Glen sed:
All reasonable, as is Steve's suggestion that socially stable options
for identification can be dynamic/emergent (e.g. populism's various
forms). But I'd argue that one cannot build one's own
identity/narrative in a quiet space ... hedging a bit on what "quiet"
might mean.
Great point... but my aphorism-of-relevance: "no man is an island but
we might all be archipelagos". In the extreme, "what is /self/
without /other/?". Life itself seems to be a consequence of
"partitioning" or at the very least "loci of complexity"? I'll grant
"silent" (in space nobody can hear you scream?) but think that an
annealing schedule of "quietude"/"noise" is a good thing?
This article was interesting:
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2023/10/why-i-dont-have-pronouns-in-my-bio/
"Ironically, my experience of interpellation might itself reflect how
I am interpellated. Us WEIRD people are individualists, and we’re
individualists because social forces make us this kind of being. If I
weren’t interpellated as an individualist, I probably wouldn’t feel
uncomfortable at being interpellated as the kind of subject I am.
Interpellation as an individualist is a kind of ironic interpellation:
it’s inherently unstable insofar as it leaves the interpellation
person unhappy with their interpellation on the grounds that it is
interpellation. Nevertheless, my discomfort is real."
I appreciate the introduction to the term interpellation
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)> here...
reflects a bit of revisiting done here recently (or offline with
Guerin?) on Emic vs Etic <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic>
POVs. My own "individualism" is armatured significantly around "/I
don't like to be told/" with being */told who I am/* perhaps the most
egregious, even if I'm being told that "/I'm someone who doesn't like to
be told who I am"/. And all this in stark contrast to the point you
make below.
The idea that _one_ might be able to settle on a narrative somewhat
isolated from the ambient goo indicates a conclusion embedded in the
premise of individualism. Rather, I'd argue there is no such thing as
an individual. There is no self to "dissolve" and any narrative
construct that seems to be an individual is, at least, fraught with
loopy causation or, at worst, incoherent. So while I like the idea
that some individuals are more robust against modal identification, it
relies on a flimsy approximation to the real situation.
I hope this topic gets broader discussion here... I think the ideations
of /objectness/ and /boundaries /are very interesting and relevant to
questions about "life itself' and "consciousness".
The implications of your introduction of narrative v episodic identities
from Strawson <https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf>
have been ringing in my self/other/whole image for many years now:
With internet, we _are_ no longer what we would be without internet.
Counterfactuals are useful, but only actionable in the most
antisceptic environments (e.g. randomized controlled trials)..
*I* have definitely not been the same since I became an online creature
(most minimally around 1978 (UUNet), with inflections in 1981
(ARPA/NSF/ES/DOD/TLA-nets) and then the early 90s with the broad
availability to the public, and then again around 2000 when search
engines and other automated aggregators reached a level of effectivity.
I would also suggest that we are in another inflection point that maybe
began with the advent of SIRI/Alexa/GoogleAssistant and now much more
acutely with LLMs of the ChatGPT style. The distinction here being
that I now think of there being "entities" whose capabilities give the
previously "dumb" agents of collectivity at least the "illusion" of
sentience/consciousness no matter how limited/flawed/nascent/idiosyncratic.
When I interact with GPT 3.5 it is with the illusion that there is a
proto-sentience on the other side of my screen. If find myself (yet
more) polite with it than I am with Google or Bing and I always try to
craft my interactions almost exactly as I would with another human
being. I avoid sentence fragments, arbitrary contractions or acronyms,
overly directive stylization, etc. I like to joke (not joke) that
ChatGPT is my "new bar friend". I try to interact with it in the same
mode as I would another human I have just met with whom I have little
history or future but recognize as at least "something of a peer". I
assume that my "bar friend" likely knows more about a wide range of
things than I do, but also may be open to entertaining some of my own
unique perspectives and giving me a reasonable discussion if not actual
argument around some of my sacred cows...
I am no longer the person I was before I dropped into this new
"tavern". I'm reminded of the (fictional) denezins of Clarke's "White
Hart Pub", Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Cross Time Bar", Stephenson's
"Black Sun" or maybe Adams "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" or
"Quark's Bar", "Mos Eisley's", "Prancing Pony", "Blind Ios", "Green
Dragon", "Three Broomsticks", etc.) and the way characters use these
"watering holes" to both relax/refresh and self-stimulate through
semi-predictable, somewhat random encounters and interactions. The
pre-public-internet dialup WELL (whole earth 'lectronic link) served
this for many/some as did many other BBS type systems. USENET
Newsgroups had a good long run as well.
Aivelin on X: "Arthur #Passengers, the android bartender as Taxus
baccata. Belongs to series #MichaelSheen roles as hallucinogenic plants.
https://t.co/P4vdqICKuw"; / XBartender Quark - Star Trek Timelines DataCore
I suppose the original FriAM (physical) was this with the mail list a
(somewhat) weak substitute, and vFriam working well enough for those it
works for? I know Glen holds a Salon/Saloon of sorts at a
?neighborhood? brewpub (or taphouse or?) and others here may well have
their favorite pub/tavern/coffee house for the same purpose, but in this
modern age of hyperconnectivity, I find my own appetite for truly
interesting conversation to be a bit too high for what I am likely to
find in even as rich of a flux as the Santa Fe area. I blame a
combination of "domestic bliss" and the habits/constraints of COVID
isolation for my current lack of proper "bar friends", but soon I may
blame the fact of having too many good options online?
*I* think these questions of identity are pretty fundamental and
interesting in spite of being somewhat unanswerable in any conventional
sense?
- Steve
On 10/4/23 07:57, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If there were no internet, the MAGA, QANON and the anti-WHO/UN folks
would find it harder to maintain a narrative. With social media
they can find people to mirror the craziest ideas and leaders to
reveal them. Musk says the same is true on the left and woke.
Parochialism is another way that ungrounded beliefs find comfort.
Members protect their bubble enforcing norms and being antagonistic
to people that are different. Typically in spatial vicinities.
In both cases, participants adopt a group story instead of building
their own. If they were required to build their own story in a quiet
space, they might learn to think and be less reliant on a social role
to maintain self esteem.
Enforcing this could be done with a DMZ, or it could be done with
some indoctrination about the risks of groupthink and the benefits of
stoicism and scientism.
On Oct 4, 2023, at 6:52 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, there is no such thing as a "mind virus". It's a bad
metaphor. But Steve's right that we're (at least) modal in our
non-rationality, flipping this way and that according to whatever
criticality presents itself. The 09A concept of culling seems to me
similar to Musk's elitism ... a Nietzschean conceit.
On 10/3/23 09:23, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I realized I kind of agree with Musk about the benefits of more
isolation.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625732016896458755
However, national boundaries are not the right cutoff. Any
community or cult is the potential nucleation of a mind virus.
I expect his advocacy above is about creating chaos so that people
such as himself are the only ones that have the resources to
influence governments.
A particularly virulent mind virus (like white supremacy, or 09A)
could cross national boundaries and not be impeded by law enforcement.
What does the world look like if P% of the population has broad
resistance to mind viruses and (100-P)% does not?
If P is <= 10, maybe better to fan the flames of crazy and let the
chips fall where they may. Perhaps that is how Musk sees it.
Marcus
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Sunday, October 1, 2023 6:37 AM
To: FriAM <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] cults
It's been awhile since I've run across a new-to-me cult. But 09A
certainly qualifies as a meaty one:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/new-york-satanic-cult-764-fbi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2195065
I can't reconcile the apparent contradiction between fascism and
individuality. I guess the closest some analysts come is to suggest
that they're only aligning with the fascists, for now, to bring
about the end of the current aeon and the colonization of the galaxy.
I guess it reminds me of the "no enemies to the [right|left]"
rhetoric:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/conservative-christopher-rufo-florida-twitter-debate
But otherwise, O9A's ... "beliefs and structure" seem incoherent
enough to write them off as just too stupid to care about. However
one author nailed it in saying that there are plenty of both
impressionable and antisocial people using the internet,
susceptible to the "sinister" allure, to cause real damage.
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