[ExI] mayan forecast

[ablainey at aol.com]

I personally do see cycles in everything including time. However my own view of a year isn't a circle like a clock, it is like a spring. 
A helix with future years stacked and hidden behind this year and previous years out of sight behind me. Which you could probably say is a perception of time that is both cyclic and linear.
Who's to say that in the reality of things my spring of time isn't actually curved around and the ends joined together? our dataset is very limited and Im amazed at how well the Myans did with apparently so little data.
Fashion comes around, politics is cyclic and we are again looking at the rise of socialism. The Earth goes round, the sun goes round, the galaxy, the atom. 
In an apparently fractallic and cyclic universe its not so hard to believe that cycles are the logical choice.

 I have often wondered why the human brain seems to deviate so much from the natural order. Just look at how we love linearity. 
Just when did we make that mental step to move from round everything to lines and right angles?
Did we pick up some kind of straight line genetic mutation?

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:18
Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast


I wouldn't have expected such a visceral and widely-varied reaction to
commentary about Mayan calendar.

Anders' reply was closest to my thoughts on the Judeo-Christian
paradigm shift to linear time.  Yeah, I know we're all better than the
primitives because they had rocks and silly ideas and we have
Science... No doubt our science will appear equally primitive and
quaint in another 5k years.

My takeaway from thinking about cyclic time was that our linear habits
tend to blind us to cyclic behaviors.  Of course the 2012 Olympics
will remain forever in the past.  Consider fashion trends though.
They don't happen once and stay dead forever.  What drives fashion?
Novelty?  New things are cool until that coolness is diluted by
mainstream adoption and the style goes out of fashion.  We forget, we
rediscover.  Retro becomes cool again because it's violated the rule
of eschewing old styles.  I wasn't trying to propose that the Mayans
had it all right.  I was attempting to convey (share) that they might
have had a different perspective on Life because of their different
perspective on Time.

Economics follow a cycle too.  Most _want_ to believe indefinitely
enduring growth.  Has anything ever delivered on that promise?
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