There is only one reality. Heaven, Hell, and mortal life are not three different things. They are one single thing.... This one single reality is connection to all things, if you are ready for it you experience this as Heaven. If you are not ready for it you experience this as Hell.
And an article, Mainstreaming Psychedelics: Secularizing spirituality with the aid of Eastern religion. The main idea is that we can put psychedelic experiences on a spectrum, where at one pole is the Eastern unitive-mystical state, being one with everything, and at the other pole is the Western interactive-relational state, where you can get specific practical insights.
Back to year-end, I see another way to frame it. Over here, you've got a clunky and unsatisfying human-made world. Over there, you've got the total bliss of union with the void. I'm interested in the stuff that's in between those things. It could be better things we could do with this world, or it could be other levels of reality, whether this reality is a simulation, or a game, or a work of art.
Finally, my song of the year, like the coronavirus, is actually from 2019: Automatic - Humanoid. The complete lyrics: "I see you, turn into, turn into, humanoid." The obvious interpretation is that we're overly domesticated, and we can draw some energy from our primal roots. But I also like the idea that all this time we've been not yet human, and now we're finally getting close.
The private is always an invention. And it can only exist to the degree there is a power structure, typically a state in the modern world, to legally and violently enforce its private status. Private property is always a socially-constructed and state-sanctioned entity that disappears or loses its valence when the state no longer functions.
I would respect an ideology that opposed both government and property (beyond personal items). The precedent is almost all the non-state peoples of history and prehistory. But I'm not ready to give up yet on government. I think we have a lot of room to make it better, while money is irredeemable.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with money, because it can buy everything that a kid thinks is awesome. Now I understand that money is a way to make other people do things that they would not do if it weren't for money. Capitalism is the ideology that money magically makes selfishness beneficial, when really it's the exact opposite: because it insulates us from the effects of our use of power, money makes it possible for completely nice people to participate in evil.
"AI" is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. Given that any such replacement is a mirage, this ideology has strong resonances with other historical ideologies, such as technocracy and central-planning-based forms of socialism, which viewed as desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite. It is thus not all that surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would find AI to be a welcome technological formulation of its own ideology.
A nice article on the UBI (thanks Steve), The Radical Idea Of Making Sure Everybody Has Enough Money To Live On.
Related: a Goodreads review of the book Scarcity, summarizing the argument that scarcity is a huge cognitive burden, which prevents poor people from getting out of poverty. It also mentions the concepts of tunneling, and cognitive bandwidth, and I wonder how these can be applied to people who are financially well-off, but still so narrowly focused on one thing they're afraid of, that they can't take a step back to see how to make things better.
An optimistic essay, The Pandemic Offers an Opportunity to Re-Wild Our Communities. I mean, this stuff is all going to happen, but it's optimistic to think it will happen through human institutions, and not over their objections:
]]>The benefit to cities expands exponentially by just getting out of nature's way. Lands that are released from traditional maintenance regimes will quickly begin to cleanse stormwater, sequester carbon, reduce the heat island effect, improve habitat, and become a low-tech but important part of a new infrastructure that is needed now more than ever. Crumbling parking lots and parks released from maintenance will take time to rewild, but once that transformation occurs, cities will feel greener and like a true respite.