uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ - I'm not clear what the intended connection between these two topic you raise is, but I share your curiosity/fascination with both: > So, I'm once again down in a rabbit hole over whether Dave's (cautiously > backed by Kim) idea of a "science of the mind" is reasonable, wherein > subjective/reflective techniques like psychedelic drugs or meditation can say > "true" things about the world, particularly that may be beyond the reach of > science. And there I am reading about Falun Gong > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong> and its "outlets" like The Epoch > Times, which spew constant nonsense, feeding the delusional QAnon narratives: > > https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-newest-trump-boosted-viral-maga-star-has-ties-to-the-epoch-times
I have my own "pet theories" (a plethora of them I am sure) on many topics, and some I hold more dear than others. Many are mere "placeholders" or heuristics of sort... a sort of knee-jerk go-to which I may have had planted in me by my family/culture-of-origin or adopted later in life from a subsequent subculture I installed myself in. Access to books, libraries, and ultimately the internet has both ameliorated and aggravated that problem. I've been able to sand off more of the rough edges of (or fill in the gaps between) those pet-theories with the received experience/knowledge/?wisdom? of other more efficiently than if I were to try to sort all of that by myself. But one aphorism goes "the problem with having an open mind is that other people with pour just about anything int While I do have a minimal meditation practice and find various glimmers of (fleeting) enlightenment through mild alcohol poisoning, sleep deprivation, and fasting (all quite minimal), I don't have nearly as strong of a fascination with seeking fundamental "truths" that way. I believe that my genotype and therefore phenotype is embued with the "training" of hundreds of thousands of years of hominid, tens of millions of years of primate and hundreds of millions as mammal/vertebrate and that "listening" to that "wisdom" seems like a worthwhile practice... so to get better at such listening, things which distract or quiet the mind seem like a good help. Alternatively, engaging my senses, my awareness with the "natural world" also seems to be a good way to explore the resonances within me to recognize these "inner truths". I'm a bit more aligned with the neo-pagan animists (if that is the right term) or the anarcho-primitivists for these purposes than I am with the various human-centric spiritual paths that involve everything from angry old white men with flowing beards to angry brown women with eight arms (and swords). When I am tempted to anthropomorphise my god(desse)s I much prefer a whole pantheon. Not so much for the choices a buffet gives as the opportunity to think in (Jungianesque) Archetypes. I suspect there is some serious neurochemistry involved in conspiracy-theory folks... I know that *I* can get pretty hopped up on one of my pet-theories if approached in just the right (wrong) way. So Chemtrailing, AntiVaxxing, JFK-assasinationg, Lizard-peopling, Illuminati-izing, Masoning, Q-Anoning, Hillary-hating, Falun-Gonging, Nationalizing, etc. all seem to share some strange cocktail of adrenals as the "reward" for belief. I also think there is a higher-level complex going on which involves herd/pack/tribe mentality... the need/drive to "follow a leader" or at least the "centroid". Strange how those who throw the term "sheeple" around freely seem to be following a "shepherd" or at least some swarm centroid of delusion. > And I'm wondering, where are the "patriot hackers" and Anonymous? > > What happened to all that rigmarole about protecting the world and the > internet from insidious sh¡t like The Epoch Times? Is it that ostensibly > white hat members are combating shallow techniques like DDoS so well that the > script kiddies who used to claim to be Anonymous are outmatched? Maybe > Assange siding with Trump fractured the group? And what about the Jester > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist)>, who was arguably > more capable than the large majority of hacktivists? Was he hired by the NSA > and now works alone in a steel cage? Or has his mind been infected by the > attractive conspiracy theories and persecution complexes we dorks are so > susceptible to? I also wonder about this. Is it merely a "delusion" of mine (ours?) that some singular (or small group of) individual can come to town and clean up the rabble? Too many Westerns or modern military-action-revenge movies? I do believe that systems are only robust within the embedding space they emerged within or were designed for. This is the stuff of punctuated criticality... Elements within a dynamical system remain in their comfortable/familiar orbits, their basins of attraction for long periods of time (relative) until they excurd (is that a word?) outside those (dynamic) equilibria regions and then (from the perspective of the rules-of-thumb characterizing those regions) all hell breaks loose. What does this have to do with Hacktivists/ism? If humans are loci of consciousness with one or more qualities than the myriad other loci such as animals, plants, other life, and perhaps seemingly less complex (or more slowly evolving) systems such the geo/cryo/atmo/biosphere as a whole, then perhaps this ability/propensity to build models of Life, the Universe and Everything and attempt to play God(dess) with it, to muck around with it, to engage in hypothesis testing and generation, to attempt to control it, leads us to the inevitability to (try to) do so. Whether Black/White/Grey or Green hatted, Hacktivists would seem to be none other than aspiring alchemists, magi, shamans, warlocks who attempt to transcend the mundane and bring actions which are disruptive (disruptive of *what* seems to define the color of their hats?). Is there a complex-adaptive-system formulation of the battle of good and evil, the (illusory/delusory?) distinction between the light and the dark? If not to explain or side with one "side" or another, to recognize how this symmetry arises, or is fundamental and how they play off of one another. We shall know our chirality? > I feel confident that some of you have some insight! Please share. Done, - Steve ?? what is the difference between an opinion and insight ?? - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
