johan Rockstrom - top down strategy, quote, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - climate top down strategy

• quote

  • we have a crisis and things have to change at the global level so fast that we need to correct big system failures at a very large scale. And I'm convinced that that can only be done top-down not bottom-up.
• author: Johan Rockstrom
• date: Sept., 2023

• for: quote, quote - net zero by 2050
• quote
  • reaching zero by 2050 won't take us there
• author: Johan Rockstrom
• date: Sept. 2023

• for: more aggressive target, question, question - fossil fuel phase out

• comment

  • the current approach sets a target of 1.5 Deg C to reach,
  • the science needs to continuously update the policy.
  • Unfortunately, this means our target will need to be LESS THAN 1.5 Deg C

• question

  • if there is no budget left anymore, that puts politicians in a bind in how to achieve an orderly phase out.
  • nobody seems to have the answer
  • what do we do?

• for: carbon sinks, carbon sinks - oceans, carbon sinks - forests, stats, stats, forest carbon sink, stats - ocean carbon sink, question, question - when do carbon sinks turn into carbon sources?

• stats

  • forests are absorbing 25% of carbon dioxide emissions
  • oceans are absorbing 50% of carbon dioxide emissions
  • these are stressing these carbon sinks

• question

  • how much longer can they absorb without unintended consequences playing out?

• for: carbon budget - underestimate, IPCC - underestimate, 1.5Deg C - underestimate, question, question - revise 1.5 Deg C target downwards?

• highlight

  • the 1.5 Deg C target does not account for cascading tipping points. In fact the cascading tipping point research is not accounted for in any of:
    • current climate models
    • global carbon estimates
    • IPCC
  • the implications are that the carbon budget is even smaller than the current number.
  • the implications are that 1.5 Deg C is not the threshold we should be aiming for, but even less. We are now at 1.2 so it has to be 1.3 or 1.4.

• question

  • Given the underestimates, should the target actually be revised downwards to 1.3 or 1.4 deg C?

• for: precautionary principle, fossil fuel phase out, carbon budget - uncertainties, carbon budget - underestimate
• highlight
  • the precautionary principle dictates that the uncertainties in:
    • soil carbon
    • ocean carbon
    • ocean heat
    • ice melt
    • biodiversity loss
    • biome tipping points
  • implies that the any one of these can easily bring our remaining carbon budget down to zero.

• for: cascading tipping points, cascading tipping points - Greenland - AMOC - Antarctica

• highlights

  • latest research at PIK shows that the two poles are connected via the AMOC current.
    • Greenland ice sheet melt releasing cold fresh water is slowing down the North Atlantic overturning of heat.
    • The slowdown is keeping more warm saline water in place in the Southern Ocean, accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.

• for Linked In post, social commentary - video

• comment
  • this video animation is a social commentary on the many failings of modernity

• for: climate change policy hypocrisy, fossil fuel lobby, EU climate policy, Hoekstra, Fox guarding the henhouse, Linked In post

• comment

  • What does it say about the EU's authenticity to deal with the global boiling crisis when they put a fox in charge of the henhouse?
  • this seems awfully similar to the choice for positioning an oil man to head COP28.
  • The fossil fuel lobby is EXTREMELY busy in the opaque back end of politics. We need more light to shine and bring the back end fossil fuel lobby activity out of the shadows to pre-empt future leadership betrayals.

• future research

  • uncover future fossil fuel lobby’s game plan and future attempts to coopt climate change policy leadership
  • needed in order to proactively preempt the next attempt at coopting climate leadership. It’s difficult when we are simply reacting

• for: TPF
• comment
  • Hamburg climate futures outlook 2023 report supports need for something on the scale of the planned TPF

• fresh perspective

  • cancer can be interpreted as a breakdown in the bodies multiscale competency architecture causing cancerous cells to lose their higher level synchronizing signals and revert to their more evolutionarily primitive forms as individuals that see the body as simply an external environment

• adjacency between

  • gap junction coupling
  • cancer
  • healthy tissue coherence
  • multiscale competency architecture
• adjacency statement
  • gap junction coupling appears to be an evolutionary means of cohering individuals together to form a larger group
  • hence, they seem to play a critical role in the continued evolution of more complex multicellular organisms
  • their pathologies within multicellular beings destroy multicellular structures and create disease, reverting the organism, or competent multicellular structures of the organism such as tissues and organs back to individualistic behavior, as in cancers

• for: definition, definition - multiscale competency architecture of life, multiscale competency architecture of life, superorganism, MET, major evolutionary transition, question, question - multiscale competency architecture
• definition: multiscale competency architecture of life

• paraphrase

  • The multiscale competency architecture of life is a hypothesis about the scaling of cognition, seeing complex system-level behaviors in any space as the
    • within-level and
    • across-level
  • competition and
  • cooperation
  • among the various
    • subunits and
    • partitions
  • of composite agents (i.e., all agents).
  • The generalization of problem spaces beyond the traditional 3D space of “behavior” into other, virtual problem spaces is essential for understanding evolution of basal cognition.
  • Living things
    • first solved problems in metabolic space, and evolution then pivoted the same kinds of strategies to
    • solve problems in
      • physiological,
      • transcriptional, and
      • anatomical space,
    • before speed-optimizing these dynamics to enable rapid behavior in 3D space.
  • Since every cognitive agent is made of parts, it is essential to have a theory about how
    • numerous goal-seeking agents link together into
    • a new, larger cognitive system that is novel and not present in any of the subunits.

• comment

• adjacency between:
  • multiscale competency architecture
  • superorganism

• adjacency statement

  • The concept of multiscale competency architecture is a useful one for considering and organizing the effects of Major Evolutionary Transitions (METs) over evolutionary timescales.
  • It links and locates the normative scale in which human consciousness exists to the lower scales of cells and subcellular life below, and to society as a social superorganism above.
  • it shows that each human INTERbeing / INTERbeCOMing is not isolated, but is part of a multiscale nexus / gestalt
  • I've incorporated this into my SRG presentation.

• question

  • is there research on signaling mechanisms exist between different levels?
    • in another part of the paper, there is discussion of gap junctions as a way to cohere individual cells into group functionality
    • in particular, is there a way for humans consciousness to communicate with lower levels of its body? ie. to tissues, cells or subcellular structures?
  • Could the Bodhisattva vow be extended not only at the level of the social superorganism of groups of individual multicellular beings, but also downwards in the multiscale competency architecture to all the trillions of cells and microbes that inhabit each multicellular planetary body?
    • if it can, it can be interpreted as taking care of your body through
      • healthy exercise
      • healthy sleep
      • healthy diet
      • healthy thoughts and emotions
      • no self-harm
      • self love but not conceit
  • what are the exact biological and evolutionary mechanisms that allow for coherence of individual organisms at the various levels of the multiscale competency architecture and can they be extended to apply to the scale of humans within a social superorganism scale?
  • could love be another word for care drive that applies to all the different scales of the multiscale competency architecture?
  • do feelings of love and compassion propagate downwards through the multiscale competency architecture and find analogous expression in the appropriate spaces?
• reference
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8988303/

• for: gap junctions, multicellular cohesion, multicellular unity, MET, major evolutionary transition, group to individual, group glue

• comment

  • gap junctions play a critical role in cohering a group of cells together
  • hence they might be considered a kind of "cellular glue" which fosters evolutionary fitness by incentifying individual organisms to beneficially socially interact with other individual organisms

• question

  • do gap junctions play a role in major evolutionary transition (MET)?

• adjacency between

  • gap junction
  • cancer
  • MET
  • individual to group
• adjacency statement
  • gap junctions may play a role in major evolutionary transition, enabling individual cells to unite into a group, leading to the evolution of multicellular organisms. Investigate and do literature review to see if this is the case.

• for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - self as control agent, self - control agent, example, example - control agent - imperfection, spontaneous thought, spontaneous action, creativity - spontaneity

• quote: Michael Levin

  • the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist.

• comment

  • adjacency between
    • nondual awareness
    • self-construct
    • self is illusion
    • singular, solid, enduring control agent
  • adjacency statement
    • nondual awareness is the deep insight that there is no solid, singular, enduring control agent.
    • creativity is unpredictable and spontaneous and would not be possible if there were perfect control
• example - control agent - imperfection: start - the unpredictability of the realtime emergence of our next exact thought or action is a good example of this

• example - control agent - imperfection: end

• triggered insight: not only are thoughts and actions random, but dreams as well

  • I dreamt the night after this about something related to this paper (cannot remember what it is now!)
  • Obviously, I had no clue the idea in this paper would end up exactly as it did in next night's dream!

• for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
• title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
• author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
• date: May 16, 2022

• source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

• summary

  • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
  • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
  • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology

• for: progress trap, unintended consequences, progress trap - new life forms, progress trap - bioengineering
• comment
  • this opens up a big can of worms. A general theory of progress traps (https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap) is urgently needed to systematically study the unintended consequences of progress.

• for: progress trap, AI, AI - care drive
• comment
  • the precautionary principle needs to be observed with AI because it has such vast artificial cognitive, pattern-recognition processes at its disposal
  • AI will also make mistakes, but the degree of power behind the mistaken decision, recommendation or action is the degree of unintended consequences or progress trap
  • An example nightmare scenario could be:
    • AI could decide that humans are contradicting their own goal of a stable climate system and if it's in control, may think it knows better and perform whole system change that dramatically reduces human induced climate change but actually harms a lot of humans in the process, for reaching the goal of saving the climate system plus a sufficient subset of humans to start all over.

• for: self construct - misperceptions
• in other words
  • if the self is no longer strongly reified, but experienced nakedly as a construction, then the misperceptions that are tethered to the solidification of self cannot survive, namely:
    • hesitation
    • fear
    • disappointment
    • attachment
    • etc...

• for: mistake - wow
• mistake
  • I think that the word should be "vow", and not "wow"

• comment
  • this is definitely seeing evolution through a Buddhist lens!
  • mara - maintain status quo
  • bodhisattva - infinite transformation

• for: bodhisattva - infinite care drive, tilopa - liberation of fish
• comment
• example: care drive - bodhisattva
  • an exemplary story comes to mind, that of the Tibetan yogi named Tilopa
    • There are stories of the master Tilopa liberating fish by biting their heads off
  • To an ordinary being, this would seem to be the direct opposite of liberation. Indeed, the story of his student Naropa's seemingly blind faith in Tilopa can easily be interpreted as abusive in modern society: https://thrangumonastery.org/about/kagyu-lineage/naropa/#:~:text=As%20he%20got%20closer%2C%20he,for%20taking%20it%20to%20market.

• for: analog, analog - human development
• analog: human development
  • Buddhist teachings on illusory nature of the self often make use of the example of our use of the same name for a body that is ever changing - it started as a sperm/egg united, then an embryo, fetus, neonate, newborn, infant, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, finally elderly.
  • the early stages of human development are just as radical as caterpillar to butterfly.
  • As adult humans, we take memories for granted, but such meta-level features do not even exist in the earlier parts of our development, such as just after the sperm inseminates the egg and we are just a collection of rapidly dividing cells
  • In this case, it is indeed insightful to apply more universal ideas of life and intelligence, since we ourselves have been through many different types of intelligences in our own individual human development

• for: cellular collaboration, gap junction, bioelectrical networks, bioelectric network

• interesting fact: multicellular mechanisms to create coherence in competent constituent subunit cells

• more research
  • very interesting mechanisms that mediate benefits of collective behavior of competent subunits within the biological body.

• for: bio-buddhism - stress, bio-buddhism, duhkha, question, question - enlightenment and stress, bio-buddhism - suffering, bio-buddhism - enlightenment
• question
  • If enlightenment is defined as the ultimate awareness that penetrates the self-illusion, and therefore subject / object dualism is what brings peace, and the cessation of suffering due to the cessation of seeking, then how does this relate to the idea of goal-seeking, homeostatic efforts to attain a specific setpoint?
    • Do we attain the setpoint by awareness that stops the suffering in a unique way?

• for: stress - satisfaction, lack project, poverty mentality, David Loy
• comment
  • what is interesting is that there is strong emphasis on Buddhist and other contemplative teachings on acceptance of the present state and cessation of searching.
  • In Buddhist teachings, desire is an expression of a dissatisfaction of some aspect of the present and drives change
  • and last but perhaps most importantly, Buddhist teachings teach that the source of the desire is indicative of attachment to the constructed self narrative
  • hence, at first read, it would seem the goal-oriented nature of the definition is at odds with Buddhist teachings.
  • David Loy refers to desires as a way to fulfill something we feel is missing. He refers to this as a "Lack project"
    • When we feel incomplete, we are motivated to strive towards those things that we perceive to make us feel more complete. This is also referred to in some branches of Buddhism as poverty mentality: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=poverty+mentality
  • If we penetrate the self construct and see it's constructed, provisional nature, then we also expose the greater already existent reality that we already are.
  • It seems paradoxical. While we are strongly reifying the self-construct, we will be goal-seeking and a priority goal may be to experience the self as a construct, which has the effect of ending root level goal seeking.

• for: bodhisattva's compassion, nondual compassion, non-dual compassion, compassion
• insightful: bodhisattva's compassion
• unpacking: bodhisattva's compassion
  • to understand what it is to experience the world free of (object, agent, action) triplet, it is necessary to understand what it means to experience the world from the (object, agent, action) perspective.
  • Buddhism's starting assumption is that experience from the (object, agent, action) perspective is the pathological but normative one.
  • It cannot be simply intellectual understanding, that is not enough for deep transformation. It must be quite deep, to the core of how we experience the world - as a seeming subject moving through a field of seeming objects.
  • This is accompanied by a feeling of alienation. The subject is separated from the field of objects.
  • David Loy has good insights on this subject of the mundane feeling of emptiness that accompanies our meaning crisis: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=david+loy
  • Of course if you are able to penetrate the illusory nature of your own self construct in a meaningful way, it also gives you insight into the other perceived selves outside of you. Even this sentence is paradoxical to say, since there is no inside / outside in a nondual realization that penetrates the self.
  • So then, it does make sense to value all aspects of reality, not just yourself and others, but treating it as one unbroken gestalt
  • The concept of poverty mentality is useful here, David Loy refers to this as the "Lack project": https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=poverty+mentality

• for: bodhisattva - compassion
• comment
  • When we understand how we construct then reify the (psycho-social) self, then we can let it go and see it as a pragmatic construct
  • If we see how we ourselves mistakenly took the constructed, reified self to be solid, then we can also see the same mistake being made in others.

• for: deconstructing self, self - deconstruction, object agent action triplet, deconstructing cognition
• comment
  • this is a necessary outcome of the self-reflective nature of human cognition.
  • English, and many other languages bake the (object, agent, action) triplet into its very structure, making it problematic to use language in the same way after the foundations of cognition have been so deconstructed.
  • Even though strictly speaking the self can be better interpreted as a psycho-social construct and an epiphenomena, it is still very compelling and practical in day-to-day living, including the use of languages which structurally embed the (object, agent, action) triplet.

• for: definition, definition - self, compassion, science - compassion, self-illusion, self-illusory, nilhism
• definition
  • Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents

• paraphrase

  • Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents
  • Agents construct models of causal Selves for others, and for ourselves, using the same machinery.
  • The same mechanisms that cause an agent to act toward stress reduction in itself
    • (even though the beneficiary of those actions is in an important sense impermanent)
  • can be expanded to extend to other Selves.
  • In this way, while our focus is on understanding and formulating Self in a way that is applicable to a broad range of scientific contexts,
    • we also see ourselves as here contributing to the treatment of perennial issues in contemporary Buddhist philosophy
      • such as the feasibility of genuine care in a world without real individuals

• comment

  • the last statement has always been a paradox for me
  • Buddhist teachers often warn of how mistaken, immature views of emptiness can lead to harmful action
    • Indeed, if no selves exist, then over can easily mistaken nilhism as the logical behavioural conclusion
    • yet, teaching texts make clear that there is something critical the student has missed it they come to that conclusion
  • the transformation is missing its most important element of that false conclusion persists

• for: emptiness, shunyata, non-existence of self, no-self, illusory self, deconstructing self
• comment
  • this short description of the reasoning behind deconstructing the self is quite fresh and insightful, especially relating it to cognition.

• for: wisdom and compassion, intelligence as care
• comment
  • the slogan "intelligence as care" seems parallel to the Buddhist slogan of "wisdom and compassion" where:
    • care is analogous to compassion
    • insight is analogous to wisdom

• for: illusory self, non-self, lack of self, organism - as process, human INTERbeCOMing, bio-buddhism, biology - buddhism

• for: common denominators, in other words - common denominators

• in other words

  • there is a need to find a common denominator of intelligence and cognition amongst this great diversity

• for: definition, definition - stress, stress
• comment
  • this is a generalized definition of stress that includes basal cognitive organisms
• definition: stress
  • In the context of a generalized definition of intelligence applied beyond the traditional definition that applies only to organisms with neurons and nervous systems to include organisms that display basal cognition,
    • stress is defined as the delta between
      • current state and
      • optimal state,
    • or the difference between the goals at different subsystems’ levels
  • Reduction of this stress parameter is a driver that keeps the system exerting energy in action to move and navigate within the problem space.
  • The authors note that stress can be seen as the inverse of “satisfaction”, and is relative to a contextual and non-stationary target.

• for: key question
• key question
• paraphrase
  • Given that
    • intelligent behavior does not require traditional brains, and
    • can take place in many spaces besides the familiar 3D space of motile behavior, for example
      • physiological space,
      • metabolic space,
      • anatomical space, and
      • other kinds of problem spaces,
    • how can we develop rigorous formalisms for
      • recognizing,
      • designing, and
      • relating
    • to truly diverse intelligences?

• for: basal cognition, definition, definition - basal cognition
• definition
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Fcollections%2Faacdfgjegj&group=world
  • https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007%2Fs10071-023-01780-3&group=world

• inspiration
  • the author's mathematical formalism is inspired by reflexive monism work of Max Velman
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FCm9x_X3HEmI%2F&group=world

• paraphrase

  • A common thread connecting both extremes of dualism and illusionism is that both assume that phenomenal consciousness is an absolute phenomenon,
    • wherein an object O evinces either property P or ¬P.
  • We will show that we need to abandon this assumption.
  • The relativistic principle in modern physics posits a universe in which for many properties an object O evinces either property P or ¬P with respect to some observer X.
  • In such a situation, there is no one answer to the question of whether object O has property P or not.

• question

  • how does this argue against the privacy of phenomena?
  • it argues against it in the sense that it isn't needed. What is interpreted as private is simply the experience from one relative frame of reference.

• for: harmonizing illusionists and scientific dualists

• paraphrase

  • illusionist exclude qualia from naturalism and try to explain it away
  • scientific dualist consider qualia a new category to add on to naturalism
  • If phenomenal properties are not private, then we can escape the trap into which both the dualist and illusionist fall.
  • We interpret the dualist and illusionist extremes as unfortunate consequences of a mistaken view of naturalism.

• for: key question, key question - hard problem of consciousness
• key questions
  • how could there be natural phenomena that are private and thus independent of physical processes
    • or how come they seem private?
  • what is the exact relationship between cognitive content and phenomenal consciousness?

• for: AI - consciousness, zombies, question, question - AI - zombie
• question: AI
  • is AI a zombie?
  • It would seem that by interviewing AI, there would be no way to tell if it's a zombie or not
    • AI would say all the right things that would try to convince you that it's not a zombie

• for: nonduality, non-duality, duality, dualism, hard problem of consciousness, explanatory gap, relativistic theory of consciousness, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH
• title: A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness
• author: Nir Lahav, Zahariah A. Neemeh

• date: May 12, 2022

• abstract

  • In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon.
  • Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect.
  • There is an “explanatory gap” between
    • our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and
    • its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects,
  • referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness.
  • The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and
    • it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation.
  • Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness.
  • Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties.
  • We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer.
  • We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which
    • a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer.
  • Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic.
    • In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and
    • in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective).
  • These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct,
    • just as in the case of
      • an observer that claims to be at rest
      • while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity.
  • Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged,
    • as they both describe the same underlying reality.
  • Based on relativistic phenomena in physics
    • we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem.
  • Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness,
    • we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.

• comment

  • This is a promising approach to solving the hard problem of consciosness

• for: relativistic theory of consciousness, question, question - shifting cognitive frames
• question
  • How is this transformation done?

• annotate

• for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - human superorganism
• quote
  • it's kind of a miracle that a collection of individual cells with their own agendas and their own ability to pursue various goals in physiological space and gene expressions, that there is a way to arrange those things that give rise to this emergent new self that operates in a different problem space
• author: Michael Levin

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfrEDUv29r0&t=159s

• comment

  • He also points out how contradictory many of the behaviors of the emergent, composite self is to the wellbeing of the individual parts.
  • We are all aware of the many destructive behaviors that the emergent, composite human superorganism can participate in such as:
  • drug addiction
  • violence
  • suicide
  • poor diet
  • lack of exercise
  • destructive emotional behavior
  • etc

• for: Indyweb provenance,
• comment
  • Indyweb would enable Michael to trace all public interactions with his papers so he WOULD know.

• for: bio-buddhism, bodhisattva vow, compassion
• comment
  • interesting adjacency between:
    • Buddhism and
    • biology:
  • Adjacency statement
    • The bodhisattva vow is a commitment to enlarge your cognitive apparatus, your cognitive light cone of compassion to enable the pursuit of bigger goals

• for: constructing selves, constructing self, reconstructing self
• comment
  • this is a fascinating insight that gives us deeper nuance on what it means to construct our selves in every moment
  • we obviously know we don't have access to our past and only have access to engrams of the past , so it isn't wrong to say that we are constantly reconstructing ourselves like a Planaria worm does to regenerate its body, all the time.
  • engrams are abstract traces of the past
  • this goes to the heart of constructing the self, in the Buddhist sense, as a kind of illusion
  • Levin says he is somewhere in the middle between the two poles of illusion and solidity of self, the self is a pragmatic useful metaphor, like everything else we construct

• for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - science of caring
• quote
  • If you're going to have a collective intelligence, what is it going to care about? We don't have a good science of that
• author: Michael Levin
• date, July 2023

• for: background, background - Michael Levin, Michael Levin - Buddhism
• background
  • Michael Levin has been interested in Eastern thought, philosophy of mind and compassion for a long time
  • the idea of care seems to have been stimulated by his child's project to build a robotic cat. He wanted the cat to have the attribute of caring.

• reference
  • Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
    • https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

• for: Buddhism, bio-Buddhism, Daisetz Suzuki, Suzuki, beginner's mind, foolbodied, wisdom signaling
• comment
  • this was a surprising adjacency to discover Levin connecting Daisetz Suzuki's concept of Beginner's mind to his research. It demonstrates a broad perspective of research
  • adjacency between
    • Suzuki's Beginner's mind
    • foolbodied
    • wisdom signaling
  • adjacency statement
    • I just finished annotating Gyuri's referall to Wisdom commons article in which the author introduced the notion of foolhood and wisdom signaling
    • These are saying the same thing as Suzuki's concept of beginner's mind

• for: bioelectrical networks, cognitive glue, Charles Darwin's Agential materials, bio-buddhism, Michael Levin
• annotate

• 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: individual / collective gestalt, Deep Humanity, superorganism, multi-level superorganism, major evolutionary transition, MET, cognitive light cone, umwelt

• paraphrase

  • a human being certainly has a light cone that does not belong to any of its pieces (ie cells)
  • at the conscious level of a human being, we have
    • goals
    • preferences
    • hopes
    • dreams
    • narratives
  • humans occupy spaces that do not belong to our individual cells, tissues or organs
    • those smaller parts work in
      • physiological space
      • transcriptional space
      • biomolecular space
  • When we were an embryo we worked in morphogenetic space

• comment

  • Since MET implies that these smaller structures of which we are constituted like
    • cells and
    • sub-cellular structures like mitochondria
  • were descended from individual organisms long ago in deep history, those contemporary proxies are occupying their own umwelt

• for: quote, quote - intelligence, major evolutionary transition, MET, quote - collective inteillgence, quote - Michael Levin
• quote
  • all intelligence is collective intelligence

• author: Michael Levin

• comment

  • Major evolutionary transition (MET) are milestones in evolution in which collections of distinct individual life forms unite into one cohesive collection due to improved fitness and begin to replicate as a new individual unit
  • hence the Deep Humanity term individual / collective gestalt, developed to deal with the level of human organisms and the societies and groups they belong to, applies to evolutionary biology as well through the MET where a new higher level individual is formed out of a collective of lower level indivdiuals

• in other words
  • a meta transformation from philosophy to science

• for: paper overview, paper overview - the computational boundary of a self

• paper overview

  • motivated by 2018 Templeton Foundation conference to present idea on unconventional and diverse intelligence

  • Levin was interested in any conceivable type of cognitive system and was interested in find a way to universally characterize them all

    • how are they detected
    • how to understand them
    • how to relate to them and
    • how to create them

  • Levin had been thinking about this for years

  • Levin adopts a cybernetic definition of intelligence proposed by William James that focuses on the competency to reach a defined goal by different paths
  • Navigation plays a critical role in this defiinition.

• for: embodied mind, TAME, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere
• reference
  • source
    • https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full
  • hypothes.is annotation
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffnsys.2022.768201&group=world

• reference
  • source paper
    • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6923654/#:~:text=Any%20Self%20is%20demarcated%20by,and%20limits%20of%20its%20cognition.
  • hypothes.is annotation:
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc%2Farticles%2FPMC6923654%2F&group=world

• for: research goal - Michael Levin, embodied mind
• question: what is the main question that motivates Michael Levin's research?
• answer: one fundamental question that he has been interested in since he was a child is the issue of embodied minds:
  • how minds can exist in the universe
  • how they interact with their bodies
  • how minds scale
    • from the primitive kinds of metabolic and other competencies of single cells
    • to the emergent mind of the of the body and then of the whole organism in a behavioral sense
  • This the scaling embodiment and communication at the root of all fields of biology

• annotate

• for: basal cognition, definition - basal cognition
• definition: basal cognition
  • cognitive behavior of non-neural organisms
• paraphrase
  • Long before the appearance of neurons and nervous systems, evolution had already laid a solid foundation of capacities to enable organisms to
    • become familiar with
    • value
    • exploit
    • evade
  • features of their surroundings to further existential goals.
• source
  • special issue on Basal Cognition
  • https://link.springer.com/collections/aacdfgjegj

• for: cultural evolution, cultural evolution - Bruce Hood, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, gene-culture coevolution

• paraphrase

  • Our evolving technology allowed us to expand into new territories and manipulate the environment in ways that gave us an edge.
  • Places like this remind me about how harsh nature can be.
  • We're so used to living in air conditioning, and having the comfort of the modern world, but when you go out into nature and experience it first hand, you're reminded very powerfully about how weak we are as an animal.
  • And this is because we are fundamentally a cultural species.
  • Culture is our life support system.
  • Our cumulative culture allows us to
    • cushion ourselves against the harsh realities of the environment and to
    • reshape the environment.

• for: humans vs other animals, personal experience, personal experience - pets, control vs adaptation, human features, quote, quote - Ruth Gates, quote - humans vs animals, quote - control vs adaptation
• quote
  • . In terms of evolution, animals adapt to their ecological conditions, but as humans, we have been able to control our ecological conditions.
• author: Ruth Gates
• source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJV0Kx7oGxU&t=496s
• comment
  • personal experience
    • her remark made me think about how often I feel this difference with our pets. They adapt to whatever we do. We control our environment by building something. They just adapt to whatever we build.
      • Our pets never build anything, but simply adapt to what we build.

• for: science and religion, Newton - religion, science and religion - Bob Inglis, CHD

• for: conflict - interpersonal
• title: Comprehending and Minimizing Interpersonal Conflict: An Adaptation of Laing, Philipson, and Lee’s Interpersonal Perception Method
• author

• presenter

  • Anton Corey

• annotate

• for: objectivism, materialism, question, question - materialism, question - objectivism, if a tree falls in the forest
• question
  • How would Donald respond to the question:
    • If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
    • Does he hold the same view as modern consensus of quantum physics?

• for: adjacency: adjacency - monotheistic religions and maerialism
• adjacency between
  • monotheistic religion
  • materialist / physicalist scientific theories
• adjacency statement:
  • Good observation of an adjacency, although not all religions hold those views, and even in those religions, those are those views are held by less critical thinkers.
    • In the more contemplative branches of major world religions, there is a lot of deep, critical thinking that is not so naive.

• comment

• good observation, that's why I have always felt strange about the simulation hypothesis. If it's a simulation, it automatically assumes, there is something which is real and not a simulation.

  • See Donald Hoffman's Information theory and contention that we live in a simulation. Does it also come with the same implicit materialist assumption?
  • The nagging thing about the simulation theories is it is also a narrative that posits an unknowable reality beyond which we can never access - a rendition of the narrative that we only ever have access to the shadows in Plato's cave.

• reference

  • Donald Hoffman
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQefdkl8PfY

• for self-simulation hypothesis
• comment
  • I agreed with a lot of what he said up to now. In fact, he does a rather good presentation summarizing the contemporary problems we face and emphasizing the acceleration of change in all human spheres, giving rise to our current polycrisis
  • I agree that the mythos of materialism needs to be seriously explored and other perspectives may give us new salient insights, but I don't think it's so obvious that the theory that we are living in a simulation.
    • and quantum gravity theory a highly abstract cultural artefact being used to prove that
  • is going to be the panacea to create a compelling new mythos..
  • If technology alone is insufficient as he earlier claimed, then quantum gravity theory, as part of the entangled STEMS nexus is part of that techno-complex that is insufficient.
  • This claim will have to be proven true by strong and compelling evidence that receives mass acceptance. Without that, it becomes an unjustified claim and the complexity of it will elude most people.

• for: Deep Humanity to DH, Klee Irwin, Are we lining in a Simulation, The Self Simulation hypothesis
• annotate
  • time 1:14 of interesting
• comment
  • Klee Irwin is a controversial figure. His claims need to be interrogated quite critically.
  • His first doom and gloom section is accurate meta presentation, but his claims on advanced physics have been questioned by a number of critics.

• for: spirituality, ego, non-duality, duality, enlightenment, spiritual confusion
• annotate
• salience: insightful

• for: anatomical regeneration, pattern homeostasis, Michael Levin
• annotate

• for: wisdom signaling, ego - reifying, foolbodied, definition, definition - foolbodied, definition - wisdom signaling, humbleness
• definition: foolbodied
  • to be aware of how ignorant (foolish) one is in an embodied way

• definition: wisdom signaling

  • the act of talking about wisdom that conveys a sense of epistemic authority or that may sound wise regardless of the actual presence of wisdom

• comment

  • this subtle shift is actually quite important
  • the centrality of our ignorance, in contrast to the focus on our wisdom is a natural antidote to reifying ego
  • Wisdom signaling appears to be a movement towards the direction of reifying ego and self-righteousness
  • Many of the greatest minds (and hearts) of humanity talk genuinely about how ignorant they are about reality because of the paradox that
    • the more you know, the greater your discovery of how much you don't know, and therefore the awareness of how expansive our ignorance is
  • in this sense, the continual reminder and awareness of the enormity of one's ignorance creates authentic sense of humbleness, not a contrived one

• for: embodied mind
• title: Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
• author: Michael Levin
• date: Mar. 24, 2022

• source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full

• annotate

• for: self, self - computational boundary, Michael Levin

• title: The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition

• author: Michael Levin
• date: Dec. 13, 2019
• source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6923654/#:~:text=Any%20Self%20is%20demarcated%20by,and%20limits%20of%20its%20cognition.
• annotate

• for quote , quote - CHD

• for: progress trap, progress trap - atomic bomb

• reference
  • https://www.etymonline.com/word/homo%20sapiens

• resonate with:

• annotate

• for: non-duality, non-duality, nondual, research - non-dual

• annotate

• for: morphogenesis, morphogenesis - example - butterfly
• paraphrase
  • the caterpillar is a soft-bodied creature that lives in a in a largely two-dimensional world that:
    • crawls around on flat surfaces
    • chews leaves and
    • has a brain appropriate for that purpose
  • it has to turn into a butterfly which is a hard-bodied creature that
    • lives in a three-dimensional world
    • has to fly it has to drink nectar
    • needs a completely different brain suited to a hard-bodied organism
  • in between what happens is during this process the brain is largely largely destroyed
    • most of the connections are broken down
    • most of the cells die and and
    • the new brain is rebuilt during the lifetime of the organism
  • this kind of change makes the the confusion of puberty seemed like child's play
  • This is a single agent radically changing its brain and its body
  • The amazing thing about it is that it has been shown that the memories that the caterpillar acquires are retained in the moth or butterfly
  • Despite the disaggregation of the brain, some information is able to make it across to the butterfly or moth

• for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, bioengineering, novel life form, culturally evolved life, bioethics, progress trap, progress trap - bioengineering, progress trap - genetic engineering
• comment
  • cultural evolution, which itself emerges from biological evolution is acting upon itself to create new life forms that have no evolutionary backstory
  • this is tantamount to playing God
  • progress traps often emerge out of the large speed mismatch between cultural and biological/genetic evolution.
  • Nowhere is this more profound than in bioengineering of new forms of life with no evolutionary history
  • This presents profound ethical challenges

• in other words
  • collective intelligence at the cellular level operating in morphospace generates biological patterns in response to solving problems at that level

• for: multi-scale competency architecture, quote, quote - multi-scale competency architecture
• quote
  • biology uses a kind of multi-scale Competency architecture of nested problem solvers and navigation is a really Central concept
• author: Michael Levin
• date: 2022

• for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - multicellular organism, quote individual/collective gestalt, individual/collective gestalt
• quote
  • If one zooms in, you find out that we are all in fact collective intelligence
• author: Michael Levin
• date: 2022
• source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLiHLDrOTW8

• for: Alan Turing, morphogenesis, AI - morphogenesis, self-organizing systems

• for: superorganism, multi-level superorganism, collective intelligence, individual-collective gestalt, Michael Levin,

• title: Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces

• author: Michael Levin
• date 2022
• comment
  • This is a talk on collective intelligence in unconventional spaces

• for: futures - food production, futures - water production, desalination, ocean solar farm, floating solar farm, floating city
• title: An interfacial solar evaporation enabled autonomous double-layered vertical floating solar sea farm
• author: Pan Wu, Xuan We, Huimin Yu, Jingyuan Zhao, Yida Wang, Kewu Pi, Gary Owens, Haolan Xu
• date: Oct. 1, 2023
• source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894723041839?via%3Dihub#f0005
• comment
  • Since this simple design integrates fresh water and food production, it can be integrated as a module for a floating city.

• for: invasive species - red fire ant - control
• comment
  • this is an excellent application for citizen science in general, to control invasive species

• for: stats, stats - invasive species - red fire ants,
• stats:
  • prefers farms and cities
    • could infest 50% of urban areas
  • could inhabit up to 7% of EU continent
  • infestation vectors
    • walk
    • fly
    • carried by wind
    • shipping
      • Sicily, the site of discovery, ships a variety of plants across the Mediterranean
    • Southern Spain offers ideal climate for red fire ants
    • Climate change could increase its range by 25% by 2050.

• for: progress trap, red fire ants, fire ants, progress trap - shipping, unintended consequences, unintended consequences - shipping

• paraphrase

  • Fire ants would be devastating if released in continental Europe and even more all around the Mediterranean Sea.
  • The cost for human economies and well-being would be enormous. Where they have been invasive, they have:
    • displaced native ant and other species
    • damage electrical equipment
  • A genetic analysis of the Italian ants suggests they likely came from either China or the United States.
  • In the U.S., the species causes an estimated $6 billion in damage each year.
  • The insects spread internationally via shipping, especially of plants and soil.
  • Red fire ants have been detected in imported products in Spain, Finland, and the Netherlands, but not as wild colonies.

• for: urban development, inequality, just boundaries, safe and just boundaries, climate justice, urban planetary boundaries, livable cities, earth system boundaries, earth system justice
• title: Urban inequalities in the 21st century economy
• author: Jan niman, Yehua Dennis Wei
• date: Apr 2, 2020
• source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7124478/

• for: Christian nationalism, Christian national, far right politics, Christian right, political extremism, MAGA fuel
• comment
  • the extreme right, MAGA Republican party is fueled by a movement composed of threatened Christian nationalists entering politics to assert power.
  • The extremism in the far right politics is in direct proportion to the high degree to which they perceive threat
  • Religious faith can inspire extremely powerful emotional responses and devotion. When combined with politics this can lead to extreme events, such as the Jan. 6 insurrection.
  • The mobilization of Christian nationals into local school boards has turned education into a political battleground.

• for: language graph, linguistic graph
• title: An application of graph theory to linguistic complexity
• author: Alexander Piperski
• date: 2014
• source:
  • chrome-extension://bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fpublications.hse.ru%2Fpubs%2Fshare%2Ffolder%2Flenyneoat0%2F178007616.pdf

• for: green city, living city, environmental justice, safe and just transition, safe and just boundaries earth system boundaries, just transition, climate justice, cross-scale translation of earth system boundaries
• title: Environmental justice in a very green city: Spatial inequality in exposure to urban nature, air pollution and heat in Oslo, Norway
• author: Zander S. Venter, Helene Figari, Olve Krange, Vegard Gundersen
• date: Feb. 2023
• source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972207293X#f0005

• for: Donald Winnicott, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH

• title: For Donald Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us

• author: James Barnes date: May 18, 2020

• comment: insight

  • adjacency
    • between
      • Donald Winnicott
      • Deep Humanity concept of human INTERbeCOMing
    • adjacency relationship
      • when James Barnes wrote that Winnicott's psychoanalysis is based on a unitary conception of self and other,
        • that resonated deeply with me
        • due to my own spiritual journey in
          • non-duality as well as
          • Deep Humanity conception of human INTERbeCOMing
• source: early morning discussions
  • this morning, after deep discussion, my partner posted a picture of Donald Winnicott on my WhatsApp and I googled Donald Winnicott and found, read and resonated deeply with this article:
    • https://psyche.co/ideas/for-donald-winnicott-the-psyche-is-not-inside-us-but-between-us

• for: dualism, dualism - psychology, unintended consequences, unintended consequences - dualism in psychology, progress trap, progress trap - dualism in psychology

• paraphrase

  • The dualism of scientific materialism gives rise to one-person psychologies
    • and are arguably complicit in much of the psychological and social damage we are now recognising.
  • For instance, a good deal of the historical denial of the role of psychological and social trauma has been traced
    • back to the Freudian model’s almost exclusive focus on the internal world;
      • the actual impact of others and society has been, as a result, relatively ignored.
  • Modern psychiatry, which accepts the same philosophical model but changes the level of explanation, is just as culpable.
  • Likewise CBT, with its focus on dysfunctional thought patterns and rational remedies administered from the outside, also follows the same misguided philosophy.

• question

  • what are concrete ways this has caused harm?
• future work
  • perform literature review on case studies where Winnicott's approach has been a more constructive therapeutic one

• for: Winnicott, Freud, comparison, comparison - Winnicott - Freud, transitional space, Bardo, evolution
• paraphrase

• comparison: Winnicott, Freud

  • Winnicott had a strikingly different notion of the agent of psychological change than Freud.

    • Winnicott
      • His psychotherapeutic model was developmental, one that sees.
        • the therapeutic relationship and
        • the original parent-child relationship(s)
      • as analogous.
      • Thus, just as he saw the development of the child as being fundamentally tied
        • to the immediate, visceral relationship with the mother in the experiential unit.

    • psychotherapeutic change was all about the relationship between - client and - therapist.

      • This was later conceptualised as a shift
        • from a ‘one-person’ psychology
        • to a ‘two-person’ psychology.

    • Freud

      • Freud was focused on rational interventions from the outside
      • This gave way in Winnicott to a co-creative journey occurring in the area in between,
    • which was much more about who one was and what one did, than what one thought or said.
      • In his book Playing and Reality (1971),
    • Winnicott called the location of this experience ‘transitional space’,
      • alluding to its dynamic, insubstantial quality,
      • but also to its nature as a place of becoming.
    • It is, he said, a place we both
      • create and that
      • creates us
    • a paradox that we must accept and not try to resolve
    • where unformulated possibility replaces
      • fixed identities, and
      • experience is necessarily co-constructed.

• comment

  • Winnicott's transitional space is like
    • the Tibetan concept of the Bardo
    • the biological concept of evolution

• for: psychopathology, psychopathology - Winnicott, comparison - Winnicott - Freud
• paraphrase
• comparison: Winnicott, Freud
  • Winnicott’s concept of psychopathology was very different from Freud’s.
    • Freud
      • Freud understood psychopathology in terms of conflicts between:
        • the internal drives and
        • the external demands of the world
      • that what goes wrong is something internal to the person
        • only triggered by the outside world.
      • This basic idea is still very much alive in reductive psychiatric thinking and CBT, which, following the common dualistic model,
        • also locate the problem inside the mind/brain.
    • Winnicott
      • By contrast, Winnicott understood psychopathology primarily in terms of trauma or deficit in the relational domain,
      • which in turn follows from his inherently interpersonal understanding of the psyche.
      • Crucially, what goes wrong is not to be located in the individual per se,
      • but in the experiential units that the person was and is involved including, by extension,
        • the sociocultural milieu in which they find themselves.

• for: constructivism, constructivism ,- Winnicott
• comment
  • Winnicott could appreciate that we play a significant role in constructing the world we inhabit

• for: non-duality, non-dual, paradox, quote, quote - non-duality, quote - James Barnes, quote - paradox
• quote: James Barge
  • Winnicott’s psychological paradox of subject and object becomes a philosophical paradox of idealism and materialism

• for: Donald Winnicott, quote, quote - Donald Winnicott, quote - human INTERbeing, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, white - humans INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity, altricial, mOTHER, non-duality

• quote: Donald Winnicott

  • There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.

• comment

  • what Winnicott says here is the essence of:
    • the Deep Humanity concepts of
      • the individual / collective gestalt and
      • human INTERbeCOMing,
    • the Buddhist concepts of:
      • emptiness,
      • non-duality in the human realm,
      • Indra's net of jewels in the human realm and
      • Thich Nhat Hahn's INTERbeing
    • complexity

• for: explanation - Freud
• explanation: Freud
• paraphrase
  • Freud conceptualised our basic nature as
    • self-contained bundles of energy, born into a sort of introverted narcissism (the Id).
    • The development of the mind (the Ego) was a result of
      • the clash between the outward expressions of this energy (the drives) and
      • the world’s responses to them.
• Psychological development was therefore a self-creative act, - shaped by the external world only in terms of necessary adaptation.
  • Freud saw the role of the other as largely limited to
    • external arbiter and enforcer of rules and regulations for behaviour.
  • While oversimplified, the core image of mind here is as
    • a sort of internal outgrowth, responsible for
      • cognitively traversing the subject-object gap and
      • acting as intermediator between two distinct domains.

• for: dualism, duality, dualism - Freud
• paraphrase
  • Freud's model of the psyche was firmly rooted in the Cartesian-empiricist philosophy that continues to dominate the scientific worldview.
  • The most basic commitment of this model is the idea that:
    • we are discrete individual entities opposed to
    • an objective, neutral world that exists independently of us.
  • Per this model, we come to know and experience the world outside of us through a combination of:
    • internally determined processes and
    • the mental assimilation of data from the outside world.
  • Minds, as such, are
    • a prerequisite for experience, and
    • experiences are essentially a result of cognition.
  • This perspective perseveres today, for example, in the notion that
    • we become familiar with other people’s internal worlds through our private theories of their minds.
  • It also perseveres in the conceptual basis of CBT,
    • which understands our experience of the world and relationships as being determined, in large part, by
      • how we individually perceive and make sense of those things.

• for: human INTERbeCOMing, human INTERbeing, DH, Deep Humanity, Donald Winnicott

• quote

  • He (Donald Winnicott) largely circumvented the subject-object dualism inherent in the Freudian model of mind (which both the Ego-psychologists and the Kleinians subscribed to) and
    • espoused, or at least regularly insinuated, a fundamentally unitary conception of self and other.

• comment -The Deep Humanity definition of the individual / collective gestalt identifies the indivisible nature of the individual and collective.

  • It can also need called the ' self / other gestalt' and both are really another way to articulate non-duality in between members of the same species
  • a ' unitary conception of self and other' is yet another way to articulate this same thing

for: human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity

• for: superorganism, multi-level superorganism, David Chavalarias
• title: From inert matter to the global society life as multi-level networks of processes
• author: David Chavalarias
• date: Feb. 24, 2020
• source
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7061952/
• paraphrase: abstract
  • A few billion years have passed since the first life forms appeared.
  • Since then, life has continued to forge complex associations between the different emergent levels of interconnection it forms.
  • The advances of recent decades in molecular chemistry and theoretical biology, which have embraced complex systems approaches, now make it possible to conceptualize the questions of the origins of life and its increasing complexity from three complementary notions of:closure:
    • processes closure,
    • autocatalytic closure and
    • constraints closure.
  • Developed in the wake of the second-order cybernetics, this triple closure approach,
    • that relies on
      • graph theory and
      • complex networks science,
    • sketch a paradigm where it is possible to go up the physical levels of organization of matter,
      • from physics
      • to biology and society,
    • without resorting to strong reductionism. -The phenomenon of life is conceived as the contingent complexification of the organization of matter, until the emergence of life forms, defined as a network of auto-catalytic process networks, organized in a multi-level manner. This approach of living systems, initiated by Maturana & Varela and Kauffman, inevitably leads to a reflection on the nature of cognition; and in the face of the deep changes that affected humanity as a complex systems, on the nature of cultural evolution. Faced with the major challenges that humanity will have to address in the decades to come, this new paradigm invites us to change our conception of causality by shifting our attention from state change to process change and to abandon a widespread notion of 'local' causality in favour of complex systems thinking. It also highlights the importance of a better understanding of the influence of social networks, recommendation systems and artificial intelligence on our future collective dynamics and social cognition processes.