This is a critique of my notion that what I'm proposing is a new developing "religion" that has a different idea of what is sacred and what are rights. The seed of this idea has been around ever since some renegade insisted on doing things his own way, resisting the group. But now it is given a new power because of the realization that human limits imposed by what we can sense and what we can make into the individual brain patterns each person makes into "reality" from his or her experience.
SCIENCE can be considered one way of approaching what actually exists in much the same way as "religion", but says all truth is provisional. We cannot predict what we will discover next and how it will change our picture of the world. Yet this is what "religions" propose, because even high Buddhism has some kind of operating premise that it recommends to humans.
SCIENCE can be considered one way of approaching what actually exists in much the same way as "religion", but says all truth is provisional. We cannot predict what we will discover next and how it will change our picture of the world. Yet this is what "religions" propose, because even high Buddhism has some kind of operating premise that it recommends to humans.
This quote is from the recent article linked.
The critique is sometimes framed as "solipsism" or "narcissism" or "being in a bubble." This version brings in "market worship and cultural deconstruction." Yet he wants to bring people together and ground them in their communities through labor unions. This assumes a boxed kind of reality depending on employers and employees.
The critique is sometimes framed as "solipsism" or "narcissism" or "being in a bubble." This version brings in "market worship and cultural deconstruction." Yet he wants to bring people together and ground them in their communities through labor unions. This assumes a boxed kind of reality depending on employers and employees.
Prometheus was a kind of Pre-Jesus who gave humans control of fire and all the benefits from its use. For that act, he was hardly "unmoored." Instead he was chained to a rock while an eagle perpetually ate his liver. Maybe that's the state of modern America. But metaphors have limits, even the catchy ones we use to defend what we want to do anyway, like save ourselves and not our enemies.
Alongside the political thrashing that keeps making holes in our lives, a competing disaster tries for our attention, one that cannot be affected by individuals. Planetary climate disaster is interfering with our ability to produce food, an ability is that is so distant from many people as to be invisible. Not only are drought, storm, floods, uncontrollable fire, disease, and high temperatures preventing crops and livestock, but also the people who have the expertise and desire to know how to farm are being destroyed. This economic disaster undercuts infrastructure and compensation -- it is too widespread to save millions of people. In the past the world's population has been cut in half. In the future there may be a much smaller percentage surviving, if any.
Skyscrapers will be of no use. Fish will more important than hydroelectric dams. The first thing to fail may be our power grid and our satellite web. No one so far has even been able to provide dependable voting machines. Forming local institutions and protecting local identities must take second place. A new "religion" must be planetary.
We thought GPS and NatSav had replaced maps, but then the magnetic north pole moved (it's done that repeatedly, which we forgot) and everything had to be recalibrated. We know the importance of safe water for humans but whole populations, including American indigenous reserves, have none. The planet, indeed "reality", does not respond to desire or tragedy or any human moral and emotional context. The universe does not care about any particular life form or that mode of creation. It simply exists and we can adapt to it or die.
Blood Quantum Entanglement posting on Twitter says: "Reminder that electric vehicles run off your extant grid. Which means Teslas arent fed by Energon cubes or Tesseract energy. They're coal-powered in a really inefficient, roundabout manner." Not enough. Not enough.
"This is a case of what Professor Thomas-Homer Dixon, University Research Chair in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, describes as “synchronous failure”—when multiple, interconnected stressors amplify over time before triggering self-reinforcing feedback loops which result in them all failing at the same time. In his book, "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization," he explains how the resulting convergence of crises overwhelms disparate political, economic and administrative functions, which are not designed for such complex events."
Some of the elements of the "perfect storm" are too new to be properly understood, like radioactivity or super germs or human dynamics like selling addictions with lollipop flavors. The perfect storm is too complex and unpredicted to be addressed by individuals but every individual could help think about it, or even make preparations -- which will not be bomb shelters. A host of dystopic films have shown us how much we will depend on other people.
Not nearly enough attention has been paid to Porges' understanding that we are hopefully evolving towards understanding each other. I mean, other people have spoken of the ideal and made an attempt to describe what is shared and yet unique, but no one pointed out the mechanism of human empathy in terms of neural function, actual physical interaction that underlies the virtual unity of all humans through straightforward regard.
It begins to be clear that people are at different stages of evolution: some have not even understood that what they know about the world is limited. They believe that their own "axis mundi" is the universal and that everyone would like to be them, in fact, is simply a failed version of them. They assume that like the people who developed the theory of "homesteading", all land is interchangeable, measurable and fertile. But it isn't.
The food that is the basis of survival is different in different places and sometimes simply not there. Ask Lewis and Clark who nearly starved to death when crossing the Rocky Mountain cordillera, more complex and wide than they could have suspected. They had run out of the Peoples who had sustained them everywhere else.
Darkness engulfs the planet for half of every revolution of the planet. As we enter a period of intolerable heat and sun-energy driven storm, night might be the only relief and renewal we get. The symbolisms of the past may swap places. We may become eager to see sundown.
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