This is a huge landmark for me. Now I'm looking for peer feedback :D #solarpunk #gifteconomy #postcapitalism #commons #opensource #collectiveintelligence #collectivebehavior
https://sintropiadao.org/the-solution-sintropiadaos-life-centric-global-coordination-tool-a-3-dimensional-support-system-that-weaves-self-relationships-and-planetary-impact/
@flaviagoma rather than mentioning an Ego, I prefer to think about an innate tendency toward othering and how humans can resist that impulse
@AEMarling Hey Alan, I was not familiar with the word othering, thanks for this lesson :).. and yes, we must check this pattern and pratice non-jugment, non-violent communication and radical acceptance while respecting our boundaries. I don't believe there's anything as an Ego death, but rather we should ego check by analyzing our biases, prejudices, and fixed beliefs. It's easier said than done tho, but some must try especially in the extreme polarized and violent times we're in.
@flaviagoma @AEMarling My understanding of the underlying neuroscience is basically regurgitating sections of Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind," so take it as you will, but the "ego" is a rough metaphor for a real part of your brain called the "default mode network."
What we perceive as ego death is decreased activity in this area of the brain, which regulates connections to other parts of the brain.
Taking the individual as isomorphic to the collective, I'm curious what the social metaphor for an experience that brings ego death is...
I haven't yet read this post yet, but I've got it in my queue. I think we're working on the same problem from different ends, so I'm excited to see where this goes. :)
@Hex Interested in knowing your comments and related work once you get a chance to read it
Edit: After some thought, I think what you've diagnosed is a memetic problem and I think what you're proposing is a technical solution.
Technical solutions can generally be described via things like user stories and use cases. I'm not able to pull clear user stories or use cases out of this. You do describe the *need* for a memetic solution. I think that the technological element can be ignored for two reasons: when people align memetically they will identify solutions naturally, and cultures around the world already solved this problem generations before capitalism tried to annihilate them and erase their solutions.
Apologies in advance for the disconnected flood of ideas that follows.
/Edit
Boiled down to a few words, I'm reading this proposal is cybernetic libertarian socialism. The technology wasn't really ready when Chile initially tried cybernetic socialism. Perhaps it could have worked if not for US intervention... And that's probably the best case for decentralization anyone could make. It's definitely good that you already seem to have that in mind.
Entropy is a funny thing. It's often oversimplified. A lot of people know some form of the second law of thermodynamics: all things move from order to entropy. What popular culture tends to miss is the fact that this only applies to closed systems. In open systems things move from order to entropy, but they can also move from entropy to order locally in order to increase entropy globally.
Life is an example of order from entropy. So we aren't really working against the natural order and entropy isn't really the enemy. It's more like the emergence of the Dyad from the Monad, or perhaps like the Tao. Syntropy and entropy could perhaps almost be metaphorically mapped to Yin and Yang, not things in opposition so much as two things in balance, expressions of something else.
There's a richness to the biological metaphor that has given me a lot of insight. I definitely caught some elements of this reading through, but I feel like it's important to really focus in on. The reason it's important is that it makes things a lot easier.
Isomorphism of the individual to the collective is extremely rich. War, for example, creates cultural trauma that leads to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism stunts creativity. PTSD, resulting from individual treauma, stunts creativity by increasing activity in the default mode network.
PTSD can suppress memory. Authoritarianism suppresses history. Early childhood trauma can manifest as narcistic insecurity. Authoritarianism is a social manifestation of narcissism, always lead by someone who is themselves deeply insecure.
Individual and collective trauma are isomorphic (metaphorically isomorphic, in the Hofstadter sense), but also interconnected in generational trauma (a tangled hierarchy).
Humans are not simply the cells of Gaia, but are specially the neurons. We *act* like neurons socially. This makes all other life part of our body, other types of cells all doing different things. As the neurons, we can become self-aware. I think this is the thing you're really getting to: we must create a self-aware planetary meta-oragnism (or, awaken our planetary meta-oragnism to self-awareness).
Now this is where we can leverage the biological metaphor to make things easier. We are not individually smart enough to figure out how to do all of this, but evolution is.
The current system is self-destructive. Mutual aid increases survivability over competition. Mutual aid is a critical factor of evolution, and no system can possibly be strong enough to resist it forever. Given a sufficent density of people who align towards these goals, natural selection will eventually wipe out the dominant culture.
I have a few things to add to my reading list. I have a couple of book recommendations of my own from this.
- Abdullah Öclean's Democratic Confederalism
- Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism
- David Graeber's Debt: the first 5000 years
- Robert Wright's The Evolution of God
- Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect
The first two talk about the implementations of a society like you're taking about (with the first being actually used to create a working system). The third is important when talking about money and why it exists, from a real anthropological perspective as opposed to the capitalist apologetics we're flooded with. The Evolution of God talks about evolutionary pressures toward pro-social systems. GEB talks about how systems become self-aware. And the Lucifer effect talks about the social psychological forces that drive pro-social and anti-social behavior.
You touched on things relevant to all of these in your writing.
It is cool to read things I've thought about stated in completely different ways and using completely different sources. There's a pleasant confirmation in that.
Edit:
- Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower
@Hex Hey Hex, first thank you so much for taking the time to read my work and share your thoughts as they flood in! I really appreciate it
Yes, solutionism is something I have questioned myself deeply. And though I don't have the skills to build the tech I'm proposing, I'm still very drawn to this idea because it came to me as a movie story of a post-monetary technological society, so for my the user case was all there from the beginning.
@Hex I could see the life of a person using the personalized task recommendation engine to organize their life and make decisions on how to interact glocally.
Considering that 'when people align memetically they will identify solutions naturally' I can't see why my solution can't be the product of such memetical alignment. Honestly, now I must exactly figure out if that's the case. We should take advantage of modern tools instead of demonizing it.
@Hex My deterministic bias let me to belief all tech tools were created for a reason, including something as powerful as AI and persuavise technologies. If there's people misusing them, it's a strong indicator to foster it's proper use asap. "As the neurons, we can become self-aware" "we must create a self-aware planetary meta-oragnism" YES!
Leads me back to defending we leverage the tech power at hand today. But I'm curious to hear on thoughts on how to achieve this without a tech solution.