I don't know if we are converging in our acceptance/dismissal of "the myth of individuality" or not, but for the moment I am hallucinating convergence.
I think the distinction we are arriving at *might* be that *every snowflake is unique* but that this is true in the very same way that *every stone is unique* and *every tree is unique*. I think the point you are making is that that (intrinsic?!) uniqueness should not be conflated with specialness? The pinon closest to the bedroom in my house which I sat under and climbed in regularly for most of my elementary school years *was* quite special *to me*, up to and including feeling guilty/uncomfortable when I let my father talk me into trimming one of the lower branches to open up a larger canopy to sit under. I could have "groomed the hell out of" the tree, maybe even nailed up a platform and made a treehouse in it, but I was (for better or worse) hyper-aware of the details that made it unique. My imagination/memory includes (I think) many of it's details including some of the larger roots humping up out of the ground and the places I needed to avoid gripping whilst climbing to avoid getting pitch on my hands. I believe that Musk's delusion includes the ideation that by moving himself (and ~1M other individual peoples) to the surface of Mars (and/or distributed through the asteroid belt) will allow the "forcing culture" to change enough to match some libertarian-utopian vision he holds. I *think* when you debunk the specialness of the individual you are saying that the uniquenesses (specific construction of any given snowflake) is mostly irrelevant in many/most contexts. My nephew is a budding materials scientist with a particular background in crystallography (his father is a minerologist) and he recently walked me through, in particular, some of the idiosyncrasies of quartz crystals and the myriad uses those specifics can yield various useful properties (in industry). I went looking for the basis of Kurt Vonnegut's Ice-9 only to find that we are up to 18 distinct crystalline forms... and of course (in the spirit of the individual/unique) those don't include the combinatorics implied by contaminants (or intentional dopants, etc.) which I assume are the basis of the plenitude (effective infinitude?) of snowflakes individuals. Individual human beings in the context of groups larger than Dunbar# pretty much get their meaning through their utility which reflects a combination of their affordances and their circumstances as much as the long-term relationships (2,...n-wise) they have with other individuals (not to mention domesticated/wild/familiar animals, edifices, plants, etc.) of On 3/29/21 3:11 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote: > Aha! Yeah, we probably do share it. But 2 points in space can be in the same > state *without* having a common driver. I.e. inter-subjectivity does not > imply communication. En garde! So you may share the same sentiment with an > alien consciousness near Sirius. And, although it sounds like I'm just > joking, I'm actually trying to say something serious, which is that > individuali[ty|sm] carries something like a "locality arrogance" ... the > impression that one blob in the pervading field(s) is somehow special or > unique, different from all the other blobs. Maybe our modern problem of > celebrity and institutional bloat is a function of a finite and fairly small > set of possible states of being? And now that we're up to 8B people, each of > us is guaranteed to share state with some N others? And anyone who thinks > they're somehow special or unique is simply ignorant of those who share their > state? If we experience a massive die off, those of us that survive will > again be true individuals? > > Or, even if the space of states is actual infinite, perhaps there's only a > small number of forcing cultures and we'd *have* to fly out to Sirius in > order to get out of those overwhelming flows. > > On 3/29/21 12:27 PM, Steve Smith wrote: >> I think I *share* the sentiment you present here, though through other >> mechanisms (than psi) to dissolve the (illusory/delusional) boundaries >> between self/other or more aptly self/whole. You are apparently >> more-better at (or at least more committed to your version of) this than >> I am which I envy/aspire. >> >> I suppose all I'm teasing at here is the apparent paradox of (for >> example) the "two" of us, trying to serialize things about our "inner >> states" to "communicate" between two "individuals". In the abstract, >> I accept the premise that what I consider to be an "individual" (e.g. >> me, you, 400+ people reading or hitting delete on this message) is more >> a locus or cluster or relative concentration in a high dimensional >> field. Maybe the only answer is to ingest a quantum of the right >> mushroom... or fast/dehydrate until I meet Joseph or Brigham across a >> campfire in an arroyo... or meditate until my spirit leaves my body and >> apprehends the cosmos directly... >> >> We two "illusory individuals" *appear* (from the perspective of illusory >> individuals) to be communicating (poorly or otherwise).... > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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 FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
