May 1. I'm still reading Marshall Sahlins' book The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, and today I have a few notes on God, specifically the differences between the supreme being as conceived by Christians and by hunter-gatherers. Sahlins, with more precision, describes these two cultures as transcendentalist and immanentist.
Transcendentalists see God as separate from the world and perfectly good, which leads to the problem of evil: why does God allow it? Immanentists don't have this problem, because they see God as containing all good and all evil -- and then it's up to us, which of those aspects we call upon.
Related: a 2005 David Abram essay, Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician. "Merleau-Ponty's careful analyses of perception revealed, contrary to our common ways of speaking, that the perceiving self is not a disembodied mind but rather a bodily subject entirely immersed in the world it perceives."
The way immanentists think about God is not unlike the way we think about the government. The government is not mythical but practical. It is both one and many. Although it's a real thing, we can't exactly see "the government" or talk to it -- all we can do is talk to various people who represent the government and perform some of its functions. In the same way, the BaKongo don't talk directly to Nzambi, only to intermediaries, which could be anything from living shamans to dead ancestors to animal spirits.
The funny thing is, even totally egalitarian cultures, where no person has power over any other person, still describe the spirit world as hierarchical. Physicalists would say, they must have been exposed to hierarchical human cultures, in order to project them on their imaginary world. Psychists would say, the spirit world came first. It is the deep nature of reality to have nested spheres of influence, for example, one spirit for the mountain, and one spirit for each tree on the mountain. It doesn't mean the mountain can force the trees to do something they'd rather not do, but that's what tends to happen in human hierarchies.
May 8. From the Psychonaut subreddit, Can you you describe THAT thing? I have a thick head against tripping and have never experienced that thing, but I've read a ton of descriptions, and the top comment is one of the best I've seen, so I'll quote it verbatim:
It's like all possible paths converging into this present thoughtless moment. It's an infinite informational orgasm that loops back on itself forever. There's no where to go because it's everywhere. There's no other time because it's all of time. There's nobody else there because it's everybody. It's not a personal experience but it's somehow also all you. It's before the universe, it's after the universe. In fact the existence of a universe becomes completely nonsensical. It will always be THAT thing, there's no room for physical existence whatsoever. There never was a universe. And you can never come down from this realization. It's Nirvana and it always has been Nirvana. But then in the same paradoxical way that you forgot this unforgettable thing when you were born. You forget it and are rebirthed. It's like the realization shape shifts into non realization. It's still THAT thing but it's completely unlike itself so you don't recognize it anymore. It's just normal reality as we know it. Something like that! xD
May 13. I was reading a review of the film Soylent Green, which pointed out that the most interesting thing is not that they're eating people, but that they live in a strange and highly constrained dystopia, and yet they see it as totally normal. You can see the same dynamic in the Fallout TV show, with the vault dwellers who think they're enlightened but are totally clueless about the real world.
This raises the question: In what sense are we vault dwellers? Is there a perspective from which we appear as narrow as the citizens of North Korea appear to us? One answer, from Ask Old People, a thread completing the sentence, "I think it would be great if you could all go back in time and experience a day (or week) of _____."
Another answer, from a 2017 article, Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression. Curtis is a big critic of the modern self, and I'm less interested in that subject than in what he says farther down:
I was reading a sociologist called Max Weber the other day. Back in the 1920s, he was predicting that we would all be taken over in a bureaucratic age. It could be left wing or right wing, but we would enter into what he called an iron cage of rationality. It would be a wonderful world where everything was managed, everything was rationally done. But what you would lose was enchantment. It would become a disenchanted age.
This Aeon article covers the history of the disenchantment narrative, and mentions that the idea goes back at least as far as Chaucer, that magic is vanishing from the world.
I think, following Morris Berman, that peak disenchantment was in the 1700s. Romanticism brought some enchantment back, but then it was buried under industrialization. Curtis says, "I sometimes wonder whether conspiracy theories are an attempt to re-enchant the world in a distorted way." That's an important insight, that if something is being suppressed, it may only appear in distorted form, which conveniently makes it look repulsive to the dominant culture.
If some future enlightened society is trying to understand the mindset behind the atrocities of the 20th century, I'm currently reading the 1926 novel Moravagine, which nails it. From the context of a suffocating mechanistic perfection, the narrator seeks to feel alive in a world of wild flux, and can't even imagine how to do that without horrific murder and destruction.
May 15. I continue to think the future will be more techno-utopian, more techno-dystopian, and more postapocalyptic, all at the same time. Here's an example, and also, following Monday's post, an example of the urge for aliveness coming through in unattractive ways. This happened Saturday night, less than a mile from my apartment, a street takeover in Seattle, in which cars did donuts in the middle of an intersection, while people got as close as they could without getting killed, while recording it on their phones.
I hate the song "Dancing in the Streets". It's so smarmy, as if dancing in the streets is some bland happy thing that no one would ever be against. This was actual dancing in the streets, and everyone in the comment thread is indignant that the streets are being used for something anti-utilitarian. "Anything that blocks the flow of traffic, protests included, should result in jail time."
The video was filmed from a pedestrian overpass, and the location was surely chosen with easy filming in mind -- this action was not just adventure, but spectacle. Expect more of this kind of thing, as we get deeper into these strange times.
May 23. Short blog post from 2007, The Complex William Jennings Bryan. I was taught to think of Bryan as a right winger who opposed the teaching of evolution. But he was left wing in some ways, and the reason he was against that book, in the famous monkey trial, is that it used evolution to justify eugenics:
If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.
May 28. The main thing I'm thinking about lately is non-materialist philosophy, so I want to go back to last week's link, What's the single most mysterious thing that has ever happened to you that you still can't explain?
Some of the reports involve what I call acute intuition: a sudden strong feeling that you should do something, or not do something, contrary to your plans or routine. Like getting the feeling you should pull the car over, and then something dangerous happens. The conventional explanation is what I call peripheral sensing. Your eyes or ears must have picked up something subtle that your conscious mind missed, but your subconscious mind noticed and warned you.
I understand why people say this, because they want to get the benefits of intuition, without accepting anything weird. But I think it's a mistake on two levels. First, on a practical level, you have to exclude any intuition that doesn't fit that theory. I've been burned by this myself, ignoring accurate feelings because there's no way the information could get there through causal objective channels.
Second, on a theoretical level, it doesn't add up. If your subconscious mind is that good at scanning your sensory inputs, calculating future events, and suggesting actions, why is your conscious mind even necessary? And why are there so few false positives? Say, your subconscious mind noticed some deer in the far distance and gave you a strange feeling to stop the car, but then the deer went a different way and you stopped for nothing. This should happen all the time, and it doesn't.
Also, in my experience, and in the many reports I've read, there is no empirical difference between acute intuitions that can or cannot be explained by peripheral sensing. These two supposedly separate categories feel the same and work the same.
This suggests that the subconscious source of acute intuition is not scanning physical senses and making calculations, like our conscious mind, but doing something we don't understand. Except we sort of do. It's not a stretch in modern sci-fi, for a character to look down alternate timelines for the flash of the soul's passing, and steer away.
This reminds me of the Incas, who had wheeled toys but lacked the infrastructure to scale the wheel up for practical use. Or the steam engine, which was understood in ancient times but not fully developed until a particular set of circumstances made a place for it. In this case, I think the context we're waiting for is not technological but cognitive.
June 4. Helen Keller on Her Life Before Self-Consciousness. This was posted last week to Hacker News, with a long comment thread about the effect of language on consciousness, and the possibility of some further human awakening. Keller writes:
I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves -- and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.
June 7. I finally bought a portable vaporizer, the Xlux Roffu, and it's better than my old Silver Surfer in almost every way. The SSV has a large chamber and a raw blast of hot air. The Roffu has a much smaller chamber, perfect for small doses, and the heat goes through it evenly. It's like the difference between a firehose and a shower. With the SSV, the vapor comes out so hot that I put water in my mouth to serve as a bubbler. The Roffu has a compact cooling apparatus, so I don't have to bubble it, and I can actually taste the different strains. It also feels like a smoother high. The SSV is still better in two ways. Because of the simple design, it's easy to clean, and very robust.