DaveW
How could I have forgotten Nicholas??? I would have relished reading dozens of books about his adventures.I may be a state/lake over from you in August... WI... I'll ping you with details as that place-time and I approach one another.I do believe we are in agreement, with just enough nuances to suggest some wonderful conversations if we ever find ourselves in physical proximity again.
IMO, human potential is just a localized, maybe somewhat specialized, expression of Life's potential and consciousness/intelligence is universal.Yes, that is a succinct point I tend to harp on (around?). It may be entirely confirmation bias if/when/as I feel I have more evidence for such than ever before... I once believed we were apex, then was told that was hubristic. Now I am returning to complexity arguments (IIT-Psi-esque) to recognize in what way we might be (temporarily) the ultimate locus of complexity (at least across Terra/Sol?). The argument afoot across this thread is whether the extended phenotype which is the computronium we are paving the planet with, will represent a qualitative *jump* in that and whether *it* might polyp off and leave us behind, no longer needing us as a substrate?
One of the nuances—I think I am more pessimistic about "groups of humans" being on a transcendent path. Reading David Graeber makes me think we are kind of an opposite path; from far more optimal forms of social organization in the past to the degenerate power-politics/rapacious-capitalism of today. But would be very happy to see a brighter side to this coin
Graeber and Wengrow do show well (IMO) many of the negative consequences of the *style* of organizations that our abstraction of "value" (Debt, currency, UoweMes) has yielded. I also agree superficially with JIm Scott's stories (how to remain ungoverned and against the grain) do paint a pretty picture of a liminal transition zone in the "poised realm" of both organizational complexity of human groups and the development of a sophisticated extension to our phenotypes. I'm not sure it is that different in some ways than the picture the JudeoChristian origin stories paint of the Garden of Eden. You probably have a more sophisticated understanding of Graeber in this regard? I would agree that at least in a sense of local (time and context) sense those modes were relatively optimal. BTW, I think this is roughly what (your own... meaning LDS) Orson Scott Card was ideating on in "Folk of the Fringe"? As I remember it, his stories in that collection did not ideate on re-ascent but rather exploring the local minima in other directions perhaps (albeit theocraticly informed).
In our 1998 paper <https://www.santafe.edu/research/results/working-papers/symbiotic-intelligence-self-organizing-knowledge-o> on /Symbiotic Intelligence: Self Organizing Knowledge on Distributed Networks Driven by Human Interaction/, one of my contributions was the Hobbesian backstory presented in /Leviathan/ (c17) of collective humanity as a (proto) superorganism. Among the few Laurels I have to rest on, this is the most relevant to our discussion unfolding here. Our work was rather premature and naive but illuminates one salient issue perhaps... that humanity has been forming a complex multicellular superorganism since the earliest protoCities and regional cultures emerged.. 10k years or more years ago (ignoring Atlantean fantasies of course)?
Scott's perspective ?romanticizes? a type of self-organized proto-superorganisms (colony creature) that humans tend to be able to create as long as they remain ungrounded (semi-mobile, hard to pin down, independent of resources which are easy to covet or hoard). Hobbes declared that before such collectivism, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He was an apologist for /Coercive Sovereign Power/, so I don't trust his motives, but I think he had a point. We do find some amazing synergy through specialization and stigmergic artifacts (infrastructure). What we do with it, of course, remains as the /Big Rub/?
The bottom line for me might be: "the only way out is through". We *have* established a certain style of super-organism (or suite of overlapping ones) such as nation states, global-scale religions, multi-national corporations, global movements (QAnon, Environmentalism, Nazi/Communist/Socialist/??? parties, MAGA-ism, etc.). Global Supply Chains and Global Monetary Systems and Energy Distribution Networks, and International Courts, are the vascular and energetic systems and immune systems of the (beyond) slime-mold that we have become collectively. A total collapse is *one* way we might scrub all this back down to the bare metal (earth) and rebuild a different version according to a different logic and even body plan and metabolism? Are there any others which we might find? I personally don't think "drill baby drill", "burn baby burn", "put the pedal to the metal" are likely to lead us out any other way than a spectacular crash, although it does fit the principle of "through". The JudeoChristian end-times/rapture story *normalizes", even idealizes this? Billionaire Bunkers and the plebian "prepper" culture are another expression of this.
I believe it is inevitable that if we don't find our way *through* to a self-organized super-organism which leaves behind the current host of dysfunctions (global military, economic, social control, etc) we will only have the option of full-collapse into something “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” whereupon we have the *option* of reforming different organizational modes and structures. Maybe Graeber and Scott have (had) some insight into whether we might find a different path toward collective human organization which does not follow the self-limiting patterns we "already tried"?
You mentioned RAH's candy coat of feminism surrounding a chocolate core of misogyny. I too detected that in his writing. The only female characters that seemed somewhat immune were Jubal's three amenuenses, especially Ann the Fair Witness.
My cousin, Vonda McIntyre was apparently the prototype for his character Friday <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_(novel)> which both flattered her (the Dean of SF acknowledging her) and appalled her (the image he projected of the /ideal/ woman onto her). She was (died just a few years ago) a fairly radical post-gender voice (early works reflected familiar feminism of the time but explored trans/bi/poly questions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora:_Beyond_Equality> not just in gender but perhaps species as well... the Divers of the Starfarers <https://vondanmcintyre.net/the-starfarers-quartet/>quartet for example). Her last completed/published Novel was The Moon and the Sun (1998?) but told me in her last weeks (4 years ago?) that she had completed the final novel she had been working on in the (20 year) interim armatured around her pet theory of how the Minoan culture collapsed in a long slow clacking of dominoes, "back in the day". I can't tell if it is actually in the works for publication.
Her younger sister passed of pancreatic cancer as well, one year before. They both grew up mostly near Hanford WA with their father as an executive with Westinghouse (soon to bring us washing-machine sized nuclear power plants to a village/neighborhood/data-center near you?). She was deeply ecologically aware but not an eco-freak yet did ask the question in her last months if that was a correlation with her and her sister's very similar cancer at a very similar age (approaching 70).
I was a member of the Church of All Worlds, almost from its beginning, circa 1963. When I went to Macalester in St. Paul, I became a member of the Lady of the Lakes Nest, circa 1969. It was always interesting to me how CAW rapidly transformed from the 'free love promiscuity" male fantasies in /Stranger/ to an organization almost exclusively characterized by Goddess/Gaia worship.I was unaware of CAW in IRL... and here we have a (near charter) member! Another proto-super-organism or a distributed organ/organelle? (re)Occupy Mars!
Just an aside (a deep dark confession??), preceding my infatuation with the SF heroes I mentioned, my very first hero was Lex Luthor in the Superman comics.
I think Science Fiction and Comics (and Graphic Novels and Action/Adventure films and ...) feed the (mostly male?) appeal of *Potency*... This is what seems to drive Authoritarian Followers (fetishizing the trappings of extreme potency) and Bro Culture (Fitness unto Fighting Dominance, Wealth unto Financial Dominance, Personal Power Projection unto Social Dominance, etc). It is possible the female circumstance of reproduction (at least as executed in mammals/marsupials) might meet the instinct for potency in a more organic way? Their potency is reserved for reproduction and direct nurturing/protection of their progeny? We men tend to splash ours all over the countryside and one another (Occupy Mars! Occupy Luna! Occupy LaGrange1,2,3,4,5, Occupy Kuiper! Occupy Cyberspace!)
I think Robin Wall Kimmerer <https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass>makes good biological/ecological arguments for why our myriad "frontier cultures" (essentially all those built on colonialism but never matured beyond said "frontier") are so toxic both to the colonized and to the colonizer (Occupy Everything!). It being "natural" for some species to thrive in recently disturbed ecological niches, but also natural for them to be part of the ultimate "healing" process supporting the return to whatever homeostatic (homeodynamic/morphodynamic) balance that the prairie/tundra/forest is good at after the fire or the plowing under or ... but humans' ability to write our own stories allows us to maintain the illusion that we are living in the "frontier" context long after it no longer serves us (or the context).
So we now (US) own more personal firearms than we have people to brandish them at one another, and we drive vehicles many times more capable than we likely need, many have many times more money flowing/hoarded than those living (semi-comfortably) at subsistence. 10kWUS vs 5kWEU 2kWCH vs 500W3rd vs 80Wprimitve extended human metabolisms for example? We fetishize excesses in all ways while pretending they are necessary to our survival? Occupy Mars!
BTW it was good to see Greta Thunberg interviewed on DN! with a much more evolved/mature affect but not diverted from her intuitive awareness of our collective insanity. I wonder if Netanyahu's IDF and Mossad will kill her on her boat this time? Or Musk's clandestinos since she seems to twig him nearly as much as MacKenzie Scott does? I hear drone executions are 'all the rage' these days! Occupy Gaza!
GruRaMumbleStumble, - Steve
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