misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
January 1. Today I finally made it to see Avatar. In keeping with my new policy, I offer questions rather than answers: 1) Why do the men have nipples but not the women? 2) Why does the best ever Hollywood film about Indians have to pretend to be about aliens? 3) Why does fictional entertainment keep getting better while politics and news keep getting worse? 4) How weird is it that Europeans came to North America, exterminated almost all the native people, consumed all the resources for money, and then made a movie about it, taking the side of the natives? I guess it's true what they say: you are what you eat.
January 1, 2010. New policy for the new year. I will no longer answer thinking questions over email. Lately I've been swamped with them and it's beginning to get stressful and exhausting. You're still welcome to ask non-thinking questions, and to contribute your own deep thoughts, but if you'd "love to hear what I think", you might be out of luck. If you're not sure what category your question is in, you can always ask it and find out.
December 31. I've had loads of free time over the last three weeks -- there were days when I started writing a post when I got up, and didn't finish until it was getting dark. That luxury is now coming to an end as I get ready for a busy January, so posts will not be as long or deep. Today, some links:
A couple readers tipped me off that this slashdot post just linked to my readings section, specifically Man of the Future, a Loren Eiseley chapter about an extinct hominid with a giant brain. The book it comes from has been in print for fifty years, and yet the Boskop people have now become famous overnight because of this article, What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?
Only one day after Discover posted that, NPR posted this, which similarly challenges our myth of progress: Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived. But again, the idea is not that new. Back in 2007 the Archdruid wrote this, in Solving Fermi's Paradox:
If unlimited technological progress is possible, then there should be clear evidence of technologically advanced species in the cosmos; there is no such evidence; therefore unlimited technological progress is impossible.
And back in 2005, I wrote the same thing in the "Intelligent Life in Space" section of The Critique of Civilization Changes Everything (scroll down two thirds). Please tell me I wasn't the first person to think of it, because it's so obvious! Although it might not be true. Here's a PDF article by Jacques Vallee, Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness, speculating that aliens are trying to contact us, but they are so different from us that we dismiss their communications as too strange to be "real".
Finally, I have to throw this in because of the date, an article about how the decade never had a name.
December 30. More philosophy! Yesterday, completely by accident, I ended up writing about the definition of "real", and a culture without the verb "to be", in the same post. This morning I finally put the pieces together:
It's silly to define "real" as "shared". A more shared world is more shared, but there's no need to say it's more real, and that's often not what we mean when we use the word "real". For example, most of us would say that a rock is more real than World of Warcraft.
Suppose there is no non-circular definition of "real". Of course, you're free to tack on any definition you want, and people do this all the time without thinking about it. If you take a step back from language, "real" is a tool we use to favor or exclude certain experiences, ideas, or directions of inquiry. We apply "authentic" and "inauthentic", "real" and "fake", "true" and "false" for all kinds of reasons, and what we're saying is "You shall respect this or disrespect it. You shall take this path or avoid it. You shall integrate this into your mental models or ignore it."
The adjective "real", like the verb "to be", is a shortcut, making language more efficient at the expense of understanding. I don't know if there are any cultures without the concept of "real", but I would very much like to live in one, because everyone in that culture would have to be more intellectually rigorous than anyone in this culture.
For example, we could no longer reject Nozick's experience machine for being less authentic. But we could reject it for being less shared: we would prefer to live in a world with other people than to be alone. We could reject it because it's nested within this world, when we would prefer to explore the world in which this world is nested. We could reject it because we don't want to get everything we ask for -- if you've ever played a video game with a good cheat mode, you know that omnipotence gets boring in ten minutes.
Yesterday I said that our whole civilization is an artificial world. If I'm not allowed to say that, I have to think harder, and say something like this: the path of civilization (as we know it) has been to impose our will upon our environment, instead of working with it on equal terms. This has severed our connections to the wider world that we came from, and crippled our understanding of it. More and more of our relations are with a maladapted and unsustainable sub-world, and we are now so deep in it that any other way of living seems impossible.
This leads to a practical question from Andy: "How do you have a shared experience in a world where people are either hypnotized by consumer culture or pre-occupied with their own physical and/or emotional survival?" Or, how do you climb out of a world by making connections, if everyone around you is even deeper in that world? One answer is to connect to something other than humans: spend an hour watching the clouds or examining a tree. Another answer is, sometimes you get out by going deeper in, by meditating or reading books or even playing video games -- but you have to choose them carefully. Any sub-world must justify itself in terms of a world that contains it. Or, if you go into a dungeon, you'd better bring out a treasure.
December 29. On a tangent to yesterday's post, Jeff mentions philosopher Robert Nozick's "experience machine":
If you were given the opportunity to hook up to a machine that would be guaranteed to let you experience absolutely anything you could ask for, and that would be completely indistinguishable from the real experience, but you had to commit to it for life, would you do it? In other words, if the only difference between reality and the machine is the abstract notion that one is "authentic," does that authenticity have value on its own?
I can think of two answers. The first is: We already did it! Civilization, compared to the ways of other human cultures and other species, is an artificial world in which we are gods. And we're pretty much all stuck in it for life. A more challenging answer, to both the first answer and to the original question, is: Give me a non-circular definition of "authentic".
A careful definition would require a book-length exploration of the deepest mysteries of matter and mind. But I can make a pretty good definition with only one word: shared. If you're not a solipsist, if you think reality has other participants, then the more participants there are in a world, or the more widely shared it is, the more "real" we say it is.
The other day Chris sent something related to all this, a long 2001 interview between Derrick Jensen and Martín Prechtel, an American Indian who became a Mayan shaman. There are some bits in here that I think are bullshit, but there's also some really great stuff about the failure of western metaphysics, the invisible debts of technology, and how some languages don't have the verb to be:
In a culture with the verb to be, one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb to be also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty. But the language becomes more efficient. The verb to be is very efficient. It allows you to build things.
December 28. Two loose ends on the technology subject. One issue is whether shortcuts are necessarily good. To extend the rock climbing metaphor: Why bother solving a crossword puzzle when you can just look up the answer? Why ride a bicycle across the continent when you can just get on a plane? Why learn to make something with your own hands when you can just buy one made by somebody else? It comes down to the meaning of life. If you're here to accomplish things, then you might as well just sit in a box pushing buttons. If you're here to explore and learn, then the long road might be more valuable than the short road. And if you're here to have a good time, then what are you doing on such an awful road that you're in a hurry to get to the end?
The other issue is how and when technologies make us weaker. One of the many things we can ask, when considering a tool, is whether the tool focuses our native strength, like a knife or a pencil or a biofeedback machine, or whether it does the work for us, like an engine or a calculator or a wire in your brain.
A more profound question is: "Does the presence of this thing make me stronger in its absence?" That's what a good teacher does, and oddly, it's what a crutch does, completely unlike a metaphorical "crutch". If your leg is broken, a crutch lets you walk around and keep the rest of your body in shape until the leg heals. And if you're building a permaculture seed community to survive the collapse of industrial civilization, you can use a truck or a backhoe to strengthen your position for a world without engines. Vaccinations are an interesting case. Individually, they make us stronger, but as a species they make us weaker, by preventing us from adapting to diseases on the level of genetics or culture.
What if a technology makes us stronger in its presence and weaker in its absence, and we go ahead and use it anyway? Then we are making a lifelong alliance with that technology, and that means both our individual lives and the life of the human species. In either context, if we ever break the alliance and give up or lose the technology, then we will have to pay back all the benefits. Our primitive ancestors made alliances with fire, stone tools, and clothing. Our more recent ancestors did it with metal tools, grain farming, machinery, electricity, the automobile, and most ominously, economic growth. In our own lifetime we've become dependent on computers -- although some uses of computers do make us stronger in their absence, like sharing information about biosand filters and rocket mass heaters.
I don't think our permanent alliances are limited to the ones we made tens of thousands of years ago. But it's going to be interesting to see which modern technologies can break free of their debts to the extractive economy.
December 26. Readers contribute a few loose ends on technologically enduced enlightenment: The hemi-sync process claims to alter brainwaves by putting certain sounds through headphones. And a stroke leads a brain scientist to a new spirituality by disabling her left brain in just the right way, something that might be reproducible with surgery. And here's an article about the business of cognitive enhancement.
My position on this issue is best expressed by this Tom Waits quote about music:
If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say: "Oh, for Christ's sake, why are we wasting our time? Let's just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something and make it bigger in the mix, don't worry about it." I'd say, "No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard."
Another way to say it: suppose you're a rock climber and someone says, "Why go to all that trouble? Here's a ladder."
Another way to say it: Machines that do physical work make us physically weaker. Machines that do mental work make us mentally weaker. So what's going to happen in the age of spiritual machines?
December 24. Adam comments on neurofeedback:
I've done a bunch of research on the Mind Mirror and OpenEEG over the past several years, including interviewing one of the original MM engineers. I looked into building a cheap EEG system... however, it's on the edge of being commercially viable, and I came to the conclusion that if I waited a few years, the technology would catch up and let me focus on software instead of hardware.
Recently Emotiv dropped its prices a lot. $1250 gets you a developer headset and a software development kit that gives you raw access to EEG data. The protocols are closed, so you can't write open source software for it, and it doesn't use active electrodes, so you have to use saline dampened pads. But it has 16 channels, not just 2, so it has a lot more detail. And the consumer version, that only works with software licensed in conjunction with Emotiv, costs $300.00.
There's also this one from Brainquiry. It uses active electrodes and has open protocols for accessing raw EEG data. To make a Mind Mirror, all you really need is the 2 channel model. I am thinking that in another year or so, I will either get the Brainquiry, or there will be another low-cost EEG. We should see inexpensive, multi-active-electrode, open EEG headsets in the next few years from other manufacturers.
The problem I had with OpenEEG is that it isn't wireless -- and I didn't want to hook my brain up to a hand-built system that is connected to 115V power.
December 23. Since we're at the turn of the decade, I'll probably continue to write about what's coming in the next decade. As a soft-core doomer, I expect many advanced technologies to survive. Here are links about a few:
Last week Jeff Vail did a short post on nuclear energy and hierarchy. Some greenies have been coming out in favor of nuclear power, because it can enable us to maintain our ridiculous high-energy lifestyle without pumping out carbon and destabilizing the climate. But Vail makes the same point that Ivan Illich made years ago: nuclear power, in its present form, requires an extremely expensive, complex, and dangerous central plant which produces a massive amount of energy. This makes it an ally of a large centrally controlled system. If, on the other hand, everyone generates their own energy at home, with some surplus to give to friends, then we can have a decentralized, autonomous, bottom-up system. I'm not going to speculate on what energy techs would do this best, but it will be interesting to see what people come up with.
Here's the same idea applied to biotech, a video from a few months ago where Michael Pollan advocates open source genetic engineering. I have mixed thoughts on this. Biotech will always be dangerous -- check out Klebsiella planticola. But if everyone is doing it in their garage, at least it won't be evil.
Finally, something I learned about a few years ago through Anna Wise's book The High Performance Mind. There are enormous subtle benefits to getting your mind in a meditative state, but it's extremely difficult -- you might practice for thousands of hours over many years before you get it right. Back in the 1970's, a scientist named Max Cade discovered how different human mental states correlate with different frequencies of brainwaves, and he invented a biofeedback device called the Mind Mirror. The idea is, it shows you the levels of the key frequencies in real time, so you can learn much more quickly to move between different mental states. And now, more than 30 years later, the Mind Mirror still costs thousands of dollars and I can't even find one for sale. But I found this: the OpenEEG project, and here's a photo gallery of a homemade model.
December 22. On yesterday's post, Sean asks two questions that many of you might also be asking: "Can you explain more about restrainers and more precisely what you mean by building an ark?" And "Is there a place in your writing that you define 'crash' in more detail?"
The most careful answer is that no one can see the future, but that I've tried to see it anyway in past essays like Fall Down Six Times and The Slow Crash. This is a good time for an update, but I'm unable to predict whether I'll finish writing one, or just keep scattering clues in the blog. I will say this about the Noah's Ark metaphor: if you build a permaculture forest garden 300 cubits by 50 cubits, it will easily feed a family, and it might even save some bird and insect species from extinction.
December 21. Happy solstice! I don't expect to be doing anything for Christmas, so I might be posting all week. Here are two brainy links about the ongoing end of the world:
First, a new post from Anne, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and the End of Modernist Epistemology. Basically, thanks to the internet, authority has been eliminated as a basis for belief, and not just opinion beliefs but fact beliefs. Now you can go online and find an authority supporting any fact you want. The result is that our mental models are now determined by only two things: what we want to believe, and direct personal experience. Where I see this going is that global consciousness will continue to fragment into what Anne calls information tribes, and these tribes will go through a kind of natural selection: the ones that are the best at seeking out relevant personal experience and adapting to it, will thrive, and the ones that are the best at blocking personal experience that contradicts their beliefs, will suffer horribly.
This brings us to George Monbiot's piece about the battle to redefine humanity:
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits.
He also makes a nice critique of economic growth, "the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved." But I don't agree with all his war language. This is not something we can solve through conflict, even intellectual conflict. I'm reminded of a Raiders of the Lost Ark review (link) that I saw this morning on Reddit, pointing out that if Indiana Jones had done nothing, the end of the movie would have been the same: the Nazis still would have got the Ark, opened it, and been cooked.
There is no stopping industrial civilization from playing the drama of perpetual growth all the way to its tragic end. The only thing that will change the minds of the expanders is personal experience of the most painful kind. Our task, as restrainers, is to restrain ourselves -- not so we can stay pure or save the world, but so we can begin learning to live in the coming age of limits. We're building another kind of Ark.
December 21. I got the same comment from two readers on yesterday's fire metaphor. I'm afraid, like most metaphors, it was not completely accurate. In nature, fires serve many useful ecological functions, and civilization as we know it is like a fire in many ways -- but there is no known function in any known ecology that is served by human systems that fall into feedback loops of increasing domination and exploitation and finally collapse.
December 20. I don't usually post on Sundays but I want to try to polish off this political crap so I can move on to something less frustrating. First, the reason health care reform is impossible goes deeper than corporate control of the government, and deeper than capitalism. The underlying problem is that civilization has never learned how to shrink. It can get larger in a smooth steady motion, but it can only get smaller in ugly collapses. I don't know why. I like to think we will someday learn how to build large complex systems where all the numbers move gently up and down like waves. The only alternative is to keep climbing and diving like suicide jumpers until we go extinct. (Or we could evolve out of our big brains that drive us to large complex systems, which is basically the same as extinction.)
Since American oil peaked in the early 1970's, continued real economic growth has been impossible, so we've been having fictional economic growth by increasing the amount of money flying around without increasing useful activity. Among the pillars of the fictional economy are the medical industry and the insurance industry. Collectively we can no longer afford to pay for them, but we also can't shrink them without economic collapse. You've probably seen this chart of worldwide life expectancy vs health care spending. Per capita, we spend 20 times as much as Cuba and live only a month longer. We spend five times as much as Singapore and live two years less. The problem is, all that wasted money is holding up the economy. It's being paid to people whose jobs are parasitic, who could serve society just as well by sitting home and doing nothing. But we have no mechanism to pay them for sitting home and doing nothing. And if we pay them less than they're now getting, they'll have less to spend, and more unnecessary jobs will be lost, and so on.
If I imagine myself as Utopian Dictator, I would eliminate the medical insurance industry, train all the unemployed in permaculture, and pay for it by slashing military spending and canceling entitlements for people who don't need them. Plus I would abolish intellectual property, cancel all debts, and ride a flying unicorn -- because I'm already in a world with no basis in reality.
The Archdruid covered the same general subject in his latest post, Weishaupt's Fallacy. Adam Weishaupt was the leader of the original Illuminati, who were basically a bunch of nice people who thought they could convert the existing power structure over to doing good. Of course the existing power structure crushed them, and they've been villified ever since. Greer thinks this was because they understimated the strength and intelligence of the ruling system, but I think it's because they failed to understand its very nature.
This is something that right wingers intuitively understand and left wingers don't: central control is fundamentally evil, and an evil system wants to do evil things: bomb foreign cities, build torture prisons, spy on citizens, and generally channel money/power from those who don't have it to those who do. Nature abhors a benevolent dictator. This is why Bush got everything he wanted and Obama is getting nothing (although he has to pretend to want what he gets to maintain the illusion that he is powerful). This is why everyone hates liberals, even other liberals.
I support left-wing politicians for the same reason you do a controlled burn to stop a fire. But as a long-term solution, the only way to stop fires is to make a non-combustible landscape. Or, the only way to build a good society is to start from the ground up, making every relationship one of equals, and every action completely voluntary. As I've said before, I think this is going to take us thousands of years, and it will require us to become aware of many kinds of domination more subtle and powerful than government.
December 18. The other day I posted a link about white skin being an adaptation to vitamin D deficiency in high-latitude grain eaters. Then Emily suggested something similar and mind-blowing: suppose malnutrition causes greed. It makes sense that malnutrition would make us greedy about food, and that greedy feeling could carry over to other things. I'm sure we can find exceptions, but there could still be a strong correlation, and as far as I know it's never been investigated. Also it's important to remember that neither wealth nor obesity necessarily means a person is getting the right nutrients. In a culture where unhealthful food is fashionable, rich people will be malnourished, and if the government subsidizes food with high calories and low nutrients, poor people will be both fat and malnourished.
Now we're coming back around to yesterday's subject, the tracing of responsibility. How did it happen that the job of the president is to escalate war and use the power of the state to force citizens to feed giant blocks of money? Why has the American political center moved steadily rightward for 30 years? Why do Americans, compared to other affluent nations, have so much fear and rage and so little compassion? If it's because our diet is so bad, how did our diet get so bad? If it's because we watch more television, why do we watch more television? If it's because of right wing think tanks in the 1970's, why did they succeed here so much more than other places?
I think it goes back hundreds of years. See how much you recognize in this Wikipedia summary of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.