Writing about progress, AI, empowerment, society, psychotools, and cosmology. suspendedreason.github.io...
Sasse: “The digital revolution that we’re going to live through... For a small number of people, with lots of intentionality, lots of habits, and thick communities of accountability... These tools are gonna be great. For the majority of people they're going to be disastrous.” Douthat: “What do you give to the normal people in that scenario? Is it a different philosophy of life? Is it a religious…
We are too thrown to know, and too temporal to track, the longterm trends. Too bound-off from the wider ways of World. We decipher old stones, haltingly and fallibly. We squint at flickering screens, simulacra of simulacra of secondhand reports. We half-remember the whisperings of elders, ambiguous and misunderstood. We transmit testimonies, and coordinate reports, into synthetic models; but the…
Stony words like ornaments adorn the silent graves. We scrutinize the potsherds' broken brushstrokes, fading. I have not been to Palestine; nor to Cathay; nor to Kievan Rus. I have not lived the shifting pledges of the passing generations. I have not heard the private words of the men in the boardroom, the Mandarin ministers of technology. I am not an expert in tax policy. I lack adequate theories…
Christian Lorentzen, for The Nation : Nolan smuggles this theory in from Eric H. Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which overturned the old thesis that the great Mediterranean cities of two millennia ago collapsed because of invasions by mysterious “sea people” and replaced it with the notion that they fell from within. As Penelope’s epiphany to Odysseus puts it after he recounts…
Dan Simmons's lovely Hyperion Cantos series, in addition to its abundant Keats lore, features a neo-Teilhardian evolution of the Catholic Church. This idea lodged in my brain, especially since neo-Teilhardian thinking has become especially popular among elites the past half-century. Most recently, Robert Hazen's Time's Second Arrow has been doing the rounds. But before that, Robert Wright's…
Yesterday I attended Catholic Mass at La Parroquia del Purísimo Corazón de María, here in Mexico City. The cathedral echoed so beautifully with the choir, you could begin to believe in God; but the homily was delivered by the priest so coldly and bureaucratically my mind wandered. I began to think the sermons should be delivered sungspoken, in the tradition of liturgical plainsong. Aesthetic…
Even if we delegate the fight against Nature to the Machines—even if we live in Abundance—there remain abundant opportunities for disharmony, conflict, and unhappiness. Arguably, most of the West already lives within Abundance. What is needed is a sort of spiritual, internal progress to accompany technological progress. How can people wake up to their suffering, and become aware of better ways to…
Is beauty truth, and truth beauty? (As Keats claimed .) Keats, like his poetic peers, was inspired by Platonist philosophy, which views beauty as an objective manifestation of the ideal, eternal, higher realm of forms. This view was largely abandoned by the late 19th C, but thinkers such as Schmidhuber (compression progress) have resurrected a more robust version, where beauty is epitomized by…
Founders in the prophetic mode offer us a vision of a unified world , a “consciously integrated and meaningful attitude toward life,” enchanting, organizing, and lending significance to participants’ conduct. Enchantment is purchased on credit . The prophet-founder, by offering a series of visions of the world, makes an implicit series of promises to investors, which racks up tech debt for…
Metabolism meats politics... Power games among the primates: How can we form a taste-based alliance? Share food and live together? Towards a metaphor of taste as the basis for social coordination. Taste names a rich, primal interface—half biology, half culture—between organism and environment: Attraction and aversion, selection and rejection. It is a theory of value in miniature: what is fit and…