[ExI] Devastated ideologies (was: italian politics as exi-chat subject)

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 06 March 2008, Jef Allbright wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote a very extropic
> thread of thought:

:) but he may not have necessarily made any new progress to report.

> >  Somebody was laughing at me the other day for suggesting that we
> > build teh tech. Odd. Another thought that I would like to add, from
> > my general observations on the state of those ideologies and the
> > "old world". The status quo takes a lot of time to update. Lots and
> > lots of time.
>
> But many structures reach the limit of their capacity and quickly
> collapse, making way for new forms.  Think punctuated change,
> unevenly distributed, but tending to ratchet forward.

This is true, and the collapse and degradation of such a large and 
distributed structure is going to be interesting and unlike the 
collapse of a ball of gas, but instead a multiphased and multifaceted 
construction of our own doing, we will see atypical fireworks.

> >  But on the other hand, we have significantly
> >  large organizations ("Left" and "Right") and ideologies still
> >  propagating and still abducting new minds even though there's no
> > real power that is necessarily making news releases to gain eyes
> > and get possible neophytes to convert (peculiar).
>
> Strange statement, considering the obvious and massive power
> structures within society which seem to be doing just that.

Hm. You're right. I'd rather refine my observation to point out that 
they are running on their own inertia of (even human) self-replication, 
to apply your terms. Otherwise there is no legitimate reason 
to 'convert' to Rightism or Leftism as far as I can tell.

> >  Today I was sitting in a
> >  psych class that was talking about 'developmental psychology',
> > going over the theories of Piaget and the like, staged versus
> > continuous development, emotional taxonomies and whatever else. The
> > designs of the studies were simply wrong -- *no*, you _don't_ do
> > longitudinal studies or cross-section studies, not at all -- that's
> > studying a mystical 'normal' brain and the normal status quo does
> > not necessarily represent something that is within the possibility
> > space of the construction or growth of the human brain, it's not
> > psychology at all (perhaps social studies, but only on a "pop"
> > level, since real social studying would involve more, you know,
> > hard (read: real) studying).
>
> I don't understand you particular criticism here, but I think it's
> significant that sociology and psychology are at the least
> "scientific" end of the scientific spectrum

I am talking about the art of psychology itself, not the sociohistorical 
context of psychology, even though that is what I am being presented. 
It is the difference between accepting staleness versus creating.

> >  And the theories of, say, Maslow, were developed so as to promote
> > a more 'humanist' idealization versus the other negative images of
> > humans at the time and while there's nothing necessarily wrong with
> > his ideas, they are not as intense as they could be. And what about
> > marxism? Or libertarianism? Republicanism? Capitalism? Objectivism
> > (cringe)? These are archaic, in more than a sense than "they are
> > old" but that they do not fall into any particular coherency when,
> > on the contrary, it seems that many historical figures were
> > 'fighting' for coherency.
>
> [Insert Arrow of Morality here, with talk of increasing coherence
> over an increasing context of values, promoted by increasingly
> effective (scientific) means...]

I'd like you to comment on the personal coherency arrow versus the 
social coherency arrow, I mentioned this either in this thread or 
another earlier today and think it would help here. (Ah, it looks like 
you did in the next snippit. But I still remember something else I 
mentioned today?) It is interesting to note that 'personal' can 
encompass society (just as I can potentially encompass an entire botnet 
or 18 wheeler to some extent, or perhaps grow and spawn enough people 
to make a society) but the reverse -- where society makes for myself -- 
does not work. (Chicken/egg?)

> > ... perhaps instead we
> >  should be working on the art of self-creation, design of new ideas
> > and societies from the ground up, integrating and sharing novelty
> > from where ever it may come from.
>
> Just as all persistent novelty results from evolutionary processes,
> we would do well to **intentionally** compete within synergistic
> systems of cooperative growth. Our current position on the
> evolutionary tree is a result of such processes, but we've just
> reached the threshold of being able to play the game intentionally.

You mention later that it is the culture that can allow us to do this, 
does this mean we need to first establish a significant population set 
first, or can this be bootstrapped from single individuals?

> >  But it seems that one must have their own
> >  internal journey of personal growth and development to come to
> > this conclusion, to some extent isolated from society.
>
> Diversity is essential to evolutionary growth, accelerating with
> selection via an increasingly evolved environment.

How is it that isolation engenders diversity?

> >  Maybe we can propose
> >  some solutions to the Keepers of the Devastated Ideologies in an
> >  attempt to minimize their damage while seemingly maximizing their
> >  missions? Or alternatively start teaching parents how to help
> > minimize the damage of society on their children as they grow up
> > and prepare for the future ("the future is now / the singularity is
> > now").
>
> My own frustration has to do with the fundamental
> (information-theoretic) impracticality of conveying larger contexts
> to smaller systems (if they could decode (decompress) it, then they'd
> already have the knowledge.)

Conveying contexts doesn't work in the first place, right? It is 
interesting, though, that I, as a context, can move from one to 
another, and you the same, but that we cannot transfer $earth through 
these bits and bytes or even to the front of our attention as a giant 
map to look at and play with, without loss of tons of relevant context. 
And we're right back to where we were months ago with training 
individuals to be able to navigate and construct contexts. Circles?

> I think the only practical way for us involves intentionally building
> a supporting framework, or Culture, promoting our evolving values more
> wisely than could any individual.  

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/