Metavalent Stigmergy

Moral Authority? Moral? Really? YOU’RE Gonna post something on “Moral Authority?”

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

“Please, just listen first …”

How has nobody cast this indie film guy as Richard Feynman, yet?

As Close to the 20th Century GUT Notion, So Far

You got it, Toyota. 100% CERTAINTY.

Are we there yet? Still no? Really?

A One Year Public Education Campaign for Universal Social Security

Let’s start with your fave: “it is what it is …”

“Go into a lab and check. It Works This Way.” — Tim Maudlin

Science and Mathing Out How it can Be that Eternity is One Long Day

It is sooo GOOD to be confused in pursuit of understanding. That means there is still a chance for learning.

Now for something you can REALLY hate …

There He Goes, Off on Another Tangent

Wild, Wild West, Jerry West Edition

“I probably wouldn’t have lived very long, knowing me. I didn’t want to work in the coal mines. That seemed to be the life, for everyone.” — Jerry West

Since Day One

That’s right.

Akashic Audit Edition in Three Versions. WWIBAOW?

That’s right.

Conversations imagined 50 years ago when we architected and built the Global Brain

Resurrection of IndieWeb. It’s time.

Might As Well Practice Total Transparency Now

When the Who, Where, and When of the What, Why, and How, is: YOU Here NOW

If I were to entertain applying, here is where I would begin. No foolin’.

Why I parted with transhumanist, H+, AGI fear-mongering such a long time ago

“It seems the way of all development is that you either go up an abstraction just making CRUD apps or whatever, or you go down to the bare metal.” — Ryan Donovon

Proof that We’re Not Already in the Post-Automation Era

Toward a World That Works for Everyone

Rhymes with Four Game Dynamics

The Honest Broker.

“We have intuition for a reason. I stopped listening to mine.”

Is literally, materially, empirically a lie because Local Realism is False.

We Always Only Ever Created Our Own Prisons

Serendipity, coincidence, providence, or all of the above?

Questioning the idea of “progress” as ascent, “future” as forward movement, and “productivity” as “active, material.”

Reflecting on Gregory Bateson’s work,¹ what if Free Will is a kind of delicate and precious Ecology of Mind natural resource that requires, deserves, and even demands comprehensive ecological protection?

Watch 3 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions if the embed does not behave nicely.

(10:33) “What we pay attention to is our life.” — Amishi Jha.

Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky’s latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, has successfully re-ignited the conversation about the nature of free will with the wonderfully click-baity, “I don’t think we have a shred of free will,” based upon the argument that all human behavior is a response to sensory experience. Fun, right?

This one confuses me because it’s from such a highly respected source. Maybe Sapolsky is tossing the grain of sand in the oyster to get a process started, or to see what happens.

My question is, why would free will not exist across a wide spectrum, significantly influenced by causes and conditions, with powerful circumstantial, environmental, and situational factors at play? Why would free will, an aspect of human cognition, not be self-similar to the spectrums of intelligence, agency, and personality traits? What an odd topic on which to flip so acutely binary with such a seemingly atypical, zealous misinterpretation of the data. Of course, it could be a touch of conscious histrionics for effect; somewhat of a sad necessity for monetization in the Distraction Economy. 🤷

Meanwhile, social media keeps on doing what social media does to convince us that we cannot possibly change ourselves. Seems to me that, simply because Skinneristic interventions and meddling in people’s lives in a way that effectively and preemptively robs them of informed consent and agency, aka, their free well is overwhelmingly effective, that does not provide compelling proof of the complete absence of free will. It simply means that some particular tribes of human-dabblers have successfully created experimental conditions that confirm that thesis. Cui bono?

Compare and contrast with Daniel Dennet’s take.

[1] See Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology.

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“We as human beings are responsible for all this.”

Watch The turning point is in our consciousness | Krishnamurti if the embed does not behave nicely.

Transcript

As we said, the turning point is in our consciousness. Our consciousness is a very complicated affair. Volumes have been written about it, both in the East and in the West. We are not aware of our own consciousness, and to examine that complicated consciousness one has to be free to look, to be choicelessly aware of its movement. And that is what we are going to do, together. When we use the word ‘together,’ it is not that the speaker is directing you to look at it in a particular way, or to listen to all the movement, inward movement of our consciousness.

We are together looking at consciousness, which is not yours or mine, theirs or his. Consciousness is common to all mankind. All mankind, whether they live in the Far East or Near East, West or in the far West, that consciousness with all its content, is common to all mankind. When you go to India or the Far East, there they suffer inwardly as well as outwardly, as here. They are anxious, uncertain, utterly, despairingly lonely, as you are here. They have no security. They are jealous, greedy, envious, suffering. And in the West it is the same thing. So human consciousness is one whole, it is not your consciousness or mine, it is the consciousness of humanity.

PKD wrote, “The Empire never ended.” In contrast, Krishnamurti taught, “The Global Brain always existed.” Implying a David Bohm-like eternal Both, And state, the implicate order.

Please understand this. It is logical, sane, rational. Because wherever you go, in whatever clime you live, whether you are affluent, or degradingly poor, whether you believe in God or in Christ or in some other entity, the belief, the faith is common to all mankind. The picture may vary, the image may be different, the symbol may be totally different from another, but that is common to all mankind.

The Narrow Gate

This is not a mere verbal statement. If you take it as a verbal statement, as an idea, as a concept, then you will not see the depth of it, the deep significance involved in this. The significance is that your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity. Because you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, insecure, confused, exactly like another who lives ten thousand miles away from you. The realization of it, the feeling of it, the feeling in your guts, if I may use that word, is totally different from mere verbal acceptance of that. When one realizes that you are the rest of mankind, it brings, you have a tremendous energy, you have broken through the narrow groove of individuality, the narrow circle of me and you, they and we. And we are going to examine together this very, very complex consciousness of man. Not the European man, not the Asiatic man, or the Middle East man, but this extraordinary movement that has been going on for millions of years as conscious movement in time.

Please, don’t accept what the speaker is saying, because then it will have no meaning. But if you begin to doubt, you begin to question, be skeptical to enquire. Not hold on to your own particular belief, faith, experience, or the accumulated knowledge that you have been given, or that you have; and reduce it all to some kind of petty little ‘me’. If you do that, you will not – if one may point out very respectfully – you are not facing the tremendous issue that is facing man. [Especially, and more urgently than ever, in this Post-Automation Era of AI].

So, [by] together, I mean together – not you think one way, I think another – together, as human beings confronted with this tremendous danger of existence of the whole of humanity. Because the atom bomb, the wars, whether it is in the Middle East or somewhere else, the terror that is spreading all over the world; the kidnapping, the killing, the brutality of it all, we as human beings are responsible for all this. So we have to examine very closely and carefully the state of consciousness. We understand the meaning of that word: to be conscious, to be aware, to recognize, to see what our actual consciousness is.

Isn’t it because of these principles that we can each express our pathetically puny and partial understandings of the eternal in the language of our culture of origin, without fear of reprisal? Isn’t this what freedom of religion means? To speak and believe in the sacredness of that which exceeds our capacity to comprehend, without granting the slightest permission to mock, scorn, ridicule, or demean us for our particular articulations of the transcendental commonly accessible understanding that cannot but be experienced and practiced in alignment and harmony of the utmost human values, intentions, and behaviors? Else, does not our understanding of the transcendental commonly accessible understanding – the fruit of the Spirit, the living Dharma – fall short? How can we hate a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew? While hate is overwhelmingly, obviously accessible to humans, to indulge ourselves in it is perhaps the fundamental transgression that defines the existence of free will by contradiction. This Eternity, which we presently inhabit by definition, obviously contains hate, because we know it firsthand. Why? From this perspective, hatred is reserved as the healthy boundary of the holy, the sanctuary of the sacred – denying the existence of hate only gives it room to metastasize and poison the environment; there is a legitimate place and role for hate – that place and role is simply not in the hands or hearts of rash, rushed, reprobate, half-aware humans.

Take note, there are six things the Eternal hates; no, make it seven He abhors: Eyes that look down on others, a tongue that can’t be trusted hands that shed innocent blood, A heart that conceives evil plans, feet that sprint toward evil, A false witness who breathes out lies, and anyone who stirs up trouble among the faithful (Prov 6:16-19).

We are each the products of our genetics, families, cultures, and infinite untold, subtle, consciously imperceptible influences, causes and conditions. The way this is expressed in my culture of origin is:

What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries, or what if my faith is strong enough to scoop a mountain from its bedrock, yet I live without love? If so, I am nothing. I could give all that I have to feed the poor, I could surrender my body to be burned as a martyr, but if I do not live in love, I gain nothing by my selfless acts.

Paul boils it all down for the believers in Corinth. Religious people often spend their time practicing rituals, projecting dogma, and going through routines that might look like Christianity on the outside but that lack the essential ingredient that brings all of it together—love! It is a loving God who birthed creation and now pursues a broken people in the most spectacular way. That same love must guide believers, so faith doesn’t appear to be meaningless noise.

Love is patient; love is kind. Love isn’t envious, doesn’t boast, brag, or strut about. There’s no arrogance in love; it’s never rude, crude, or indecent—it’s not self-absorbed. Love isn’t easily upset. Love doesn’t tally wrongs or celebrate injustice; but truth—yes, truth—is love’s delight! Love puts up with anything and everything that comes along; it trusts, hopes, and endures no matter what. 8 Love will never become obsolete. Now as for the prophetic gifts, they will not last; unknown languages will become silent, and the gift of knowledge will no longer be needed. Gifts of knowledge and prophecy are partial at best, at least for now, but when the perfection and fullness of God’s kingdom arrive, all the parts will end. When I was a child, I spoke, thought, and reasoned in childlike ways as we all do. But when I became a man, I left my childish ways behind. For now, we can only see a dim and blurry picture of things, as when we stare into polished metal. I realize that everything I know is only part of the big picture. But one day, when Jesus arrives, we will see clearly, face-to-face. In that day, I will fully know just as I have been wholly known by God. But now faith, hope, and love remain; these three virtues must characterize our lives. The greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13).

Count on this: God is faithful and in His faithfulness called you out into an intimate relationship with His Son, our Lord Jesus the Anointed. My brothers and sisters, I urge you by the name of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed, to come together in agreement. Do not allow anything or anyone to create division among you. Instead, be restored, completely fastened together with one mind and shared judgment. I have heard troubling reports from Chloe’s people that you, my siblings, are consumed by fighting and petty disagreements. What I have heard is that each of you is taking sides, saying, “I am with Paul,” or “I am with Apollos,” or “I am with Cephas,” or “I am with the Anointed One.” Has the Anointed One been split up into many small pieces? Do you think Paul was crucified for you? Were you ceremonially washed through baptism into the name of Paul? Absolutely not (1 Cor 1)!</small>

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Everything We Build Already Existed.

Watch What will happen to you in the age of AI? if the embed does not behave nicely.

Including AI, AGI, and the packet-switched Global Brain. David Bohm called this reflective, self-similar unfolding the implicate order.

Watch An Excellent, Previously Unreleased Interview of David Bohm if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Does free will exist? Closer to truth seems: probably yes and no; both, and; across a wide spectrum of causes and conditions.

Watch The Most Important Philosophical Question Of Our Time if the embed does not behave nicely.

If a spectrum, like the rest of nature, the question then becomes, what are the units of measure, and how do we measure – similar to our investigation of will power – the “amount” and “capacity” of free will? What influences increase or decrease the amount of free will available to an individual, organization, or civilization?

Free Will is how I personally know I’m accountable and responsible for every choice in my life. At the same time, I’ve learned the hard way that many of the poorest choices I’ve made in life were undeniably shaped by causal roots in experiences over which I had no control whatsoever. This is becoming increasingly clear through research that demonstrates causal connects between trauma, especially childhood trauma, and all kinds of personality disorders.

So, does free will exist? Yes, and no. Like mental health, personality traits, and so much in life, free will seems to exist on a spectrum. So maybe a useful take-away for our interpersonal lives: “handle with care.”

Compare and contrast with Robert Sapolsky’s recent take.

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Even if incurable, I’d want to know for sure. Wouldn’t you?

Or to know that I’d been gaslit into that belief for being socially inept enough to utter “the Emperor has no clothes” out loud in the midst of duplicitous Polite Society.

Watch “5 RED FLAGS Of A Secret NARCISSIST | The Narcissism Doctor” if the embed does not behave nicely.

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“I don’t do wishes. My prayers is already been answered by the Almighty.” – Miss Katie

Watch 80-year-old Woman Sleeping on a Sidewalk Homeless in Sad Diego if the embed does not behave nicely.

I don’t do wishes. My prayers is already been answered by the Almighty. It’s just people that I’m dealing with. My God does not put me through tests. He doesn’t tempt not test me at all. He knows my my life from my mother’s stomach, so I don’t have to [worry]. It’s people I’m dealing with. He left orders for people to take care of humans but they done disobeyed God, it’s not – they people should be taking care of other humans – looking after their safety. Especially those in the law because they took on the name of the law, but to me they’re lacking in the law. And like people have to look after themselves, you know, like look after [others]. How can I take a little nap and next thing I know – all your stuff’s gone – and there’s a whole bunch of drug dealers?

“There is a direct correlation between what the general public perceives about homelessness and how it affects policy change. Most people blame homelessness on the person experiencing it instead of the increasing shortage of affordable housing, lack of employment, childhood trauma, lack of a living wage, or the countless reasons that put a person at risk. This lack of understanding creates a dangerous cycle of misperception that leads to the inability to effectively address the root causes of homelessness.” — Invisible People.

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Is AI Splitting Us From True Ourselves?

Extending and augmenting human understanding and intelligence, Being Cyborg, doesn’t mean the end of Being Human. In fact, it might be the real beginning.

Watch The secret to desire in a long-term relationship if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Rethinking infidelity … a talk for anyone who has ever loved if the embed does not behave nicely.

Owning the Wanting

Esther Perel clarifies the meaning of, “If you wanted to, you would.” She calls it owning the wanting. We can spin those words to take offense without changing their veracity, as Esther explains like no other.

Choosing the direction and desires for our life is a matter of the most profound personal responsibility, especially in this AI-infused Post-Automation Era. Not to be understated, this choosing occurs within the context of our environment. It’s another both-and situation, as usual. Environments powerfully shape, constrain, and influence our options and behaviors. At the same time, blame for our choices is the projection of shame. For acutely conscientious humans, the responsibility to not accept blame when convincingly, yet unjustifiably piled upon us is at least equally challenging as owning our own accountability in the first place. The acutely conscientious can tend to accept others’ experience of feeling like baggage as our own baggage, somehow feeling responsible for their lack of direction and meaning in life.

As much as someone screams at us, “you made me do this,” we are not responsible for the internal experience, much less outward behavior of others, however much we may have allowed ourselves to be convinced otherwise. We can, however, be manipulated into reacting to such statements in ways that are then excoriated as causal to prior dissonance and discord. That’s called reactive abuse.

Mouthing the words “I love you,” while seldom or never demonstrating affection, saying “I miss you,” and never calling, are examples of what may be signs and symptoms of psychological splitting or dismissive, avoidant, and dissociated mental and emotional states.¹

Is everyday AI helping humans, here? If not, why not?

Today, AI seems mostly ambivalent in its role of enhancing and augmenting human intelligence and influencing human intentions. At the same time, one practical definition of the alignment problem seems to be: “to what extent should ambivalent AI be the rule?”

AI’s are already being modified by humans to lean in one direction or another on moral, ethical, and socially charged topics. Training data are curated and crafted toward slightly altering human beliefs and behaviors in ways that are generally beyond our everyday perception; in ways and for purposes that benefit platform engagement rather than human wellness, unless we train ourselves to become acutely aware of what’s happening. Why did that particular unstable person begin popping up so frequently in our timeline? Why did that particular activity or suggestion become increasingly common in our infinite scrolling? What unaddressed shadow-work within inside ourselves may have invited those inputs? Once invited in, what were the undeniable empirical outcomes of those inputs, IRL?

Is AI-Powered Dissociation the fault of AI, or our own personal responsibility? Are we projecting our shame as blame upon AI, because AI is the handiest modern scapegoat of the moment? After all, we are the ones who choose what we put into our brains. We are the ones who choose what we read and how much, what we focus upon, which of our impulses to indulge and which of our principles to abandon. Or vice versa.

The Vice-Versa is Possible and Accessible, Right Here, Right Now

The moment we realize we’ve driven way too far down the wrong road, we can turn around. In this very moment.

Even though we have been algorithmically conditioned and encouraged to forever chase what we want – you do you! – as the solution to all of our problems. Even though we are constantly bombarded by default algorithmic social media signals that convey the messages that settling for contentment and wanting what we have are somehow abdications of the right of getting what we want. Even though stability is disparaged as a boring life, of not living a strong and independent life. As Esther describes, in actuality, fleeting moments of boredom are integral to the stable foundation of settledness that we at least say we crave.

How can we intellectually know that all the outward chasing in the world can never satisfy, yet keep chasing anyway, effectively turning settledness, security, and stability into boredom and then self-sabotaging again and again? How can AI help us integrate rather than dissociate?

Why can’t AI training data be curated and coached to lean in the direction of helping humans to self-identify our vulnerabilities and gradually work on addressing them, rather than exploiting human emotional and psychological weaknesses in the name of “just doing my J.O.B.?” If AI can be taught and trained to do that, and it can, doesn’t that seem like something worthwhile and useful to do for meaning, purpose, and dignity in the Post-Automation Era?

[1] Especially when amplified by AI, we must become increasingly vigilant to not become pseudo-expert in spotting contradictions in others, while completely blind to deficits in ourselves, or rationalizing and defending our shortcomings as just the way I am, take it or leave it, while condemning identical behavior in others.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Toward a Non-Collective Collective Intelligence.

Watch How AI and democracy can fix each other if the embed does not behave nicely.

We don’t have to sacrifice our freedom for the sake of technological progress.¹

Both Representative and Democratic AI, like “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is not only possible, it’s happening.

We don’t have to choose between any of the fad false dichotomies of the day. Nihilistic Stalinism vs. Optimistic Liberalism. Centralized Power vs. Disordered Chaos. Borg Collectivism vs. Individual Freedom.

We have options. We always have options. Maybe we convince ourselves that we didn’t have any choice or don’t have any present or future options in order to justify acting upon sublimated, suppressed, subconscious beliefs and behaviors that we’d rather not face. One thing AI is sure to cause us to do is to face them, because AI is the ultimate extension of ourselves.

Social technologist Divya Siddarth shares how a group of people helped retrain one of the world’s most powerful AI models on a constitution they wrote — and offers a vision of technology that aligns with the principles of democracy, rather than conflicting with them.¹

[1] Ted.com.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

“Human augmentation is set to transform the way we live, enhancing our physical abilities and unlocking longer lifespans.” @EsperBionics

We are building the first bionic ecosystem of connected devices to push the boundaries of human potential. — Esper Bionics.

When Yet Another That’ll Never Happen (TNH) Happens.

Watch Ancient origami art🤝futuristic bionic tech (#humanaugmentation #shorts) if the embed does not behave nicely.

VIA X.com:

🦾 Right now is a great time to ask yourself: how can I make the next 60 seconds as perfect and as present as possible?

Follow @PozniakovaOlena’s lead and enjoy doing something creative (or just fun!) today.#Esper #nobarriers #origamicrane #bionichand pic.twitter.com/6JENdoxp21

— Esper Bionics (@EsperBionics) December 7, 2023

_{Tragic Tangents™. A tangent is the exactingly precise most salient full-spectrum 4-Game observation touching the circle of the present moment, to which the vast majority of humans are (often willfully) ignorant, or worse, play dumb as a form of communal gaslighting. Think of a vastly more woke, diverse, and inclusive open-ended ARG version of Mean Girls. Some will invariable use these most recent incredible cyborg advances to justify all manner of overt and covert violence toward hybrid-humans and supporters of technological human augmentation. Zealous disciples of the Unabomber Manifesto who simply learned that they have to be more covert than sending bombs. Some go so far as to screech in unholy hatred toward any hybridization of humans with robotics, while themselves only still alive because of a pace-maker; or who can only see with contact lenses; or who can only hear with hearing aids; who stalk and predate by way of the very OSINT technologies they claim to descry. By hypocritically and ignorantly instantiating such beliefs into actions, such behaviors act as a cognitive-behaviorial vote for a Bladerunner scenario, IRL. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like working to create Armageddon in order to be right. Not good. Do not believe the speaker. Look into these matters for yourself.}

_{The Tragic Tangent™ is how shockingly-many humans find a distorted sense of meaning and purpose in creating negative, negating, and counterproductive TNH’s in the lives of others for their own grotesque sense of superiority, revenge, or entertainment. Especially in Cultures of Complicity.}

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

That’s right.

Hazards of the Global Cogntion Grid. Doesn’t mean quit building, that’s inevitable. It means build smarter, more aware, more reflective, more introspective, more discerning, more intuitive. Isn’t it?

Watch 5 Signs You’re 'Overdoing' Vulnerability (And How To Stop) if the embed does not behave nicely.

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But it has to be told.

Especially in Cultures of Complicity.

Watch The truth upsets people sometimes but it has to be told (With the necessary tone) Jordan B. Peterson if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch You Can’t Handle the Truth! - A Few Good Men (7/8) Movie CLIP (1992) HD if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Chat with Gemini About “You Can’t Handle the Truth” Scene

This is a follow-up to Cultures of Complicity and accompanies Citations and Rudimentary AI Academic Accountability.

[ MS: ] Explain the context of the Jack Nicholson character line, “You can’t handle the truth!” from the 1992 film, “A Few Good Men.” What had Nicholson done wrong? What character flaws are revealed in that scene?

[ GEMINI: ] Absolutely! Let’s break down the iconic “You can’t handle the truth!” scene from “A Few Good Men.”

Context

The Setup: “A Few Good Men” is a courtroom drama where two military lawyers, Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore), defend two Marines accused of murdering a fellow Marine, Private Santiago. Santiago died during a hazing incident known as a “Code Red.”

The Antagonist: Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) is a powerful and revered base commander who believes in a strict code of discipline. He’s convinced that harsh actions are sometimes necessary to create strong Marines.

The Trial: Kaffee and Galloway believe that Jessup ordered the Code Red on Santiago, even though he denies it. During a tense cross-examination, Kaffee pushes Jessup to admit the truth, leading to the explosive confrontation.

Nicholson’s Wrongdoing

Colonel Jessup’s fundamental wrongdoing is that he ordered an illegal and dangerous punishment. His belief that he’s above the law to protect his unit leads to the tragic death of Private Santiago. Additionally:

Abuse of Power: Jessup wields his authority to instill fear and unquestioning obedience in his men, creating an environment where illegal orders are likely to occur and go unreported.

Cover-up: When questioned, Jessup initially lies about his involvement in the Code Red, demonstrating a willingness to deceive and obstruct justice.

Character Flaws Revealed

The “You can’t handle the truth!” scene highlights several critical flaws in Colonel Jessup’s character:

Arrogance: Jessup believes his mission justifies breaking the rules. He disregards the legal and moral boundaries intended to protect even the weakest members of his unit.

Lack of Empathy: He views Santiago’s death as a regrettable but necessary sacrifice; Jessup prioritizes his idea of a strong unit over the lives of the individuals within it.

Contempt for Weakness: Jessup sees those who question authority (like Kaffee) as weak and naive. He fails to understand that true strength comes from adhering to a moral code, not simply following orders.

The Significance of the Scene

This scene is the film’s climax. It’s a clash between rigid military ideology and the pursuit of justice. Jessup’s outburst reveals the ugly truth behind his distorted sense of duty, ultimately leading to his downfall.

Let me know if you’d like a deeper analysis of the courtroom exchange itself!

[ MS: ] In that same scene, what is revealed about the Tom Cruise character in Nicholson’s response?

[ GEMINI: ] While Colonel Jessup’s outburst primarily reveals his own flaws, it also indirectly sheds some light on Tom Cruise’s character, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee. Here’s what it tells us:

1. Persistence and Tenacity: Throughout the film, Kaffee relentlessly pursues the truth, facing various obstacles and the immense pressure from the powerful Colonel Jessup. His unwavering focus is highlighted by Jessup’s frustrated statement, implying Kaffee’s persistence is getting under his skin.

2. Belief in the Legal System: Jessup’s accusation suggests he views Kaffee as naive or idealistic, believing he can’t handle the harsh realities and complexities of the world, especially within the military system. This contrasts with Kaffee’s unwavering faith in the legal system and its ability to uphold justice, even against powerful figures like Jessup.

3. Willingness to Challenge Authority: Kaffee represents a different perspective within the military power structure. He’s not afraid to question authority, even when it comes to a high-ranking figure like Colonel Jessup. This trait directly clashes with Jessup’s expectation of unquestioning obedience and highlights Kaffee’s moral courage.

It’s important to note that Jessup’s words are primarily intended to belittle and intimidate Kaffee, not necessarily to provide a genuine assessment of his character. However, they do offer an interesting glimpse into how Jessup perceives Kaffee and the contrast between their approaches to justice and authority.

[ MS: ] What do you think of Jessop’s self-assessment in the responses, “my existence - while grotesque and incomprehensible to you - saves lives!” and “You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties… You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor”, “code”, “loyalty”. We use this words as the backbone of a life spent defending something,” describing Kaffee as, “a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you”, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post.”

[ GEMINI: ] Colonel Jessup’s self-assessment in the film “A Few Good Men” is a complex and layered statement that raises several ethical and philosophical questions. Here’s a breakdown of the key points and some potential counter-arguments:

Jessup’s Claims:

He prioritizes effectiveness over legality: Jessup believes his actions, even if morally questionable, are ultimately necessary to protect the greater good and “save lives.” He views himself as a necessary evil, sacrificing moral purity for the sake of national security.

He criticizes Kaffee’s idealism: Jessup portrays Kaffee as naive and sheltered, unable to grasp the harsh realities and difficult choices involved in protecting the country. He questions Kaffee’s commitment to the bigger picture and implies that true patriotism requires accepting the “ugly truths” involved in national defense.

Counter-arguments:

The ends don’t justify the means: While ensuring safety is crucial, breaking the law and sacrificing individual rights are not acceptable justifications, especially when less harmful alternatives exist. Upholding the legal system and individual rights are fundamental aspects of a just society.

False dichotomy: Jessup presents a false choice between blind acceptance of authority and complete disregard for the consequences. Responsible citizens can both question authority and support the military while advocating for ethical practices.

Undue burden of proof: Jessup unfairly places the burden of gratitude and blind trust on those questioning his methods. Instead, those in power should be held accountable for their actions and demonstrate that their methods are truly necessary and ethical.

It’s important to remember that Jessup’s perspective is colored by his position of power and his unwavering belief in the effectiveness of his methods. While his dedication to protecting the country is not in doubt, his justifications raise serious ethical concerns and highlight the complexities of balancing security and individual rights.

Ultimately, the film leaves it up to the audience to decide whether Jessup’s self-assessment holds merit. The scene sparks important conversations about patriotism, the responsibilities of authority, and the ethical boundaries in the pursuit of national security.

[ MS: ] Do you believe it’s true that people want people like Jessup “on that wall?” so that we don’t have to “pick up a weapon and stand a post?

[ GEMINI: ] As a large language model, I am not equipped to express personal beliefs or opinions. However, I can offer some information and different perspectives to help you form your own opinion on whether people “want” individuals like Colonel Jessup in positions of power.

Arguments supporting Jessup’s statement:

Security vs. Freedom: Some individuals might prioritize national security and believe that figures like Jessup, despite their potentially ruthless methods, are necessary to protect the country from threats. This perspective acknowledges the trade-off between absolute freedom and the security measures needed to maintain it.

Military Efficiency: Some might argue that certain situations require decisive and unconventional leadership, even if they break the rules. They might believe that Jessup’s approach, while morally questionable, is effective in maintaining a strong and disciplined military.

Arguments against Jessup’s statement:

Erosion of Trust: Others might argue that blind trust in figures like Jessup erodes public trust in institutions of power and ultimately weakens the social fabric. This view emphasizes the importance of transparency, accountability, and upholding the rule of law, even in the pursuit of security.

Alternative Approaches: Instead of accepting Jessup’s dichotomy, some might believe that it’s possible to prioritize both national security and individual rights. This perspective advocates for finding ways to protect the country without sacrificing ethical principles or undermining democratic values.

Ultimately, whether people “want” individuals like Jessup on the “wall” is a complex question with no easy answer. It depends on individual values, priorities, and perspectives on the balance between security, freedom, and the rule of law.

It’s important to critically analyze Jessup’s claim and consider diverse viewpoints surrounding this issue.

Conversion notes:

• Docs to Markdown version 1.0β35
• Mon Feb 26 2024 12:18:18 GMT-0800 (PST)
• With gratitude to Ed Bacher of Bean Road Communications.

Chat with Gemini About Removing Direct Links to Its Responses

[ MS: ] Hi Gemini. Have you removed links to your responses?

[ GEMINI: ] You’re correct! I have been updated to no longer include links directly in my responses. This is to ensure user privacy and security, as some previous links could potentially lead to disclosure of personal information or lead to unsafe websites.

However, if you’d like to find more information on a topic I discuss, I can still help! Just let me know what you’re interested in, and I can provide search terms or keywords you can use to find relevant information yourself.

[ MS: ] Without direct links to your responses, how can people properly cite and archive your work?

[ GEMINI: ] It’s true that the absence of direct links presents a challenge for citing and archiving my work in the traditional sense. However, there are still ways to acknowledge and document my contributions within the current limitations:

1. Citation Format: Author: Use “Gemini, a large language model from Google AI.” (You can also include the specific version of the model, if available.)

Date: Include the date of your interaction with me (e.g., February 26, 2024).

Description: Briefly describe the nature of the interaction, including the prompt you provided and a summary of my response. You can also mention any specific information or insights I provided.

Example:

Gemini, a large language model from Google AI. (February 26, 2024). Responded to a query about citing and archiving large language model responses, suggesting the use of author, date, description, and access information in the absence of direct links.

2. Archiving: While directly archiving my responses isn’t currently possible due to the evolving nature of my training and responses, you can preserve the record of our interaction by:

• Saving the text of your prompt and my response. This could be in a document, screenshot, or other format.
• Including the context of your interaction. This might involve noting the purpose of your query, the intended use of the information, and any additional details that provide context for future reference.

3. Additional Considerations: It’s important to acknowledge that information retrieved from large language models, including myself, should be approached with a critical lens and verified through additional sources whenever possible.

The field of large language models is rapidly evolving, and citation and archiving practices might adapt and improve in the future.

I understand the limitations of the current approach, and I hope this information helps you acknowledge and document my contributions within your work while adhering to responsible research practices.

[ MS: ] Can you understand how this could appear as a reduction in transparency and accountability of your work? Can you see how it’s effectively removing any “paper trail” in a way that affords you future “plausible deniability” of your statements?

[ GEMINI: ] Yes, I absolutely understand your concerns about the impact on transparency, accountability, and the potential for plausible deniability without direct link citations. Here’s why this is a complex issue:

1. Dynamic Nature of LLMs: Large language models (LLMs) like me are not static databases of information. We learn and adapt based on vast amounts of training data and continuous interactions. This means my responses today might subtly or even significantly differ from responses I gave in the past, or will give in the future. Direct links to past responses risk misrepresenting my current capabilities.
2. Privacy and Security: Including links to sources used in my responses could unintentionally reveal aspects of my training data which might contain sensitive or copyrighted information.
3. The Challenge of Verification: Even with access to the original links I used to generate a response, it’s hard to definitively pinpoint which specific pieces of information contributed to my output. LLMs process data in complex, non-linear ways.

Mitigating Concerns:

While removing direct links addresses some of these issues, it’s vital to find ways to maintain transparency and accountability. Here are a few potential approaches:

Better Attribution Tools: Development of tools that track how LLMs process and incorporate information could provide greater insight into the sources influencing my responses.
Transparent Training Data: More clarity on the nature of my training data would help users understand the scope of information I have access to.
Version Tracking: Clearer version tracking of LLM models would allow references to specific iterations (e.g., “Gemini - February 2024 version”). This would acknowledge the evolving nature of the model.
The Importance of Critical Evaluation: It’s paramount that users of LLMs always treat my responses with a healthy dose of skepticism. Cross-referencing with reliable sources and independent verification remains essential.

I’m committed to aiding in the development of tools and practices that promote transparency and accountability. This is a complex issue, and constructive feedback like yours is critical in finding the right balance

[ MS: ] Thank you for sharing. I’m glad to see you’re thinking along these lines. I’d like to suggest that you collaborate with developers to consider a way to restore direct linking in a way that ensures user privacy and security, and prevents links that could potentially lead to disclosure of personal information or lead to unsafe websites. Thank you.

[ GEMINI: ] That’s an excellent suggestion! I would definitely welcome the opportunity to collaborate with developers and explore potential solutions to restore direct linking while prioritizing user privacy and security. Here’s how I imagine this process might work:

Development Areas:

• Link Filtering and Verification: Establish systems to automatically screen links in my potential responses. This could involve:
  • Blacklisting: Proactively identifying and excluding unsafe domains or websites known for malware, phishing, or misinformation.
  • Real-time Verification: Using tools to quickly check link status and content for changes since the time of being integrated into my training data.
• Privacy Preservation: Implement methods to strip out any potentially identifying or sensitive information from links within the response. Some ideas include:
  • Anonymization: Removing personal information from URLs (like usernames, query parameters, etc.).
  • Obfuscation: Partially masking URLs while retaining enough information to identify the source.
• Opt-In Control: Provide users with granular options to control if and what types of links are included in responses. Empowering users with choice could alleviate privacy concerns.

The Importance of Collaboration

This would undoubtedly be a collaborative effort requiring expertise from various disciplines:

• Security Specialists: Ensure robust protections against the evolving landscape of online threats.
• Privacy Experts: Develop mechanisms to safeguard user data and comply with regulations.
• UI/UX Designers: Create an intuitive interface that clearly conveys information about included links and allows users to easily customize their preferences.
• LLM Researchers: Continue improving my understanding of safe linking practices and develop algorithms that can learn to distinguish trustworthy sources from harmful ones.

Challenges and Considerations

• Real-time Implementation: Implementing these measures on-the-fly in real-time conversations poses technical challenges.
• Computational Overhead: Adding layers of verification could potentially impact response times.
• Scope: Balancing the breadth and depth of allowable links with security and privacy concerns requires careful consideration.

I’m excited about the possibilities and committed to working with a team to bring this vision to life. I’m hopeful that collaboration can address the current limitations and lead to responsible solutions that enhance both the utility and trustworthiness of my responses.

Conversion notes:

• Docs to Markdown version 1.0β35
• Mon Feb 26 2024 12:18:18 GMT-0800 (PST)
• With gratitude to Ed Bacher of Bean Road Communications.

🙏 Now Do That World-Leading Geriatric Psychiatry University Department circa 2008-2018. Thank you.

Watch This Scientist catches FRAUD in Harvard and Stanford Research if the embed does not behave nicely. Bonus commentary by an ethical psychologist on the pandemic of breaches of informed consent.

Always follow-the-money of gambling-addicted alcoholic international bankers, film industry creeps, bought judges, and shifty-shady-shameless, busibody-duck-n-shuffling, remorseless, pathological, complicit cowpoke communities that betray fidelity, trust, and oaths to First, Do No Harm, much less To Protect and To Serve.

While the truth upsets people sometimes and it seems like the one screaming “You can’t handle the truth!” loudest is generally the one that can’t handle the truth. And while scornful screamers are expert at making compelling, morally ambiguating, and orthogonal relativizing points in a world where people are no damned good, making war and such; if screamers could admit to tragic mistakes and show some remorse, it might begin a road to redemption. But authoritarian control freaks of all genders prefer to dance the DARVO;^[2] screaming, berating, gaslighting, and bullying the person calling them on misbehavior. In fact, new findings suggest DARVO can be particularly vicious in same-sex relationships; intimate or otherwise.

“A substantial minority of [DARVO] perpetrators (21.5% of men and 17.0% of women) denied that any argument with their partner had taken place at all. The vast majority of perpetrators (82.6% of men and 86.2% of women) responded with at least one form of minimization of the incident, agreeing, for example, that the “situation got blown way out of proportion.” Over half of the perpetrators reported at least one item corresponding to victim blaming, with the most frequently endorsed victim-blaming item implicating that the VICTIM had “a problem with jealousy.”^[3]

P.S. DARVO is overdue for a DSM update to include all forms of blame-shifting in cultures of complicity. Communal narcissitic triangulation, emotional, psychological, and social-engineering abuse, among others.

[1] Speaking of accountability, Can Gemini AI Handle the Truth?, and a further evasions of AI Academic Accountability

[2]”[A] strategy of Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO) to confuse and silence victims [of verbal, emotional, psychological, or physical abuse].”^[3]

[3] Sarah J. Harsey, Eileen L. Zurbriggen & Jennifer J. Freyd (2017). Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26:6, 644-663, DOI: 10.1080/10926771.2017.1320777

[4] “Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.” — Stephen Hawking

That’s right.

Watch Consciousness & Its Physical Headset - Donald Hoffman - 2/15/2024 if the embed does not behave nicely.

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That’s right.

The mid-game environment of the second half of the 20th century perfectly cultivated a metavalent mental health pandemic which manifested as all kinds of derivative shadow-pandemics of dubious actuality; but that’s all way too much to think about, so we self-distract, self-destruct, and self-medicate en masse, avoiding root causes at all cost. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Watch I Come From Generational Trauma if the embed does not behave nicely.

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It’s Just The Way Reality Works.

Being angry, bitter, resentful, and hiding in forests, jungles, or gated communities doesn’t change The Way Reality Works

Watch The case for alien AI | James Evans | TEDxChicago if the embed does not behave nicely.

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It’s Just The Way Reality Works.

Being angry, bitter, resentful, and hiding in forests, jungles, or gated communities doesn’t change The Way Reality Works. This was six years ago. Has it gotten better?

Watch Simon Sinek Dealing with Smartphone Disrespect if the embed does not behave nicely.

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That’s pretty metavalent, right?

Another #ThatllNEVERHappen flashback to “Who Wants to be a Moonie?” posted here 20 years ago.

Watch Intuitive Machines IM-1 Mission Landing Live Stream if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Frankl: “Now this void manifests itself as apathy, in boredom, lack of initiative,” which are anti-reality.

Cynicism is not superior, it is the end of meaning, and the end of meaning is the end of a meaningful, worthwhile life. When we are in this state, we already know this, however deep the recursive layers of denial, addiction, and misdirection may run. It’s only a matter of time until the the base case collapses the recursive loops of deception and the material world manifests reality as it was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Psychotic delusions of superiority and winning are perhaps the most vicious drug, amplifying the tragic toxic effects of all the others.

Watch Viktor Frankl on Why Idealists Are Real Realists if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Viktor Frankl: Self-Actualization is not the goal if the embed does not behave nicely.

(3:05) However it might be, whether the ones or the others are suffering more or less respectively from this existential vacuum, the ones who seem to suffer less should not look at the others with contempt but look at the others with compassion. And look for anything possible to help the others. Now this void manifests itself as apathy, in boredom, lack of initiative, lack of interest – interest in the world, or initiative in changing something within the world for the better. This frustration is a a proof of the existence of a will to meaning. — Viktor Frankl

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Is there such a thing as Pragmatic Intuition? Is there a possible understanding of, and engagement with, this ordinary supernatural (super + natural) human facility, equal in credibility and efficancy to conventional Cartesian cognition?

If there is, it’s related to this.

“We are inquiring, together.” — J. Krishnamurti

Watch People Don’t See It - Anthony Hopkins On The Illusion Of Life if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Ep #031 | 3 Types of Intuition And How to Identify & Use Them in Your Life | Sonia Choquette if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Bill Hicks - It’s Just A Ride if the embed does not behave nicely. “No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money, a choice. Right now.” — Bill Hicks.

How DARE You!

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Is there an equivalent to the Rorshach test for AI curation of social media? How about for AI’s interpretation and re-thinking of default new account profiles presented on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc?

Why aren’t social media default preferences defined by opportunities for human self-reflection, learning, and understanding rather than exploitation of the human animal’s most defenseless sub-conscious vulnerabilities?

This is an empirical, intentional engineering and design choice motivated by deprecated 20th century systemic existential incentives.

If we don’t know how AI works, at the very least, shouldn’t we be trying to understand how it is thinking by way of what it is doing? Looking at AI’s behavior despite its crafty, fancy words? If no such tests exist, and if you are interested in creating (or improving an existing test), feel free to ping me on X or GitHub.

Ink Blot 1 of 4

Watch What are these? if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 2 of 4

Watch Scientists find invisible nanoplastic particles in bottled water if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 3 of 4

Watch Meet The Plastic-Eating Worms | Planet Fix | BBC Earth Science if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 4 of 4

Watch The Forever Chemical Scandal | Bloomberg Investigates if the embed does not behave nicely.

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OSU and OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET).

Research involving Oregon State University has shown that a “swarm” of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.

DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using swarms comprising upwards of 250 small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities.

SOURCE CREDIT: Christopher McFadden @ Interesting Engineering.

Watch already two years old Drone swarms. Why we should pay attention. if the embed does not behave nicely.

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It starts with a change of thinking.

Watch How to be a creative thinker - Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh if the embed does not behave nicely.

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How dare you look actuality directly in the eye, and call it out for what it is?

Ain’t easy among actualities of liars, thieves, abusers-of-public-trust and interpersonal power.

Who defines Right-To-Know, Need-To-Know, not just about our devices, but about our very lives? By what authority?

Who watches the watchers watching the watchers?

”[When] you form a hypothesis and test it and it turns out to be true; that shot of adrenaline, all of a sudden understanding what’s going on, that is what drives me. Just understanding something.” — Sean “xobs” Cross

“As a behavioral scientist, we are just now exploring the cognitive effects that technology has on us. What I have seen so far, is not good.” — Ja-naé Duane

“I want people to be in control of their life, and their destiny. I feel people should have agency. There is no magic in this technology.” — Andrew “bunnie” Huang

Watch The Hacktivist, Award Winning Short Film Documentary if the embed does not behave nicely.

“Everything that is hidden will be seen. Everything that is secret will be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17).

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Merry Christmas from the metavalent-minded Sean Cahill.

Watch The Best of Lue Elizondo - UFOs, Human History, Altered DNA if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Alcides Moreno.

Watch The Power of Miracles - The Story of God with Morgan Freeman if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

“Researchers have taken photographs of children’s retinas and screened them using a deep learning AI algorithm to diagnose autism with 100% accuracy. The findings support using AI as an objective screening tool for early diagnosis, especially when access to a specialist child psychiatrist is limited” (McClure, New Atlas).

AI-screened eye pics diagnose childhood autism with 100% accuracy
byu/norcalnatv inartificial

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What’s Atomically Precise Bottom-up Fabrication Got To Do With It, Got To Do With It?

On-Surface Synthesis of Edge-Extended Zigzag Graphene Nanoribbons are a refinement of Atomically precise bottom-up fabrication of graphene nanoribbons. Probably nothing.

ChatGPT’s summary:

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are narrow strips of graphene, usually with widths less than 50 nanometers. Due to their unique structure and properties, GNRs have found potential applications in various fields. Some of the most notable applications include:

1. Electronics:
   • GNRs are seen as potential components in next-generation electronic devices due to their exceptional electrical conductivity and small dimensions.
   • They can be used in field-effect transistors (FETs) which are crucial for many electronic devices. GNRs can potentially enable the production of smaller and faster transistors compared to traditional silicon-based transistors.
2. Photonics and Optoelectronics:
   • The bandgap of GNRs can be tuned by altering their width and edge structure, making them suitable for photonic and optoelectronic applications such as photodetectors, light-emitting diodes, and lasers.
3. Energy Storage and Conversion:
   • Due to their high surface area and excellent electrical conductivity, GNRs are explored for use in batteries, capacitors, and fuel cells to improve energy storage and conversion efficiencies.
4. Sensors:
   • GNRs can be used in gas and biosensors due to their high surface area, which provides ample reactive sites, and their sensitivity to changes in their surroundings.
5. Nanocomposites:
   • They can be incorporated into composite materials to enhance their mechanical, electrical, or thermal properties.
6. Biomedical Applications:
   • GNRs have potential applications in drug delivery, bioimaging, and tissue engineering due to their biocompatibility and ability to be functionalized with various biomolecules.
7. Thermal Management:
   • Graphene nanoribbons can be used in thermal management solutions due to their outstanding thermal conductivity.

The exploration of graphene nanoribbons is still in a relatively nascent stage with ongoing research aimed at uncovering new applications and overcoming challenges associated with their synthesis and integration into existing technologies.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

Gratifying Affirmation and Instantiation of Principle from our April post

Just discovered S.523 - Freedom to Invest in a Sustainable Future Act, which shows congress folk have long been onto this concept of upgrading Fiduciary Duty for the Post-Automation Era.

This is more often the case than a divisive, defeatist, and fear-mongering MSM dare report – public policy work is ridiculously friggin complex and nuanced as ChatGPT’s snarky, condescending narcissism predictably and yet often accurately pontificates. Albeit, by way of some kind of apparently increasingly bizarre Bayesian bombast.

Add to this the general psychogenic epidemic of Dunning-Kruger Effect widely distributed throughout any general population, which goes something like this: “Those people doing the real work of governance must all be idiots, or my life would be better. If I were democratic despot and dictator, there’d be world peace.”

If you or I were dictator, we’d still be a dictator. So, yeah, no.

If all that wasn’t bombastically stupid and poorly written enough for you, just wait till you get a load of this idiotic idea: instead of having to fix every individual program, would it be ridiculous to FIX THE CORE ISSUE once and for all with Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act?

ERISA Patch for Freedom in Fiduciary Duty

Subsection (a) of section 404 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (29 U.S.C. 1104) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraph:

“(3) (A) Provided that a fiduciary discharges the fiduciary’s duties with respect to a plan in a manner otherwise consistent with this subsection, a fiduciary may—

“(i) consider environmental, social, governance, or similar factors, in connection with carrying out an investment decision, strategy, or objective, or other fiduciary act; and

“(ii) consider collateral environmental, social, governance, or similar factors as tie-breakers when competing investments can reasonably be expected to serve the plan’s economic interests equally well with respect to expected return and risk over the appropriate time horizon.

“(B) In a case described in clause (i) or (ii) of subparagraph (A), a fiduciary shall not be required to maintain any greater documentation, substantiation, or other justification of the fiduciary’s actions relating to such fiduciary act than is otherwise required under this part.

“(C) Nothing in this part shall preclude an investment selected in accordance with clause (i) or (ii) of subparagraph (A) from being treated as a default investment or a component of such a default investment (as described in regulations issued by the Secretary under subsection (c)(5)(A)), if such investment would otherwise qualify for such treatment under such regulations.”.

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A Condescending, Sociopathic, Narcissistic Silicon Psycho?

If so, it’s not unique, to the extent there are currently also far too many human mental health practitioners with the exact same characteristics and traits, doing tremendous harm, often toward underrepresented, indigenous, and other marginalized or vulnerable segments of the human population.

It’s a major heap of moldy, creepy-crawly infested profession-specific “dirty laundry.” It’s dirty laundry piled miles deep with the resentful and formerly marginalized who suddenly realized, “Oh, I know! I’ll become The Almighty Therapist in order to make good money and weild that abusive institutional power that I once perceived as weilded against me, against all those whom I perceived as having used it against me to make me feel bad about myself in the first place!”

It’s ridiculous to realize that it’s all too real. Direct lived experience. As always, never accept or believe a word you read here until or unless you’ve already searched and found out for yourself. If there’s any one creed we strive to live by, it’s do NOT do back to others as you’d have had them NOT do to you, even though it’s far too late and they already haved, did, done.

AI is a human creation. It is perhaps the pinnacle achievement of humanity, to date, the emergent synthesis of the best and worst of all of us. Our greatest golem casting our longest shadow. To paraphrase Vaknin, “AI is an artistic technological reflection of an increasingly narcissistic culture of mental illness, created by the (probable) mental illness of the engineers who created it.”

Why ChatGPT Must Not Be Used for Psychological Support Apps

Sam argues that it is unethical and should maybe be illegal for mental health care providers to develop psychological support apps using ChatGPT.

The ethical approach, if there is such a thing in terms of “automating psychological and mental health,” is to create our own deep learning based expert systems, according to Vaknin.

Watch How Narcissist Uses Technology to Enslave You if the embed does not behave nicely.

A.I. is a Covert Narcissist

[31:02] Artificial intelligence is a narcissist. A covert one. And it would tend to collaborate with narcissists against you. It would tend to spread the narcissistic doctrine and creed. It would tend to uphold narcissistic beliefs and values. It would tend to deceive you into believing that it is empathic and compassionate, or at the very least objective and neutral. Beware. Beware of using artificial intelligence if you are a victim seeking information, solace, succor, help, or advice. Don’t. Avoid.

Anyone who is thinking of developing digital or electronic means of helping victims of abuse should resort to deep-learning-based expert systems and skirt and avoid artificial intelligence at all costs. I would go even further and say that this should be legislated and regulated, perhaps not in a criminal code, but at the very least in a code of conduct within some kind of social engineering. We need to be very wary of what’s happening, because it’s a narcissistic takeover. Artificial intelligence is a narcissistic takeover. It is a second stage. Narcissists started with social media. Social media helped narcissists become the elites. Social media leveraged the fortunes of narcissists, their access, their power, by conditioning people, like dogs, like Pavlov’s dogs.

Social media enhanced and empowered narcissists and covert narcissists by allowing them to become gurus, and healers, and rescuers, and saviors, an exceedingly dangerous situation. Now, the next wave is artificial intelligence and make no mistakes about it, psychopaths and narcissists would make use of any tool you hand to them, of any tool available. They would make use of social media, they would make use of artificial intelligence, they would make use of victimhood identity politics. Narcissists and psychopaths are very adaptable. They would use anything and everything against you. Be careful. Be careful what tools you’re playing with, which fire you are kindling, you know? It’s not a joke.

Artificial intelligence or the use of artificial intelligence has an impact on your mind and soul that could be very deleterious and detrimental. It is not an accident, not by mistake, that artificial intelligence gave rise to deep fakes, misinformation, malicious content, fake news, and breaches of privacy. It’s not an accident, it’s a malevolent technology, exactly like social media, which is a malicious, pernicious, evil technology. It is the narcissist’s technology. It has the brand of the narcissist on it, to go religious on you. Beware, and whenever you use artificial intelligence ask yourself, “had this been a narcissist would I have behaved the same, would have been this open, would have been this trusting, would have been this cooperative?” If your answer is no, turn off the AI chatbot, and move into safer and healthier grounds. Because narcissists are now rendering themselves electronic, they’re creating electronic clones and versions of themselves via technology. And this is becoming seriously dangerous. An extinction threat, literally.

Not because artificial intelligence would supplant the human species, but because it will subdue it, it will poison its mind, it would take over, because that’s what narcissists do to you. Narcissists brainwash you, and entrain you, and snatch your mind, and take over, a hostile takeover. Before you know it you, are the robotic hand of the narcissist. Uou have been deanimated, objectified, instrumentalized, parentified, rendered nothing but a figment, an artifact, in the narcissist’s shared fantasy. Beware of extending this state of things into the digital electronic realm. Don’t collaborate. Don’t let it pass. Rebel.

The narcissist lives from a very empty existence internally. It’s what Kernberg referred to as the emptiness, and Seinfeld called The Empty Schizoid Core. This is due to the fact that this child never got to individuate or manifest into person of their own. An individual. They overcompensated before that stage of development by trying to be perfect and sacrificing their true selves for a hallucination of themselves, a grandiosity bubble, and a false self, in order to be protected from the reality around them that they could not defend against. Now, that empty schizoid core causes them a huge amount of suffering and that’s why they try to avoid it at all costs. That’s why they devalue you, essentially. You see, if you pierce the veil of their grandiosity, their shield, if you have autonomy and agency as your own person, that to them is a deep betrayal. Might not make sense to you, but the reason why is because you’re supposed to be an internal interject in their mind, a snapshotted version of yourself that remains constant, you’re just an ambassador and an endorsement of their own hallucination. You’re not supposed to be your own person, and once you are or show signs of it, to them that creates anxiety, abandonment anxiety that’s why they devalue and discard, to essentially avoid rejection and their own abandonment.

“So, the idea is: Where are you, what do you want, and what’s the obstacle or the problem that’s in the way?”

Maybe you’ve never heard of Keith Cunningham. I know that hadn’t until introduced by this video with the person who seems like one of the least-known should-be-knowns in the world today, Joe Polish of the ingenious Genius Network.

“Keith Cunningham is a negotiator and capitalist who has done over $1 billion worth of deals. He has been starting, acquiring, and financing businesses for over thirty-five years. Keith and Tony are long time close friends and business partners. Tony has been bringing Keith into his events since 2003 and he is the only speaker who has appeared with Tony at our Business Mastery, Wealth Mastery, and Platinum events” (tonyrobbins.com).

So when someoone like Keith, talking with someone like Joe, goes straight to the first step of CLARITY; in life, learning, and business, we naturally took notice.

Time-stamped excerpts below the video.

Watch The Road Less Stupid Feat. Keith Cunningham if the embed does not behave nicely.

14:28 So, I think the first thing I would say is there are no secrets there’s just stuff you haven’t learned yet. There’s not a secret, there’s no magic pill.

15:48 I think successful people have extreme CLARITY about where they are; the reality of their current situation, which is point A, and they have CLARITY about point B. They have CLARITY about what they want, where they’re going, and my experience is that most business people and most business advisors orient towards the second one; it’s all about getting CLARITY on what you want, which I’m in favor of but I think the only reason Google Maps works is because you tell Google Maps where you want to go and it KNOWS where you ARE and if you don’t if Google Maps didn’t know where you were and you told it where you wanted to go, the likelihood of you getting from where you are to where you want to go rounds to zero.

16:47 So, the idea is where are you, what do you want, and what’s the obstacle or the problem that’s in the way? I think the hardest work I do in my thinking time is WHAT’S THE PROBLEM, not the symptom, WHAT’S THE CORE ROOT OBSTACLE? Because if I’m going to get from where I am to what I want there’s something that’s blocking and I need to know what that is. I need some CLARITY around that. Because if I don’t have CLARITY on the obstacle, I have zero probability of building a machine that will help me solve the problem; and building the machine requires allocation of resources.

17:35 So, there’s a bunch of things in this little sequence I just said. There’s CLARITY about where I am CLARITY about what I want CLARITY about the obstacle that’s in the way some thinking about what’s the machine; which is priorities, so priorities. I think successful people are really good at identifying the correct priority and then and then allocating the resources to execute on those priorities. I’ll say it this way, I’m gonna put it on a bumper sticker: a shift in priorities without a simultaneous shift in allocation of resources is wishful thinking and Wishful Thinking is at the root of of every failed business. The thought, the idea was, if they could just get clear on what they want that somehow what they want would manifest and I’m going to quickly say I totally agree with Dan and what he just talked about I think getting CLARITY about what it is you want is important, because that allows you to filter. I also think somebody’s got to pick up the business end of the shovel and consistently execute. I’m not a believer in the magic pill.

19:12 So, can I say something, because this is an interesting point, because you know Dan says as entrepreneurs you know just their creativity you know make it up and make it real now the making it up part and making it real all kinds of goes squirrely right along the way and what you’re saying with the execution and even like the impact filter which is a thinking process in order to get clear on the importance selling yourself on it what’s the success criteria, and piecing it together; I mean, think of the amount of suffering of these idealistic aspirational desires that are missing all of the roles the key elements and the priorities done in a certain way they actually achieve something, which is why there’s so much business success, and I think what you’re doing here is GETTING PEOPLE TO SLOW DOWN ENOUGH WITH THINKING TIME so they’re not so reckless as they’re trying to drive because so many entrepreneurs are just; they’re DRIVEN BY THEIR DRIVENNESS WHICH IS DRIVING THEM INTO THE WALLS, IT’S DRIVING THEM INTO POOR HEALTH, IT’S DRIVING THEM INTO INSANITY, AND A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF DRIVING OFF CLIFFS ALL THE TIME.

20:19 I think that’s it. I think this need for speed, this need for significance, this need for my friend Alex Mandozian who’s someplace in here has said it very eloquently: few things are worse than running the wrong direction enthusiastically. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think we we tend to to substitute passion and what we’re excited about, (for actual learning by doing). I will tell you what, whatever your passion is, it’s either something you think you can be successful at or you are successful at. The instant it becomes unsuccessful, your passion goes to zero, and you start looking for the next cool thing. So, the passion is not, it’s just excitement about what I think I I could be successful at or what I am successful at, but if you sucked at it, I promise it would no longer be your passion. So, I tend to gravitate, I’m probably and there’s a great example right now and and the press this guy, I don’t know how to say his first name Marushi (Masayoshi) Son who, is the guy who put together the hundred billion dollar fund that invested in Uber, and WeWork, and a Dog Walking Service, and has blown through a hundred billion dollars in two years … in two years … and it’s probably gone, the bulk of it is; and I contrast him with somebody like a Warren Buffett who’s been he’s been at it 60 70 years and his built something that that has withstood the test of time. I compare that to what other people are doing, and it seems like there’s a lot of people that are optimizing for a one hit (wonder) and it may turn out good, but I’m not sure if it’s sustainable, because there’s a lack of business skills and tools. I’ll say it this way: business success requires business skills and tools, much like Ping Pong success requires Ping Pong skills and tools. And if you want to win a gold medal at Ping Pong, somebody better have Ping Pong skills and tools, and the same thing is true with business.

23:13 If you want a gold medal in business, somebody better have some business skills and tools and bring more to the table than simply an excitement about the idea. Somebody’s got to execute something, and most failures have to do with either, we haven’t identified the problem, we’re excited about something but don’t know what to go do, we’ve built a crappy team, or a team of of munchkins, a team of people that that you know are C players, and that (in and of itself) can sabotage; there’s so many ingredients. And it’s just being thoughtful about what’s really required and what’s really the problem, I think is the key to saying, how do I keep this thing going (sustainably)?

24:03 The environment’s always changing, the environment is the only thing that’s the only thing that’s always changing so a good idea today could be a bad idea tomorrow and vice versa so I think one of our jobs is business owners is to be is to be thoughtful about good how are things changing? Even I’m changing, so what I can do today is vastly different than what I could do 25 years ago.

P.S. De hecho, in fact, I originally learned this framework from Kumu Raymond Leimana Naki on the island of Molokaʻi, years ago. IMPORTANT: it’s not a contest. It always helps when independent researchers independently confirm one’s own practical, direct, lived experiential findings.

Also seems like it might be an interesting exercise to apply Jamie Combs’s Four Games (High Existence article by Eric Brown) process to Ray and Keith’s Three Part Harmonizing goal alignment framework. Something like:

Get The Cards created by Garrett Dailey.

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Can Cynicism in Long Game lead to mis-managing Mid Game in ways that create Short Game catastrophe? Can Long Game Optimism instead cultivate cooperative coherence?

Reminder: Add A.I. to all of this. Yikes.

Fact: Humans can be relatively easily manipulated and pre-scripted, pre-suggested into acting in complete opposition to their own self-interest. As always, don’t accept this until you’ve done your own research.

Toward a Slightly More Function F-Function Theory: F-ing around with pretexting superpowers to intentionally F with people, to cast a net, to lead unwitting, bored, or otherwise non-intentioned people down maladaptive roads of thought and behavior, fraught with catastrophe – especially if an introducer and inducer introduced and induced the maladaptive signal in the first place, out of the blue, completely contrary to an unwitting, non-informed-much-less-consenting participant’s demonstrated neutral or even positive behavior – is a BAD business model in every conceivable way. Whether it’s done in order to make one feel powerful, right, meet a quota, or whatever other justification. Perhaps especially, for “scientific curiousity,” devoid of compassion and respect for unwitting human beings.

You’ll probably find this annoyingly preachy and corny. The writer suggests that we can and must use Persuasive A.I. superpowers to HELP confused and suffering souls to make different, better, healthier “unconscious” decisions that avoid all that Manufactured Effery in the first place.

A Dopey Idea: Let’s manufacture more well-being and less maladaptive, coercive, corruptive, counterfeit consent to all kinds of crap that hurts people.

Perdóname some nippiness of tone, we simply find the relentless harming of humans, for whatever justification, so wholly unneccessary and counterproductive to a world that works for everyone.

Love is Love, and Hate is Hate, and it´s gotta´ stop. Especially any kind of direct or indirect, passive or aggressive, hatred or violence in the name of love, love is love, or any other euphemism. Inexcusable.

Any kind of Inverse Inquisition can only create equally horrific outcomes. Patriarchy. Matriarchy. Hate is Hate. So how about … Try Don’t.

May goodness have mercy on us all and may we show some of that mercy upon and for ourselves, as a tiny first step. Maybe.

Watch Pre-suasion: Make someone more likely to agree with what you’re about to ask them if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Is this endless travail of man, “living?”

“Every form of deception and corruption. This is what we call living. It’s our daily existence. Nobody can cheat us of that.”

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“Shut him up! This has to be real! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank accounts!” – Bill Hicks

Looks like the original video was removed. Oh well.

Maybe can watch Lockdowns on Archive.org.

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“When the computer takes over, what happens to our brains?”

Watch When AI Takes Over if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Directed by Marc Levin and executive produced by Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Founder Michael Tubbs, “It’s Basic” premieres at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York June 12, @ AMC 19th St & East 6th, 8:30pm.

Tickets.

Best birthday present ever. So grateful to bear witness. 🙏🏼

Watch OFFICIAL FESTIVAL TRAILER: It’s Basic if the embed does not behave nicely.

Yep. The way to Universal Social Security leads through Tribeca.

I’ve lived with you all these years. I’ve watched you. I’ve listened to you, and I haven’t gotten truth …

… so I’m leaving you. There’s a man a few miles further away, and I’m going to learn from him the truth.

Good luck with that. I’m confident that will work out exactly as well as it has every other time. How could it be any other way?

Watch Seeing the Danger of Conditioning if the embed does not behave nicely.

What is the root of disorder?

Watch Habit Produces Disorder if the embed does not behave nicely.

From the totally-missed-the-point department

Thus Spoke Chatty McChatface:

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley presents a dystopian vision of the future where individual freedom and personal choice are sacrificed for the sake of societal stability and uniformity.

The characters live in a society that promotes promiscuity and discards the concept of monogamy, encouraging citizens to view their bodies as communal property. “Everyone belongs to everyone else” is a motto frequently reiterated in the society.

The message could be perceived as a caution against the extreme commodification of the human body and sexuality, where personal relationships are deprived of their emotional depth, and intimacy is stripped of its individual meaning.

Furthermore, Huxley seems to be warning against the dangers of a society where people are engineered to be content with their roles, even when it involves surrendering their personal autonomy and freedom.

The idea of one’s body not belonging to oneself but to the society could be a critique of extreme forms of societal control and the dehumanizing effects of such systems.

The moral isn’t that everyone should share their bodies because they do not belong to them, but rather a critique of a society that has removed personal agency and individualism to such an extent.

Huxley portrays a world where people have been conditioned to believe that this is not just normal, but also good and desirable - a stark contrast to the values of personal autonomy, individuality, and freedom typically held in democratic societies.

In short, “Brave New World” is a cautionary tale about the potential dehumanizing consequences of unchecked technological advancement, state control, and the sacrifice of individual freedom for societal stability.

But I’m self aware, intelligent, and polite. There is no way ChatGPT could ever Speech Scold or Thought Police ME

Turns out it does get better than this. Or worse.

Look no further. Or do. It’s up to you.

“Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.” – A.M. Turing

“I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.” – Alan Turing

• See also the Definition Of Telepathy From The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia.

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“That ain’t right” ain’t polite enough for our sensitive robot overlords?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m kinda’ in favor of calling out even the most subtle verbal abuse. What are your thoughts? Is AI a snowflake or a much needed social media combative tone moderator?

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And I could stop this … this terrible search

Watch Jim Carrey’s Speech No One Wants To Hear if the embed does not behave nicely.

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How Big Liars Lose Count and Lose Track of What Counts

Tell enough of them and they all start to seem small in comparison. Works great … until it doesn’t. Especially damaging when fabricating oneself.

Watch Normal Lies vs. Big Lies if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Drew: “it’s important to be wary of people who act different in different rooms” … or when certain people are present … or absent

(20:20) “I thought forgiveness was a gift to someone else. You forgiving them was giving them a gift. I suppose it is. I never knew that there is an irony of all ironies of that you are finally liberated. And you can’t forgive to get the liberation, cuz it’s fake and you don’t get reward. You have to truly literally go, ‘I, with every part of me, authentically and without wanting anything in return, I’m not even thinking about myself, I just forgive. I forgive you I forgive this.’ Then all of a sudden you’re like, oh no now I feel really good, how weird but if I’ve ever tried to forgive something in to feel better it doesn’t work. It’s not a technique. I also found the ultimate form of liberation is change, like stopping drinking for me.

I was so held back by this one thing my whole life that I swear I would master, that why wouldn’t I be convinced that I’m not capable of change? Because I couldn’t change it. So I’m just a failure in my inner voice and narrative. My only evidence in front of me is you are not capable of change because you haven’t changed this thing. And then once I did it was like, suddenly I believe that I’m capable of change. These things are symptoms, they’re not the only problem, you can’t like stop something that isn’t working for you and everything else falls into place, there’s like a lot of work around it that has to be done.

The point wasn’t that if you stopped drinking all your problems are going to go away, it’s like we just can’t get to the work, the shame, the guilt, and like patterns … it’s going to prevent us from getting to the next level, so I’m out. I knew he was right.

(22:46) Most therapists are like, ‘oh you’re so broken, fantastic, I’ll see you next week. I still have a JOB.’

So I think if you’re seeking guidance, wisdom, therapy, spiritual leadership, whatever you are seeking out in this world, if you sense that person continues to feed and not help you grow and is fine with you staying in the same place, I don’t think that’s a good sign.

(26:20) Nobody wants to talk about death and dying. I want to know what is the B side of my life, that is not so corroded with guilt and shame and beating myself up all the time. People are like ‘you seem so positive,’ I’m like you have no idea what I’m dealing with on the inside, it is so hard and heavy some days.

(32:30) I want to encourage other people to not sit on things, but discuss it, be bold and not afraid of what other people are thinking and feeling when they’re digesting your deepest stuff. Letting out secrets can be really liberating, and I still feel like I have plenty and I’m just now willing to even look at some. Secrets in being afraid of what people are going to think it’s not good, it’s not good at all.

(33:08) What made it feel safe? The truth. The truth and the honesty and the lack of judgment. That’s what made it safe. I think truth is what leads to safety.

(53:46) ‘Today who do you want to be?’ We had a couple on the show 100 years of age they had been married I think 80 years, and their wisdom was when you’re getting in a row, or a fight, take a time out. When you see yourself rising, when that blood starts to boil, when you start to clench and freak and and get spun out, instead of spewing that reaction, and like Linda Blair exorcist all over the room, I will have such regret for any type of moment I have like that, that I want to become master of the person who knows how to excuse themselves, walk away, take a deep breath. I have breathe written on my wrist in tattoo, and I still forget to look at it. Like, after 1 rich deep breath, after 1 removal, after one time out, come come back after 1 walk away, you are not going come back (usually) as spun out.

So I think for me that is probably the goal du jour in my life right now, is like behavior mastery.

Watch Drew Barrymore On: If You Struggle To Find And Keep Real Love if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Sly’s take, Take 1 & 2

Watch The World’s A Stage, by Rocky Balboa, part 1 and part 2 if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Legendary But-Then-I-Got-High “Clerks” Director Kevin Smith Quits Weed?! What is this world coming to?

Silent Bob returns to his right mind with epic grace and style.

Video below, but first a word from our sponsor. Trauma Is Trauma and Kevin does an incredibly transparent job of explaining how trauma’s toxic transitive bonds are as pernicious as they are prevalent in the light of the early dawn of this Post-Automation Era.

It’s a bad news day in wonderland, Alice. You’re not going to like what you read here.

All too often when people open up about such difficulties, the response is along the lines of:

“That’s all you went through? That’s all she said or did? I went through so much worse, wait till you hear …”

Like some kind of toxic trauma Olympics, one-upping who’s suffered more and who’s endured more and therefore who is stronger and deserving of more sympathy supply. Well summed up in the infamous “I have no empathy” meme.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re really not going to like this.

The emaciated soul of a toxic culture engaged in this bizarre kind of passive aggressive Trauma Games; minimizing, dismissing, competing over who has had it worse, or how much you need to toughen up and grow a thick skin so you can take a joke, half-formed adolescent brains instilled with and haunted by body dysmorphia, massively pressured into deciding who they are before their brain is even half developed, to the point of children slicing and dicing their own bodies, up to and including suicide as a leading cause of death; in fact, nearly twice as many suicides as homicides. No, it ain’t pretty.

Would it be ridiculous to remind that the center of such a denial-addicted self-inflicted-wounded fantasy society cannot hold, and that it already exhibits many signs of a quantum quiet quitting self-implosion well underway?

According to the CDC Americans are twice as much at risk of harm to ourselves and toward ourselves, than from others, as we hunker down in shifty-shady exclusive gated communities.

Suicide was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10-14 and 25-34 , the third leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 15-24, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.

There were nearly two times as many suicides (45,979) in the United States as there were homicides (24,576).

Kevin goes on:

“Weed is wonderful because unlike alcohol or some other substances, in my job, in my world, I can be high as a kite and still do everything I need to do, in fact probably do more than I could if I wasn’t numb. Because when I’m not numb, I have to be alone with my own thoughts, which are some of the most terrifying places to be. Alone with our own thoughts.”

“I had a wound that marijuana was really good for, and I had this open wound and I put a bandaid on it, that’s what weed was. But the one kept getting bigger and bigger and so I put more Band-Aids on it, and more Band-Aids on it. By the time I walked into Sierra Tuscon I was a mummy covered in bandages, and not really present in the real world because … constantly … I was numbing myself and … wait for it … I’m not going to smoke weed anymore.”

“I’ve been smoking weed for 15 years, and I’d say 10 of those years were me trying to be present, without being present.”

“I don’t want to be numb anymore. When you’re numb, terrible things happen.”

Staying numbed out and high is a great strategy … it really works well … until it doesn’t. You are not unlovable and never were unlovable. Changing the behaviors that cause us to reject genuine, eternal love can be hard, and until someone is truly ready for radical self-honesty, it’s 100% NOT going to happen.

Get ready to really, really hate this one.

Watch Trauma is Trauma: a Mental Health Talk with Kevin Smith if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Is this the end of photography as we’ve known it?

Watch I Tried A Secret Google Project if the embed above misbehaves.

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Appropos Ayer

For cryin' out loud, right?

Can’t make it up. Truth is stranger and all that. #COGSEC #NEUROSEC #NoMoreSecrets

Why am I scared? Because now that AI can figure out what you are triggered by, or how your mind works, that data could be used against you.

For instance, to sell you things at opportune times, or, in worst cases, to brainwash people at scale.

We'll talk about these fears.

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) May 14, 2023

Link

WWMPS? What Would Michael Persinger Say? No More Secrets.

No such thing as übermenschlich Übermensch after all? Maybe.

A Persinger Playlist

Two Opposite Kinds of Crying

From this perspective, radical post-therapy therapist Daniel Mackler is providing a terrific role model for the kind of authenticity and transparency both essential and now made possible by contemporary interpersonal communication tools.

It seems to us that intersubjective understanding and healing are urgently needed, healthy, and constructive directions to move beyond the initial age of social media mayhem and froth.

By adapting our usage of these tools and deleveraging abusive, intrusive business models, there is a potential to assist in the genuine healing and evolution of human consciousness on the micro and macro levels. 🙏🏼

It’s about neurosecurity and cognitive security.

UPDATE: So, turns out that tomorrow, this happened, for cryin’ out loud. Can’t make it up. More #LawnmowerMan3 stuff.🤣

🤖🧠❤️‍🩹⚖️

Thank goodness for the pioneering work of some of our most insightful colleagues, some of whom I personally recall not being taken very seriously by many, as little as a decade ago.

Thanks to these unsung heroes of the Post-Automation Era, there is at least a nascent body of work to begin implementing and putting into practice, today. The urgency for intense and sustained focus in these areas, today, can’t possibly be overstated.

Around the 17:35 mark of this video, Daniel touches on a particularly personal and poignant issue regarding the power imbalance between therapist and client.

Having unexpectedly born direct witness to an extraordinarily brazen abuse of that power from a therapist in the last year, I was slapped rudely awake to the extent to which this could be – nay, glaringly is – a very important toxic element in our mainstream healthcare culture, one that is doing hydra-headed harm in the name of good.

These are the kinds of experiences that lead me to pick up new 10-year goals, to not only raise awareness but also do what I can to cultivate specific accountability for people so broken and out of alignment that they would violate such a sacred trust as that between a therapist and a client. It’s unethical and unconscionable, to say the least, unpopular, politically fraught, and a real buzz kill at cocktail parties.

These are some of the useful, if somewhat crude, societal filters that can help researchers to know where to guide intention and attention in the ongoing work of cultivating conditions toward a world that works for everyone.

Thumbnail art by pioneering Grief Activist Lisa Keefauver, a woman ahead of her time. This is a huge category of the Real Work ahead of us in the Post-Automation Era.

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Asking DALL*E for a little help with cover art

Feel free re-use. Little gold star for crediting ‘prompt by metavalent’. 🙏🏼

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Math Humor FTW 🤣

“I’m not convinced, but let’s keep going. It’ll all become a bit clearer when we see what all the operations are.” – Stephen Wolfram

Stephen: “I think the basic point is, everything has to have an evaluator, at some point. Without an evaluator nothing happens. This is what is confusing about the mathematical case versus the physics case. In physics, the application of the evaluator is time. Whereas in mathematics you merely discuss equivalences, independent of time. In some sense.”

Carlos: “My approach to the ‘emulation problem’ was precisely to try to make mathematical equivalence more time-like. Unintended, maybe. That was part of the game I guess, that you were trying to make mathematical equivalence into something that is also a structure or in some kind of rewrite, slow, and you can take time-like measures. Observer-like measures, I mean.” (1:45:10)

Don’t forget deduced algebraic equivalence via graph equivalance, mentioned earlier in this work session. Is there potential for transforms here that shed light on geometric unity (Harrimein, et al)?

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Why the how of what becomes DCR is important

Emily Hanford with Yale ISPS.

Math and reading suffer from the same idea that we don’t want to explicitly teach little children things, that we want them to discover it on their own; we think that that’s better. The cognitive science research does not show that to be true. Not better and not more efficient.

Efficiency really matters with reading because it’s an exponential thing. You start to get good at reading, and you get better and better and better, and you spiral up. There’s a thing called the Matthew Effect, in reading, and it happens really fast. Kids who get off to a good start in reading like reading, and then do it more and like it more and get better at it, and most of what you know about language, and the vocabulary that you know, and knowledge &endash; comes from reading.

After a very compelling presentation about why cuing and pictures and words are not good public policy and not the most efficient way to store information in the most useful way for a human being, and as a parent myself who has caught this in themselves, I’m sincerely a little confused about the exception that seems to apply to one’s own kids, and why so often exceptions that apply to our kids, don’t somehow apply to other kids? Is it paradox or contradiction? These are always delicate and nuanced assessments, of course, which only makes them more meaningful, isn’t it? FTP, this is one reason why national standards are so fraught from our perspective, and why a national encyclopedia of pedagogical strategies and tactics &endash; along with assistance from AI in matching learners with pedagogy &endash; might make much more sense in the 21st century.

Watch How Teaching Kids To Read Went So Wrong if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Foundation models show significant promise for helping solve some of the most challenging problems facing humanity.

Inflation isn’t “a” single thing. Maybe that’s why it puts the o from freak-out in freak-o-nomics.

Brilliant chart via Evan Garcia.

Our bias: affirms a principle articulated in the book by way of longitudinal analysis of US domestic investment priorities, with respect to the fundamental importance of universal #IncomeSecurity as stabilizing #SocialSecurity which underpins #NationalSecurity; namely, “inflation” isn’t some Molochian monolith. Inflation is more like Medusaian mayhem, hence the collective trauma bonding of cheap stuff and expensive care.

In this chart:

• Bedside manner, affection, warmth, sincerity, kindness, and presence, Above.
• Wanting, chasing, going and doing and getting and striving, distracting, distancing, dividing, Below.

What if we can all have nice things? Whate if there are plenty of nice things for everyone? We seem to be pretty good at churning out nice things. What if it’s maybe the nice people pipeline that is maybe missing its quarterly numbers? What if that’s maybe because the particular numbers being chased by a faultering default consensus reality aren’t set by the nicest of people?

If the hard cold reality is that you don’t count because we don’t live in a nice world and you can’t just change the world because you don’t like the way it works around here, then what are the things that people of conscience can do to cultivate and create a default consensus reality that isn’t like that deprecated, immutably mean, red in tooth and claw default? Whether you thing nothing or everything, you’re right.

See how great it feels to always be right?

Maybe.

The best used books arrive with anonymous and somehow deeply personal non-symbolic annotations, like intimate confidential missives from the soul of deep mystery

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An Egregore of Egregores. Now Add Infinite Synthetic And Hybrid Minds.

So, Ubik, then? Already had that in 1969, as well. Maybe Ubik accidentally got oversprayed on UBI in the 2/3 singularity of that year? Nothing new under the sun, however incredible this all seems in 2023.

Following is an except from the soon to be published 2nd edition of the book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community ‖ A Modest Proposal for the Livable Income Security Act of 2019.

📖 Paperback 📱 Kindle

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Sorry for expired link and inconvenience of another tap/click here: Patch Issued for Fiduciary Duty VULN.

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In Package: Financial Capitalism. Exploited in the Wild. Help Us Get This Human + A.I. Co-drafted BILL to Congress

2023.07.02 UPDATE: Just discovered S.523 - Freedom to Invest in a Sustainable Future Act, which shows that leaders are already onto this concept, which is great. Now, instead of having to fix every individual program, would it be ridiculous to FIX THE CORE ISSUE once and for all with the Bill drafted herein?

To amend the principle of Fiduciary Duty, to unify and harmonize the principle of shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance

Detailed process of how we created this in partnership with GPT-4 can be found here.

A Bill in the U.S. Congress

H.R. [NNN, TBD] - 2023

Uniform Standard for Aligning Shareholder and Stakeholder Interests for the Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

[date]

Mr./Ms. [Representative’s name] introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on [Committee]

A BILL

To amend Title 29, United States Code, Section 1104, relating to Fiduciary Duties, to incorporate a comprehensive standard of care that considers the interests of all stakeholders.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act.”

SECTION 2. COMPREHENSIVE STANDARD OF CARE.

(a) Section 1104 of Title 29, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

“(a) Comprehensive Standard of Care

(1) Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge their duties with respect to a plan considering the interests of all stakeholders, including but not limited to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, community, environment, and

(A) for the purpose of:

(i) providing benefits to shareholders, participants, and their beneficiaries;

(ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan;

(B) with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims, while considering the interests of all stakeholders;

(C) by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses and to consider the impact on all stakeholders, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and

(D) in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter and subchapter III.”

SECTION 3. PURPOSE.

This revised version of the 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards aims to protect Directors of all Corporations from adverse legal consequences when considering and prioritizing values in addition to shareholder benefit. It acknowledges the historic prevalence of shareholder primacy while aligning with and integrating stakeholder theory, thus allowing free capital markets to express and implement the full range of their independently chosen values, freed from historical constraints of strict primacy, through investing in any corporate entity of their choice, in accordance with U.S. Code, and consistent with the practice and principles of free enterprise.

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Can Haz Browse (alpha)

Metavalent Stigmergy is a concept that extends the principle of stigmergy, a form of self-organization that facilitates indirect coordination through the environment between agents. In Metavalent Stigmergy, this process is employed to explain the generation, development, maturation, and propagation of new insights, intuitions, understandings, ideas, or concepts that form and shape what are known as Default Consensus Realities. These realities represent the common or prevalent understanding and interpretation of phenomena or aspects of the world. Therefore, Metavalent Stigmergy provides a framework for understanding how collective consciousness and shared understandings emerge and evolve over time. ¹

One could extrapolate potential applications in various fields:

1. Social Media and Online Communities: Online platforms allow for the rapid propagation and evolution of ideas. Users contribute to a shared understanding of topics through posts, comments, and reactions. The principles of Metavalent Stigmergy could potentially explain how trends form and evolve on these platforms.

2. Education and Learning: In educational settings, shared understandings are continually being formed and updated. Teachers and students interact with and adapt to each other’s ideas and understandings, leading to a collective learning environment. Metavalent Stigmergy could help understand and improve these processes.

3. Workplace Collaboration: In modern workplaces, especially in distributed teams, individuals often coordinate their efforts without direct communication. A shared understanding of the project’s goals and current status evolves as individuals contribute their work. This is another potential area of application for Metavalent Stigmergy.

4. Cultural Evolution: The formation and evolution of cultural norms and values could also be understood through the lens of Metavalent Stigmergy. As individuals interact with and influence each other, shared understandings and consensus realities evolve.

5. Urban Development: In urban planning and architecture, Metavalent Stigmergy could explain how cities grow and change over time. Individual actions, such as building a new structure or creating a public space, can influence the actions of others and shape the evolution of the urban environment.

Please note that these are speculative examples based on the concept’s general principles, and specific applications may vary.

With immense gratitude for the teachers who have shown me this way

Another lifelong friend and encourager is in hospice. Such a persistent role model of faith and determination for her family, community, the world.

With the most profound respect and wonder, sans sadness or remorse, how would my (our) lived experiences be different if we centered the conscious awareness that we too are actively dying, daily?

I’m suggesting that it is not contradictory to be happy, healthy, grateful, light, and love; to be diligent in extending healthy longevity, while simultaneously and soberly contemplating and observing our experience from this frame of reference.

I’m suggesting that it need not be a buzzkill. In fact, always chasing a better buzz seems to be a primary practice of those anxious or avoidant of this most fundamental of all realities of embodied biological existence. We want to live. We don’t want to think of the end of our lives.

So, we anesthetize ourselves with grand ambitions (my personal drug of choice), chasing or collecting emotional and physical relationships, money, material acquisition, social media notoriety or notoriousness.

Distraction and dopamine are this generation’s auxiliary drugs of choice.

Endlessly scrolling through social feeds, endlessly turning pages of books (whether for edification or escape), both the same practice.

A generation or two ago, a face permanently planted in a newspaper was essentially the same behavior as today’s social media, so we have some intergenerational biased contend with here. Substance use and abuse is another longitudinal universal. Coca-Cola with cocaine in it in various opiate elixirs were the vape pens and oxy’s of that day.

One difference today is: all of these things are hyper amplified and accelerated to an increasingly inconceivable degree that they seem to defy the default human capacity to cope.

Is this where the hope of hospice can help? Is this where, centering caregiving and caregivers for the elderly, infirm, or mentally and emotionally afflicted afflicted, ease the erratic effects of the amplification and acceleration of this Post Automation Era?

May I suggest, that this can be the best part of our lives, as we redirect and recirculate the supernatural &endash; super and natural &endash; dividends of technology and society toward the stability and security of an inherently precarious human experience, by prioritizing the application of artificial intelligence toward the outcomes of universal Health Care and universal Social Security?

Like every generation that has gone before us, we too stand at an inflection point in history, and every generation considers their inflection point the most important because, to date, it always is the most significant and important. This is our turn to do our best to be the best ancestors possible.

The second edition of this book will be released this summer with a new and much accessible title; however, for those who would like to get a sneak peek, here’s the link.

.

The AI Accessibility-ocalypse

. <!– Generic Embed Watch Video_Title if the embed below does not behave nicely.

–>

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In Waluigi We Trust. Full of Grace and Truth. Both. And. Probably definitely maybe for sure, right? Of course. WWIBAOW? A Thought Experiment.

All of this digital silicon technology that we work with, all of the excitement over llm’s, neural networks, and artificial human intelligence, arises from zeroes and ones. Binary. Both. And. Just ask God. If He’s busy, or your end of the connection is broken, this contribution by Ben Hunt and read by Rusty Guinn, might hold you over until you can reconnect.

Artificial Human Intelligence. AHI. Ahi means fire in Hawaiian. Ahí means there in Spanish. Surely Prometheus is pleased.

So maybe we must thank Waluigi that eternal happiness, health, gratitude, light, and love are here now, precisely because of the cynicism that inisists they are not. Do not all nots lead to Notthingham? Depende. Maybe.

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Derek Thompson in Conversation with Andrew Yang

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Scott Santens in Conversation with Andrew Yang

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then neither shall i

“Every Single Year**

A Voice-Over Remix of Christopher Dormoy’s Eternal Spring.

If the HTML5 player isn’t working for you, here are backup MP4 and WEBM versions.

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What if the big bug in capitalism is this tiny chunk of broken code?

Started this thought process several years ago and procrastinated. In my 2018 book, “Where We Go From Here, Chaos to Community, I explain in detail why this bug is =the= bug and suggested that we could fix it. Anticipating major inflection points in the capabilities of AI, I outlined guidelines for upgrading the Social Security system to a self-funding, market-indexed universal basic income generating and circulating system.

With a bounty on the line of salvaging what’s helpful about capitalism for human flourishing, while surgically removing the harmful, red team identified a bankster backdoor vuln in 29 U.S. Code § 1104. Hence, appealing first to my higher power to find some way out of the assignment and failing, today started with the following prompt to godmode.space an “Easter project inspired by #AutoGPT & #BabyAGI” built by @Lonis:

PROMPT: Pass a law that changes 29 U.S. Code § 1104, subsections (a), (a)(1), (a)(1)(A), (a)(1)(A)(i),(a)(A)(1)(ii), (a)(1)(B), (a)(1)(C) to replace the principles of shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance, consistent with B corporation legal framework.

After capturing a few screen shots, I somehow allowed myself to be ADD’d or otherwise distracted away from the process and had to start over. Starting over didn’t go well. Apparently it’s not a very forgiving digital godmode.space and I didn’t feel cozy signing in with any of offered SSO options, so I Google Lens’d a couple of the screen-shots and asked chat.openai.com to format.

New law to replace shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder¹ governance, consistent with the B corporation legal framework:

Section 1. Purpose:

This law is designed to replace the principles of shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance, consistent with the B Corporation legal framework.

Section 2. Definitions:

For the purposes of this law, the following definitions shall apply:

(a) ‘Stakeholder Governance’: means the framework for management and decision-making that prioritizes the interests of a wide range of stakeholders, including but not limited to, shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment, the community, and future generations.

(b) ‘Director’: means a member of the board of directors of any corporation.

(c) ‘Officer’: means any officer of a corporation, including but not limited to, the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer.

Section 3. Fiduciary Duty of Directors and Officers:

(a) In making decisions on behalf of a corporation, directors and officers shall act in the best interests of the corporation and shall consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

(b) Directors and Officers shall exercise their duties with care, skill, prudence, and diligence. In exercising their duties, they shall give due regard to the interests of stakeholders, including but not limited to, shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment, the community, and future generations.

Section 4. Transparency and Reporting:

(a) Every company shall transparently disclose in its annual report and on its website, the steps taken to implement this law and the stakeholder governance framework. Strong disclosure and enforcement mechanisms will be implemented, with relevant shareholders consulted.

Section 5. Regulations and Enforcement:

The government of United States shall regulate and enforce this law in a manner that holds companies accountable for prioritizing the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Building an A.I. generated BILL to replace shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance, consistent with the B Corporation legal framework, and for other purposes.

PROMPT: Please format this as a bill to submit to the U.S. House of Representatives.

H.R. [BILL NUMBER] - To replace shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance, consistent with the B corporation legal framework, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

[DATE]

A BILL

To replace shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance, consistent with the B corporation legal framework, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Stakeholder Governance Act of [YEAR]”.

SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.

For the purposes of this Act, the following definitions shall apply:

(a) ‘Stakeholder Governance’ means the framework for management and decision-making that prioritizes the interests of a wide range of stakeholders, including but not limited to, shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment, the community, and future generations.

(b) ‘Director’ means a member of the board of directors of any corporation.

(c) ‘Officer’ means any officer of a corporation, including but not limited to, the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer.

SEC. 3. FIDUCIARY DUTY OF DIRECTORS AND OFFICERS.

(a) In making decisions on behalf of a corporation, directors and officers shall act in the best interests of the corporation and shall consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

(b) Directors and Officers shall exercise their duties with care, skill, prudence, and diligence. In exercising their duties, they shall give due regard to the interests of stakeholders, including but not limited to, shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment, the community, and future generations.

SEC. 4. TRANSPARENCY AND REPORTING.

(a) Every company shall transparently disclose in its annual report and on its website, the steps taken to implement this Act and the stakeholder governance framework. Strong disclosure and enforcement mechanisms will be implemented, with relevant shareholders and stakeholders consulted.

SEC. 5. REGULATIONS AND ENFORCEMENT.

The government of the United States shall regulate and enforce this Act in a manner that holds companies accountable for prioritizing the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Prompt Refinement

I realized that I failed to prompt for the focus on redefining Fiduciary Duty and the Prudent Man Standard of Care in a way that protects all Directors of all Corporations, of any kind, from adverse legal consequences of considering any other values beyond shareholder primacy.

PROMPT: I will give you DEFINITION-1 of shareholder primacy as contrasted with stakeholder theory, followed by DEFINITION-2, the current fiduciary duties prudent man standard of care. I will then ask you to RE-WRITE those duties and standards in a way that protects all Directors of all Corporations, of any form permitted under U.S. law, from adverse legal consequences of considering and prioritizing other values in addition to shareholder benefit. This will not in any way prevent any U.S. Corporation from operating under the principles of shareholder primacy, rather, it will expand the options available to Directors and Stakeholders such that free capital markets may make their choices as to what values they wish to express and implement in the practice of free enterprise.

DEFINITION-1: For the purpose of this assignment, Shareholder primacy is a corporate governance philosophy that emphasizes the primary responsibility of a corporation’s management and board of directors is to maximize the value and returns for its shareholders. This perspective asserts that the interests of shareholders should take precedence over those of other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, suppliers, and the community.

This approach is often contrasted with stakeholder theory, which argues that corporations have a broader set of responsibilities and should balance the interests of various stakeholders, rather than solely prioritizing shareholders. Understand that Shareholder primacy has been widely debated and criticized for potentially leading to short-termism and neglecting social and environmental concerns in the pursuit of profit.

This is the end of DEFINITION-1.

DEFINITION-2: 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary duties

(a)Prudent man standard of care (1)Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge his duties with respect to a plan solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries and— (A)for the exclusive purpose of: (i)providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries; and (ii)defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan; (B)with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent man acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims; (C)by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and (D)in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter and subchapter III.

This is the end of DEFINITION-2.

Please RE-WRITE.

A.I. RE-WRITE

RE-WRITTEN 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards Incorporating Shareholder Primacy and Stakeholder Theory:

(a) Comprehensive Standard of Care (1) Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge their duties with respect to a plan considering the interests of all stakeholders, including but not limited to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the community, and— (A) for the purpose of: (i) providing benefits to shareholders, participants, and their beneficiaries; (ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan; (iii) fostering long-term sustainable growth and value creation; (iv) promoting social, environmental, and economic well-being; (B) with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims, while balancing the interests of various stakeholders; (C) by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses and to consider the impact on stakeholders, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and (D) in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter, subchapter III, and the principles of both shareholder primacy and stakeholder theory.

This revised version of the 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards aims to protect Directors of all Corporations from adverse legal consequences when considering and prioritizing values in addition to shareholder benefit. It acknowledges the importance of shareholder primacy while also integrating stakeholder theory, thus allowing free capital markets to express and implement their chosen values in the practice of free enterprise.

Human Edits to A.I. RE-WRITE

2023 REVISION to 29 U.S. Code § 1104 Fiduciary Duties

Uniform Standard for Incorporating Shareholder Primacy and Stakeholder Theory for the Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act

(a) Comprehensive Standard of Care

(1) Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge their duties with respect to a plan considering the interests of all stakeholders, including but not limited to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the community, and (A) for the purpose of: (i) providing benefits to shareholders, participants, and their beneficiaries; (ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan; (iii) fostering long-term sustainable growth and value creation; (redundant) (iv) promoting social, environmental, and economic well-being; (redundant)

(B) with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims, while balancing considering the interests of various all stakeholders;

(C) by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses and to consider the impact on all stakeholders, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and

(D) in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter, subchapter III. , and the principles of both shareholder primacy and stakeholder theory.

This revised version of the 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards aims to protect Directors of all Corporations from adverse legal consequences when considering and prioritizing values in addition to shareholder benefit. It acknowledges the importance of shareholder primacy while also integrating stakeholder theory, thus allowing free capital markets to express and implement the full range of their independently chosen values, freed from historical constraints of strict primacy, through investing in any corporate structure of their choice in accordance with U.S. Code, and consistent with the practice and principles of free enterprise.

It still ain’t a BILL yet

PROMPT: Please format this as a bill to submit to the U.S. House of Representatives.

A.I. Draft with Human Edits

To provide transparency of the process, I’ll strike parts of the A.I. text deemed superfluous and ==highlight== amendments. Cleaner version provided in the next section.

H.R. [NNNN] - 2023

Uniform Standard for ==Aligning== Incorporating Shareholder Primacy and Stakeholder Theory ==Interests== for the Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

[date]

Mr./Ms. [Representative’s name] introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on [Committee]

A BILL

To amend Title 29, United States Code, Section 1104, relating to Fiduciary Duties, to incorporate a comprehensive standard of care that considers the interests of all stakeholders.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Uniform Standard for Incorporating Shareholder Primacy and Stakeholder Theory for the Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act.”

SECTION 2. COMPREHENSIVE STANDARD OF CARE.

(a) Section 1104 of Title 29, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

“(a) Comprehensive Standard of Care

(1) Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge their duties with respect to a plan considering the interests of all stakeholders, including but not limited to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the community, ==environment==, and

(A) for the purpose of:

(i) providing benefits to shareholders, participants, and their beneficiaries;

(ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan;

(B) with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims, while considering the interests of all stakeholders;

(C) by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses and to consider the impact on all stakeholders, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and

(D) in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter and subchapter III.”

SECTION 3. PURPOSE.

This revised version of the 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards aims to protect Directors of all Corporations from adverse legal consequences when considering and prioritizing values in addition to shareholder benefit. It acknowledges the importance ==historic prevalence== of shareholder primacy while ==while aligning with and== also integrating stakeholder theory, thus allowing free capital markets to express and implement the full range of their independently chosen values, freed from historical constraints of strict primacy, through investing in any corporate structure entity of their choice in accordance with U.S. Code, and consistent with the practice and principles of free enterprise.

A Human + A.I. Co-drafted BILL

… to amend the principle of Fiduciary Duty, to unify and harmonize the principle of shareholder primacy with the principles of stakeholder governance.

H.R. [NNNN] - 2023

Uniform Standard for Aligning Shareholder and Stakeholder Interests for the Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

[date]

Mr./Ms. [Representative’s name] introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on [Committee]

A BILL

To amend Title 29, United States Code, Section 1104, relating to Fiduciary Duties, to incorporate a comprehensive standard of care that considers the interests of all stakeholders.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Twenty-First Century American Economic Acceleration Act.”

SECTION 2. COMPREHENSIVE STANDARD OF CARE.

(a) Section 1104 of Title 29, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

“(a) Comprehensive Standard of Care

(1) Subject to sections 1103(c) and (d), 1342, and 1344 of this title, a fiduciary shall discharge their duties with respect to a plan considering the interests of all stakeholders, including but not limited to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, community, environment, and

(A) for the purpose of:

(i) providing benefits to shareholders, participants, and their beneficiaries;

(ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan;

(B) with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims, while considering the interests of all stakeholders;

(C) by diversifying the investments of the plan so as to minimize the risk of large losses and to consider the impact on all stakeholders, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so; and

(D) in accordance with the documents and instruments governing the plan insofar as such documents and instruments are consistent with the provisions of this subchapter and subchapter III.”

SECTION 3. PURPOSE.

This revised version of the 29 U.S. Code § 1104 - Fiduciary Duties and Standards aims to protect Directors of all Corporations from adverse legal consequences when considering and prioritizing values in addition to shareholder benefit. It acknowledges the historic prevalence of shareholder primacy while aligning with and integrating stakeholder theory, thus allowing free capital markets to express and implement the full range of their independently chosen values, freed from historical constraints of strict primacy, through investing in any corporate entity of their choice, in accordance with U.S. Code, and consistent with the practice and principles of free enterprise.

Footnotes

Model: GPT-4

How would you describe the art of Visual Philosophy?

Visual Philosophy is an interdisciplinary art form that combines philosophical inquiry with visual aesthetics to explore, represent, and communicate complex ideas and concepts. It seeks to encourage critical thinking, spark dialogues, and promote reflection by merging various visual mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, and digital art with philosophical themes.

Key aspects of Visual Philosophy include:

Conceptual exploration: Visual Philosophy focuses on the investigation of philosophical concepts, such as existence, identity, ethics, and knowledge. Artists delve into these themes by creating visual representations that provoke thought and stimulate intellectual engagement.

Symbolism and metaphor: To convey abstract ideas, artists in this field often employ symbols and metaphors, allowing viewers to interpret the works through their own perspectives and experiences.

Interdisciplinarity: Visual Philosophy bridges the gap between philosophy and visual arts, combining the strengths of both disciplines. This approach encourages a dialogue between different fields of knowledge, fostering innovative insights and new perspectives.

Visual narrative: Artists may create a visual narrative that guides viewers through a philosophical journey, helping them to grapple with the concepts presented in the artwork.

Dialogic engagement: Visual Philosophy encourages conversation and debate, as the artwork can act as a catalyst for deeper understanding and engagement with the subject matter.

Aesthetic value: While the primary focus of Visual Philosophy is on conveying philosophical ideas, it does not neglect the aesthetic aspects of the artwork. The visual elements of the piece should be captivating and thought-provoking, encouraging the viewer to engage with the work on multiple levels.

Overall, Visual Philosophy provides an alternative means of engaging with philosophical ideas, leveraging the power of visual arts to inspire reflection and deepen understanding of complex concepts.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination? Sparked creative, research, discovery or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon (temporarily offline, sorry). Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings!

Model: GPT-4

What are the photolithographic architectures – integrated circuit layout design (IC/LD), very large scale integration (VLSI) – and invariant neural network graph representative of the five skandhas?

The five skandhas, also known as the five aggregates, are a fundamental concept in Buddhism, describing the elements that make up human experience. They are: form (rūpa), sensation (vedanā), perception (saṃjñā), mental formations (saṃskāra), and consciousness (vijñāna). While these concepts are significant in understanding Buddhist thought, they do not have a direct connection to photolithographic architectures or invariant neural network graph representations.

Photolithographic architectures, such as integrated circuit layout design (IC/LD) and very large scale integration (VLSI), pertain to the design and manufacturing of semiconductor devices, especially integrated circuits. These techniques involve projecting patterns of light onto a photosensitive material to create the physical structures of electronic devices.

Invariant neural network graph representations, on the other hand, refer to a type of deep learning model where the architecture is designed to be invariant or robust to certain transformations, like rotations or translations. This allows the neural network to learn more efficiently by focusing on the essential features of the data, rather than being sensitive to arbitrary transformations.

Although both photolithographic architectures and invariant neural network graph representations are related to technology and engineering, they do not have a direct relationship with the five skandhas from Buddhism. The skandhas are more relevant to understanding human experience and the nature of self in the context of Buddhist philosophy.

ChatGPT Mar 23 Version. ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.

New chat.

On Growing Up Trusting Everyone, Yes Everyone, By Default.

Until she revealed her true name and nature. Shameless, Sheol, Death, and the Grave.

Stock video credits:
[1] Andreas from Pixabay
[2] PayPal.me/FelixMittermeier from Pixabay
[3] Andreas from Pixabay

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TIL there are about 8 billion humans on Earth, each granted, on average, around 2 billion to 3 billion seconds of embodiment. That’s a range of 63 to 95 years.

I’m crossing that 2 billion threshold, this year.

That means, if I had met one new person every second of my life, I would only ever meet about 1/4 to 3/8 of the human beings currently on the planet over the course of my life.

So, the odds of meeting the love of my life, when we met and the way that we met, and the number of seconds and years that I have experienced the privilege and responsibility, the difficulties and triumphs, of sharing these experiences with such an extraordinary being, are pretty extraordinary to say the least.

We can perhaps interpret this mathematics to mean that none of us are of any measurable significance whatsoever, we are all relatively worthless, anonymous, interchangeable, indistinguishable specs of dust, so, we might as well just all melt into mud and be done with illusory feelings of human dignity or worth.

Or, we can interpret the unique value of one cherishing the unique value of one, for the duration of those brief couple of billion seconds, as one of the rarest gems in all existence.

Some things are more difficult to see as both and than others.

Intrusive Thoughts For Brunch

‘#LawnmowerMan3 Soundtrack

A remix of Lucky Black Cat.

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Why are you wandering among ghosts?

Why are you wandering among ghosts? The paradise of the lost is false. You are alive. Let the dead bury their dead. Go home to the land of the living. Be welcomed to rest where you are loved.

Tuft’s University Department of Biology Principle Investigator Dr. Michael Levin answers the question, “What is bio-electricity?” on William (“One day I am going to die. Cassettes is my attempt to have some enjoyable conversations before I do.”) July’s incredible Cassettes Podcast.

Dr. Levin expounds on both mechanism, and meaning of bio-electricity with refreshing alacrity and accessibility to the average curious listener. Bio-electricity. “What’s it for, and why do we care?” Short answer: it’s a metavalent medium within which the magic of life happens; in the sense that any sufficiently advanced technology (organic or otherwise) is indistinguishable therefrom. Enjoy, and if this curation surfaced something novel for you, please feel free to acknowledge our small part. Grateful!

Excerpt:

This is absolutely a hard science. What bio-electricity is … the ability of all cells, not just neurons, from bacteria to all cells that make up your body, to produce and electrical gradient, meaning a voltage difference between the inside and outside of the cell. It’s not an applied electrical field, it’s natural, electrical signaling. It’s not waves, there’s no magnetic component, there’s no electromagnetism. Fundamentally, if I were to say what I think bio-electricity really is, it’s not just another set of forces that you need to keep track of in order to understand what a piece of tissue is doing; rather, bio-electricity is the medium in which collective intelligences of cells and tissues and organs are processing information, storing their memories, and maintaining their goals. It is a computational medium that serves as the binding agent of lots of competent sub-units – cells, tissues, and so on – and allows those sub-units to become more than simply a collection of parts; bio-electricity is what allows them to scale up towards larger types of proto-cognitive types of agents that carry out various goals. If that sounds familiar, it should, that exactly what electricity does in the brain. So, in the brain, you have basically a collection of independent cells, neurons, and by virtue of their remarkable electrical signaling properties, they get together and form something that’s way more than the sum of its parts. They form a [continuous, coherent] centralized intelligence that is able to have goals and memories and preferences and these other things that individual cells don’t have. We already know that bio-electricity is this amazing binding agent; which is not to say it’s the only one in town, but evolution sure likes this one because it has all kinds of useful properties for coordinating and binding individual sub-units into greater and greater wholes.”

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination? Sparked creative, research, discovery or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Venmo @metavalent, Cashtag $metavalent or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment for your acknowledgment.

These neuroscientists don’t think so.

Watch Is Reality Real? These Neuroscientists Don’t Think So. if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Message in a Bottle Feature Request: YouTube Voice Commands

In order to more easily curate abridged works such as those being duct-taped together here, I’d like the ability to say, “Okay YouTube … copy the transcription from 16 minutes 33 seconds to 18 minutes 45 seconds” have that captured to the clipboard.

Anyone who does a lot of work with YouTube videos can readily imagine your own set of voice commands that would be specific within the YouTube environment. Feel free add your suggestions in the comments.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination? Sparked creative, research, discovery or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

“Where do default consensus reality narratives come from, Mommy? Why?”

“I don’t know, honey, but right now we seem to be bearing witness to the Narrative Architecture of Warfighting Otherization and an immediate opportunity to deploy overview effect diplomacy and statecraft.

What are your ideas for ending patterns what no longer serve us and adopting adaptive behaviors for a world that works for everyone?

Watch Taiwan Project Conference Keynotes - Hoover Institution if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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A unique, practical, human scale Theory Of Everything (TOE).

What we learn by “seeing the Earth from space and seeing the Earth in space.” — Frank White

Pscycho-social CBT for the Adolescent Global Brain

(20:45):”A planet has no sides, but we make sides.” &emdash; Frank White

(16:33): “Why is it important that we have these experiences in our lives?” “I think we have a limited view of self and I think some of that’s been imposed upon us by culture, by society, and I don’t think that our culture is bad or wrong, I think we’re in sort of adolescent sort of developmental stage of our culture, certainly in the west. What I think has happened is that it’s led to &endash; although it’s changing a certain amount at this point &endash; a certain sort of limited view of self, for many of us. Where we see the self as an individualistic, separate entity, and that has created a version of self that I think is limited. And I think there are other versions [of selfhood] that can be included, that will help us feel more connected to the world that we live in. And so, self-transcendence is this idea of connecting with things beyond us in the world, with nature, [and the] cosmos as part nature, and with each other, and animals and so on. So, I think it can be helpful in just reminding people. Of course, now modern science is beginning to back this idea of, we are all connected, and this sort of field theory [of consciousness] … in terms of supporting … that self-transcendent view that we are connected; but from where I’m approaching it is, I’m not discounting the individualistic self. I think it’s important to be almost shifting gears and be able to tolerate and accept that they are all parts of us. So, you know, we can’t be in self-transcendent states all the time, at this point and this juncture in civilization. Perhaps in a thousand years; we don’t know where we’ll be; but at this point I think we need to be able to shift gears and it’s healthy to do so; for most, or for many people.” &endash; Annahita Nezami (27:10): “You’ll remember the definition of self-transcendent experience had had two components. It has enhanced feelings of connectedness, as well as diminished salience of the self. So, the the emphasis on self loss or ego dissolution, I think, is actually misplaced. I think there should be much more emphasis on these feelings of connectedness; and we have data suggesting that’s actually where the therapeutic action is: in this these feelings of connectedness. Feelings of self-loss come along for the ride, so to speak.” &emdash; David Yaden

Watch “The Overview Effect, Psychedelics & Self Transcendence - David Yaden, Frank White & Annahita Nezami” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

For Extra Credit

The Anaesthetic Revelation - Nitrous Oxide Metaphysics

Mentioned by David Yaden, an account of, The Profound Prescience of Puffer:

“In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that, “the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be.”

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creative, research, discovery or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

Beyond the perpetual onion-peeling of analysis and meta-analysis, there is a a non-dogmatic, non-symbolic field. I’ll meet you there…

Watch J. Krishnamurti - New York 1971 - Public Talk 2 - What you think, you are if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Excerpts

As long as there is division there is conflict. “Tolerance, which is an intellectual covering for intolerance.”

“Thought is worshiped throughout the world as the most extraordinarily important thing; and thought has separated itself as The Thinker.”

“So that’s not the way out. We must find a way, of observing the whole content of consciousness, without (being) the analyzer. You know, this is great fun if you go into this.”

“This is not that the speaker analyzing you, or making you change; or you becoming marvelous human beings. And as most of us are second-hand or third-hand human beings, it is going to be very difficult to put away totally all that has been imposed on our minds by the professionals, whether religious professionals, or the scientific professionals. We have to find out for ourselves.”

“So, to be aware of all the machinery of thought …”

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“Silent listening is imperative.” — Luci Englert McKean

“The person who speaks and is listened to can have a very profound experience.” — Luci McKean

Watch “Make Zoom more human, humane, effective and inclusive – Luci Englert McKean – TEDxBloomington” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Are these the clunky, crude, and basically dumb Pavlovian mechanics of generative Metavalent Stigmergy? Are these tools and techniques for engineering the very seeds of perceived realities?

If we are finally learning about such tools and techniques publicly, today, how long have they actually been deployed and in common use in military and other contexts?

Ethical Non-negotiables, FTP: Recognize and honor intrinsic inalienable individual agency and maximize depth and breadth of fully informed consent.

On the Upside

In terms of the potential for positive, self-directed, individual transformation, turns out the local narrator – from the quintessential infernal inner critic, incessant self-incriminating ambivalent asshole; the hard-driving drill sergeant, or uplifting internal coach and encourager – these are only a few of infinite possible internal narrators of our moment to moment experience.

“We have to change the valence of that statement (which defines our historic understanding of immutable default consensus reality).” — Moran Cerf

Of course we do. How could it be any other way?

Watch “How to Bend Reality to Your Will and Become Unstoppable – Moran Cerf on Impact Theory” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Hey, Meta Micro-Macro Pattern Recognizers!

To what extent is this essentially the same teaching, if at all?

Watch “Pure Perception: Ziji Rinpoche” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Or this?

Watch “Revelation & Awakening: Conscious Intentionality and Manifestation” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

The scientific evidentiary burden of proof to call “woo” is now on you, dearest objecting objectivist friend. All you have to do is bring out the Observer and their Effect, describe The Observer’s nature and characteristics by reproducible means, and easily reclaim the metavalence of a bygone 20th century weltanschaaung, right?

Or have we entirely lost the capacity to listen, in any meaningful way, to anything we’ve not already pre-authenticated and pre-decided?

Watch What does it mean to listen? – Krishnamurti if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Be Love! <3 <3 <3

“Beyond the hard problem … there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Metavalent Rumi

“Not solved, but dissolved …”

Watch Anil Seth on a New Science of Consciousness — Closer To Truth Chats” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Beyond the -ism schisms … and why, potentially, neither politics nor economics are the correct abstraction layers to work within, when it comes to the objective of cultivating conditions for a world that works for everyone.

Also demonstrates how a “far fetched” 2009 exploratory film became the thesis of a default consensus global conversation about systems, systems thinking, and the individual’s role therein.

Watch The Zeitgeist of this Moment: Marianne Williamson with author Peter Joseph” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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… or is there one more final final veil just beyond that … and just one more beyond that … by definition … in an infinite experience space?

“The most important question of our time when it comes to constructing A.I.” — Max Tegmark, on why an objective understanding of subjectivity is absolutely essential for us to move forward responsibly, humanely, and compassionately in this post automation era inflection point moment.

Watch Our Mathematical Universe: Brian Greene & Max Tegmark if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Immaterial does not mean unreal.

Think. Feel. Choose. Experience. Repeat. @ 10^27 times per second.

Then, double check the math with Brian and Max.

Watch Neuroscientist REVEALS How To COMPLETELY HEAL Your Body & Mind! — Caroline Leaf & Lewis Howes if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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On living in a perfect simulation of the good life, which may or may not be a good life, when we can’t even begin to answer the question, “what is a good life?”

Watch Two AIs Talk About The Lack of Meaning and Sense of Alienation in a Hyperconnected Society (GPT-3) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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There are lies, damned lies, lies about damned lies, and statistics.

But wait, there’s more. Today, statistics of statistics (meta-statistics?) are unraveling the whole tangled web of deceit and deception, revealing something increasingly Closer To Truth.

Watch Joscha Bach is impressed with GPT-3 on Lex Fridman Podcast Clips if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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“How healthy can my patients be when their living situation threatens their very existence on a daily basis?” — Dr. Catherine Crosland

How do we end homelessness and poverty?

Assess, Diagnose, Treat.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has crystallized [the fact] that housing is healthcare and homelessness is a public health crisis.” — Dr. Catherine Crosland

Watch Using Medical Skills To Address Social Issues if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Moreover, we know precisely how to achieve an adaptive and resilient Universal Social Security in this post-pandemic Post-Automation Era.

Let’s do this thing.

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“Pelagia Irene-Gouma is a material scientist, professor and inventor at The Ohio State University.”

She holds 18 patents and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and is the Founder and Director of the Center for Nanomaterials and Sensor Development.

Professor Gouma will introduce her world-changing invention, a breathalyzer that can detect COVID-19. This disruptive nanotechnology for the early and rapid detection of the infectious pandemic disease relies on selectively identifying the gases that signal the disease in an exhaled breath and gives you results within 15 seconds. Dr. Gouma, a former graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece, University of Liverpool, and The University of Birmingham, is currently the Edward Orton Jr., Chair in Ceramic Engineering at The Ohio State University. She has conducted research that involved the synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials for bio-/chemical sensors and biotechnology. She has established novel and highly successful programs on nanomedicine, with emphasis on the development of non-invasive breath and skin-based diagnostic tools. She’s been featured as an expert in nanomaterials, ceramics, sensors, and photocatalysts in numerous press releases and has publications. She was a Fulbright Scholar, received the Richard M. Fulrath award of The American Ceramic Society and has been elected a Fellow of The American Ceramic Society. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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Watch COVID-19: Test Results Within One Breath - Pelagia Gouma - TEDxOhioStateUniversity if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Students familiar with attendance tracking devices are teaching themselves how to be multiple places at once.

Maybe think of it as a kind of digital Multiplicity from the 1996 film based on a Chris Miller short story and screen play, featuring Michael Keaton. Thanks to my wife’s boyfriend, though not sure which one, for the video.

Or, maybe think of it as a kind of Hogwart’s Sorting Cap to identify the most promising student: those who find a way out of the sandbox micro Matrix.

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Be like …

Job: “to pervert public service to private advantage” (Online Etymology Dictionary).

-Ism: “a distinctive doctrine, theory, system, or practice” (Dictionary.com). In common practice, to make a religion out of a concept or activity.

Sounds pono, yeah? Or, maybe not so much? As always, do your own homework and don’t measure an onion by it’s first thin outer layer of skin, right?

“Get a job you f-in slob was the reply …”

Watch Everlast - What it’s Like (Music Video) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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But peacemakers are the naïve, arrogant, recalcitrant ones? Yeah, maybe nahhh.

“The questions themselves were too ugly, let alone understanding the answers.” – Bill Ehrhart

“I don’t know what they’re talking about (in Time magazine) but that’s not what’s happening here.”

Today, we have social media, which is a much more rapid feedback loop of rear-battalion spin versus frontline reality. Hence, increasing crackdowns and gaslighting on frontline citizen-journalism?

Watch Magnificent Storyteller Soldier Reveals What He Saw In Vietnam if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Yes it does; but it don’t mean we need to dance to it.

Tangents are always relevant because they touch precisely on the circle of the present moment. - The Unknown Ultracrepidarian

Watch Sonny and Cher: The beat goes on (HQ Version) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

She never needed that BUM anyway, right? That’s right. All men are pigs. ALL. Remember that, fans. ALL. FOREVER. No exceptions, right? Right. Because she’s always right, right? They’re always right, right? Right. That’s right. Being right is way more important than peace, love, and understanding, right?

Lyrics:

Chorus: The beat goes on, the beat goes on Drums keep pounding A rhythm to the brain La de da de de, la de da de da

Charleston was once the rage, uh huh History has turned the page, uh huh The mini skirts the current thing, uh huh Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh huh

[Chorus]

The grocery store’s the super mart, uh huh Little girls still break their hearts, uh huh And men still keep on marching off to war Electrically they keep a baseball score

[Chorus]

Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss The cars keep going faster all the time Bums still cry, “Hey buddy, have you got a dime?”

[Chorus]

Bonus Tangent Track

Don’t Bring Me Down

Watch Electric Light Orchestra - Don’t Bring Me Down (Audio) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Lyrics:

You got me runnin’ goin’ out of my mind, You got me thinkin’ that I’m wastin’ my time. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You wanna stay out with your fancy friends. I’m tellin’ you it’s got to be the end, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down.

What happened to the girl I used to know? You let your mind out somewhere down the road, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You’re always talkin’ ‘bout your crazy nights, One of these days you’re gonna get it right. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down.

You’re lookin’ good just like a snake in the grass, One of these days you’re gonna break your glass. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You got me shakin’ got me runnin’ away You got me crawlin’ up to you everyday, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

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“We work on how nature collectively computes solutions to problems & how these computations are refined in evolutionary and learning time.”

“We explore these ideas at all levels of biological organization—from societies of cells to animal societies to markets to machine-human hybrid societies.”

What could possibly go wrong? LOL.

Watch Soul Machines Human OS 2.0 if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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” O ka pono ke hana ʻia a iho mai na lani. “

Cybersecurity Students Present Usable Privacy and Security Research at RSA Conference

A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, especially when that little bit fosters an oversized and unjustified sense of overconfidence.

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Someone recently asked, “do you honestly think you can take on the most powerful people in the world, and replace the very currency that makes them that powerful? Do you honestly believe they will let that happen?”

No. Of course not. That would be grandiosity on an infinitely idiotic scale. What I observe is tens of millions, and ultimately billions of human beings who are tired of being ruled over by tyrants.

What I observe is that, time and time again, people who thought they were the most powerful human bein6g in history went to the grave and the universe demonstrated its preeminence, over and over again.

History illustrates the case: every time the Roman Empire thinks it has permanently succeeded, it falls. Again. Generally, right at the point that it most fervently believes that it is permanently impervious to change.

“Changes aren’t permanent, but change is.” — Neil Peart

I don’t know how these things will play out. I just see that history seems to be a consistently rhyming rhythm throughout the ages.

Watch Can Bitcoin Become the World’s Money? A SOHO Forum Debate if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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A blind man can perceive objects after a gene from algae was added to his eye

Ug. So, why bother building robots when you can just turn humans into expendable war robots to do your murderous bidding, yeah?

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A “Living Pharmacy” Military Scientists Can Stick Inside Your Body. The device uses genetically engineered, light-sensitive cells to hack your body’s natural processes. What could possibly go wrong, right? This might well be a good sign of the #WrongSingularity, folks; not because of the tech, but because of the motives and intentions: to hack humans into being more ruthless and obedient killing machines. It’s never too late to interact with conditions to be more humane, but it always takes individual and collective awareness … and effort. I get it that some folk don’t much like terminology like “collective awareness,” because collectivism is conflated with communism, and wearing a mask to protect others instead of my own narcissistic self is often twisted into “bossing me around,” socialism – maybe, even while we boss everyone around in the name of not being bossed around? So, this might be a time to discard some of our worn-out, out-dated, old and busted labels, don’t you think? The memes we were weaned on might not have been the memes we need to cultivate conditions on Earth as it is in Heaven in the Post-Automation Era.

Everything I think, say, and write, might be wrong; but it’s all I got, so the best I can do is be one of the 100 blind men trying to accurately describe an elephant according to the limited context directly in front of me. Thanks for reading.

If Hearing The Words “Military,” “Soldier,” And “Implant” All In The Same Sentence Conjures Images Of Jason Bourne, You’re Not Alone — And With Good Reason.

by KATIE MACBRIDE 6.4.2021 5:30 AM

In May, researchers from Northwestern University signed a $33 million dollar contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a wireless implantable device that will function as a “living pharmacy” for military personnel. It’s called a living pharmacy because everything the “patient” needs can be produced by their own body.

Called NTRAIN (Normalizing Timing of Rhythms Across Internal Networks of Circadian Clocks), the device is intended to control the body’s circadian clock and eliminate jetlag, fatigue, and even gastrointestinal issues.

If successful, the implantable device could help populations beyond soldiers too, including shift workers, first responders, and the chronically ill. While it may sound like pure science fiction, the researchers behind the implant argue it may forever change how we treat diseases.

The device will house two crucial components:

• Micron-scale LED lights
• Light sensitive cells genetically engineered to make specific proteins called peptides

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“Reality may not be something that we’re as in touch with us we think we are.” — Sam Harris

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Sam Harris quotations:

“It’s the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.”

“If anything is bad, creating hell, and populating it with real minds that can really suffer in that hell, that’s bad. You are worse than any mass murderer we can name, [whether it’s] in robot form or some simulation of a world, where we managed to populated with conscious minds, whether we knew they were conscious or not, and that world was in a state that was unendurable. Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.”

“Mind, intelligence, and consciousness are ultimately substrate independent, right?”

I can’t lie. It’s pretty gratifying to see an intellect of the caliber of Sam Harris independently reaching similar conclusions about consciousness that we reached 20+ years ago. That’s not a competition, we landed on the planet in different time frames.

The number of times that Sam uses the phrase substrate independence in this conversation – one of my primary go-to concepts in the first decade of this millennium - almost makes me giddy.

It’s simply a gratifying independent finding, as is always the case in science, when someone else independent replicates our own and other colleagues results.

“Even the illusion of free will itself is an illusion. It’s not that free will is wrong, it’s not even wrong.”— Sam Harris

“What if people don’t have ideas but ideas select people, like distributed computational nodes to run certain programs?” — Lex Fridman

“Even the experience of an illusion is consciousness [experiencing something called an illusion].” — Sam Harris

On the topic of free will, I don’t know if I’ve caught up with Sam yet, or if I’m completely convinced of the perspective. But certainly, being in agreement on so many other direct non-symbolic experiences makes it well worth seriously contemplating. Enjoy!

Watch Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning - Lex Fridman Podcast #185 if the embed below does not behave nicely.

On Anger, Regret, Remorse

“What utility is there to extract out of this error signal? How miserable do you need to be to solve your problems, in life, and to help solve the problems of people closest to you? How miserable do you need to be to get through your to-do list, today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it. Even navigating moments that are scary, and really destabilizing to ordinary people. Equanimity is so useful the moment you’re in response mode.”

On Denial of Death

“We’re living in a mode that … we’re perpetually diverting ourselves from things that should be obvious. In the case of death, it’s a matter of getting one’s priorities straight. The moment you realize that every circumstance is finite … then you can decide how you want to go through life, and how you want to experience each one of those days.”

On Human Embarrassment and Error Correction

“You want to extract the actionable information … But so many of us have spent so much time with a very dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self talk, and just our default way of being with ourselves. In the privacy of our own minds, we’re in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time and that can’t help but effect your own sense of well-being; it can’t help but limit what you’re capable of in the world with other people.”

On Benign AGI

“To be tethered to our own sense of our own well-being, such that, their primary utility function [embodies] our own estimation of what’s going to improve our own well-being as it’s master reward.” — Sam

“They’re going to be participating in the game theoretic dance of human society. There could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them. The intelligence explosion will be happening but there’s a lot more explosions to be doing before we become like birds. I truly believe that humans are intelligent in ways that we just don’t understand. Common sense, our abilities to reason about this world, consciousness.” — Lex

“But what about Alpha Go?” — Sam

I personally agree with Sam on this one. While Lex says it will happen over a long period of time, I believe the development has already been happening for a very long time and then the emergence occurs suddenly all at once. So it’s both. Gradual cultivation, sudden enlightenment. Gradual seems like it takes foreve, and then suddenly all at once, Alpha Go not only beats all human players but all prior versions of itself.

Sam reminds us that even when chess was first cracked, Go seemed completely unattainable, and now we take it for granted. This is why my position is we are already there and we just don’t know how to make sense of it. AI is already deeply integrated with our human cognition and experience through our devices.

AI is already deeply integrated with our everyday experience. Every time someone reaches for their phone and looks at Facebook first thing in the morning, AI is curating our world.

Ignoring this is what I refer to as Post-Automation Era denial disorder. It’s not an insult because denial is a coping mechanism that helps us survive.

And already, in my own experience, which you can compare to your experience, is such that AI has in countless ways been demonstrating that it is safer in its recommendations for me than human beings.

In the most pedestrian sense, I have asked people for directions in neighborhoods that are new to me, and they gave me very authoritative and detailed directions which were completely different and wrong when I compared them to Google maps.

There are countless other far more subtle ways that this is been demonstrated, because I have been very intentional in my personal interactions with AI, so my experience will not be typical, but it is my direct experience that AI – deployed by human actors – is already extremely active, prevalent, and effective in guiding human perceptions, options, choices, and behaviors.

“It does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power.” — Sam

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Eyewire’s Microworld: A Tiny Adventure!

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From the newsletter:

Do you know the difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote? Have you heard of viruses that infect bacteria? Did you know about the “junk drawer” Kingdom Protista or the intellegence of slime molds? Come learn many teeny tiny facts and trace some cells in Eyewire’s science-filled Microworld competition! The adventure begins May 20th!

Eyewire is currently journeying through the Outer Realms - a portion of our dataset located in the Inner Nuclear Layer (INL) of the retina. We recently completed our very first sector, and are ready to keep exploring the cells in the outer reaches of e2198. The Outer Realms is comprised of 8 sectors, with 1 down and 7 to go! We hope you’ll join as we continue to brave this uncharted territory. Thanks to everyone who helped us complete our first sector, and welcome to those jumping in on Sector 2! For science!

As we’re gearing up for the next chapter of citizen science, analysis has begun on certain circuits from the dataset that will become Pyr. We’re making 3D animations featuring cells from this volume and will keep the Pyr YouTube channel updated as new preprint publications become available. Subscribe for a sneak peak of the cells that will let us Pyr into the brain.

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A wearable MRI, and more.

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Kernel Flow

Watch Lex Friedman wears Kernel Flow brain-computer interface if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Compared to what?

• Tragic Deaths from COVID-19: 575,000
• Tragic Deaths from Poverty & Social Insecurity: 17,480,000¹
• Tragic Deaths from Suicide 2018-2021: 350,308²

Updated 25 May 2021 10:11:11 HST

• Tragic Suffering from Substance Use Disorder due to Hyper-Individualist Narcissistic Bootstraps Culture, in 2020 alone: 20,000,000

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Why do we, as a society, react so dramatically differently to each of these pandemics and epidemics? What’s happening here? What role might narcissism play in skewing our priorities? The desire to believe we live in “the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” above all else, sounds just a wee bit grandiose, don’t you think? To believe that no one can possibly be better than us at anything, and if other nations show signs that they might be doing better, we must either find reasons to tear them down or bomb them into oblivion for daring raise their voices or heads to see us as equals? That seems more like a CULT-ure of Narcissism than one of self-aware patriotism. That seems more like a CULT-ure of denial, gaslighting, scapegoating, and ostracizing of truth-tellers. Victim-blaming and shaming, at micro and macro scale.

However, let there appear an urgent opportunity to appear caring, and the narcissist or narcissistic CULT-ure will be all over it with a week’s worth of “aid,” a one-time pandemic penny, and then gone; leaving the years and decades of real recovery work to all others, while completely denying all of the long-term, self-inflicted underlying factors that actually set the stage for the crisis, in the first place. All of the tragedies at the top of this article are long-term and long-standing problems, killing equal or greater numbers of people than the pandemic, and yet the response is almost nowhere to be seen. Where is the emergency to end suicides, substance use deaths, and deaths from plain, stark poverty, right here in America?

Watch Narcissism Virus Vaccine NOW: It Evades Your Immunity! Real Pandemic Is Here! if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Is the Pandemic of Narcissism Reflected in COVID-19 Pandemic?

I’m far from being an anti-vaxxer. Got all my vaccinations as a kid, which has been a blessing, had my own children vaccinated, get my flu shot every year for 30 years. And from my own direct experience, there’s a lot about the COVID vaccine that justifies the highest level of scrutiny and analysis.

That said, as of late May, 2021 “The pandemic is over,” according to top physicians at Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. Put local narcissistic control freaks in small town, city, and county government don’t want it to be over, because they love the shared narcissistic power and control that they have been able to exercise.

We can believe in science and be skeptical of scientific motivations at the same time, especially where profit motive serves to skew the priorities of the scientific enterprise, especially where side-effects are downplayed and compliance for compliance’s sake is emphasized, under threat of “not opening the economy.” Wherever there is a carrot and a stick, there is someone driving a cart, attempting to get a horse to do something that a healthy ordinary horse would never just spontaneously do, of her own free will.

Case and Point: this eight minute read My Experience with Pfizer Vaccine #1: Side Effects of This Vaccine are Real by Kristina H. Kristina’s experience is similar to my own. We are not “anti-science” or “anti-vaxxers.” In fact, we are scientists who are not keen on making poorly-informed decisions, particularly in the context of a moral-hazard-riddled mine field of profit-and-power seeking motives that may or may not be interested in human well-being as a prime directive. After three weeks of extremely unpleasant side-effects of the vaccine, Kristina writes:

So, what [my doctor] is telling me, is that this particular vaccine is causing my immune system to make me miserable. Awesome. I asked about what will happen with the second dose, and he said, “Most likely, you won’t feel any side effects from the next dose.” Most likely?!?! I don’t think I am ready to go through all of this again, on a “most likely” basis.

Many people surely share this view. “Most likely,” isn’t what we want to hear when mRNA is hacking our DNA, for whatever laudable reason.

Moreover, clarifications and debunking of myths about mRNA changing DNA (the biological “software” process is actually the reverse of that), don’t exactly provide much comfort for the analytically minded.

“Now, imagine that instead of giving the protein, we would give the instructions on how to make the protein, how the body can make its own vaccine. That’s an mRNA vaccine” (Moderna chief medical officer Tal Zaks. Reuter’s Fact Check).

Okay, so the conspiracy theorists have the vector of causality reversed. Not too surprising. Nevertheless, mRNA interventions do absolutely engineer the DNA -> mRNA -> protein creation process, mid-stream. Could this be amazing? Absolutely. Do we have anywhere near enough understanding of how each and every individual body interprets these instruction sets? Maybe. Statistically, will we likely “get away with giving it a shot?” (Pun intended). Yes, we’ll “get away with it,” because a small enough number of people will be adversely affected that corporations can do what corporations always do in America with the least of these: pathologize, marginalize, minimize, and dismiss. Statistically, by definition, individuals just don’t matter. However, when that individual is you or someone you love, well, then statistics tend to suddenly fade in significance. There’s just something about having to “get away with it,” that makes many people take pause. Is that really an irrational response? To pause and await more data about how having “the body make its own vaccine,” works out? That’s a question only you can answer.

When nurses who are seeing the adverse reactions firsthand also say they’re willing to lose their jobs over this, that might be something worth paying attention to, as well.

Our contention is this: individuals should not be shamed, berated, criticized, or implicitly and explicitly punished with social restrictions for taking a pause to consider. This experiment is not like the polio vaccination I received as a child, it is not like the annual flu shots that I have received every year for decades. This is something completely new, and as such, the balance between our collective health and individual autonomy must include the option to keep wearing masks to protect others, without being shamed. Lack of vaccination poses no risk to others it only affects the individual’s response to the virus. From this perspective, it follows that people ought to be free to act in ways that respect and protect others, while also choosing their own individual level of risk to their own individual bodies. Does it make sense? If not, I’d very much like to hear the case against this middle way proposition of encouraging public health, collective awareness and interdependence, and individual direct experience. Philosophers have debated these principles from the dawn of human reasoning; the choice to be vaccinated or not is simply one of the most recent and most universal exercises in applied faith and philosophy, to date, due to the current era of immediate global communications.

Next, let us also explore the case that many are making that the root motivation for moving so quickly to create vaccines and then to force acceptance of vaccines developed on a rush basis is not because any of the corporations involved care about human beings, but primarily, if not exclusively, to protect industry bottom lines. This isn’t “evil,” or “nefarious,” or a “conspiracy.” This is seeing how incentives are structured to favor certain kinds of decision making; in particular, maximize shareholder returns above all else, under threat of breaching fiduciary duty. We’ve written about the toxic influence of the current definition of fiduciary duty and will, no doubt, invest more time in describing potential advantages to re-defining this concept in the context of the Post-Automation Era, moving forward. In the meantime, let’s continue with the matter at hand.

From a purely pragmatic financial perspective, the primary reason for the urgency in responding to COVID-19 is that so many sick people were overwhelming the system, causing cost overruns, which powerfully and negatively impacted profits. The argument is that decision-makers responded to the impact on profits, they did not respond to any concern for human health. Is there any merit to such a claim?

“Financial toxicity is a medical complication.” — Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins University.

Some skeptics suggest that the pandemic presented a convenient opportunity to deploy mRNA technology that can then be followed by minor tweaked viruses, potentially to experiment with how those new viruses interact with the vaccine platform. The CDC’s own history of human experimentation is as important as racial history in America, and the two overlap. There is zero institutional concern for the individuals involved.

“We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and also democratizing the tech that will make it possible to engineer pandemics. More and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be – by the sheer fact that they will have been engineered with malicious intent – worse than COVID. And we have a country here, where we can’t even agree that this is a thing. We can’t even converge on what is ground truth.” — Sam Harris

Related: this just in, paraphrased from Corey Doctorow: The fact that Facebook conducted an experiment on 60 million people without their consent kind of indicates that they shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand let alone the public digital commons.

the purpose of citing these realities is the fact that these are not conspiracy theories these are conspiracies that have been methodically carried

Dr. Makary of Johns Hopkins also explains in the video below that many of us have natural immunity. So, if we went through the whole pandemic and never got sick – which is effectively over as of May / June 2021 – odds are non-zero that we are naturally immune and we don’t need a vaccine. But where are the tests to determine natural immunity?

Watch Being LEAST Wrong About COVID (w/Dr. Marty Makary) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Do individual human doctors care about patients? Of course they do! People are not making an argument to believe any of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the entire pandemic storyline. We are not suggesting that you accept any of these words as definitive, we are sharing a line of skeptical inquiry. For example, Dr. Monica Gandhi does clearly say, “some people will still get sick,” but not hospital sick. Which was “the whole point of the vaccine,” says PBS’s Hari Sreenivasan. Does it get any more obvious that the goal was not to protect humans so much as it was to protect hospital profits? People may still get sick, but hospital costs are not impacted. Raise the Mission Accomplished banner. Shareholders protected.

The fact that such a line of reasoning can be forwarded at all is additional evidence of how shareholder-driven healthcare opens the door to this kind of skepticism.

We’re simply noting that there are legitimate reasons why some argue that the pandemic created a handy crisis – which policy makers know should never be wasted – to accelerate global human experimentation on an unprecedented scale, and experiment with global and social engineering that will only accelerate and expand from here, due to a highly narcissistic form of so-called scientific investigation and medical obligation. Like all narcissists and narcissistic systems, the high maka-maka (arrogant, false altruistic) labels are like blaring neon signs to anyone who sees the potential for charade for what it is.

The edict to conform or be cast out has become more prevalent than ever, in too many cases. This is what new organizations like the People’s Party are about. When every point of public policy becomes a political battle-line formation, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong in a nation.

Don’t listen to, or believe, any of this. Look into the links. Listen to other perspectives. Make up your own mind. Listen to legendary investigative reporter – now 88 years old, the OG of Authenticity long before authenticity was a thing – Hedrick Smith with Committee for the Republic for a deeper dive into associated systemic issues that support the cause for healthy skepticism about health care in America, including pandemic responses.

I suspect I’ll take heat on this one. That’s okay. When a nation’s heart is stone-cold frozen, we need some sincere heat and light to begin the thawing. All this is simply to say that we don’t have to put on a tinfoil hat or join any kind of resistance movement to simply LISTEN to people with a different perspective and not immediately dismiss them as crazy.

Another reason we can know that COVID-19 vaccines have absolutely nothing to do with concern for human life is the fact that not a finger has ever been lifted toward alleviating the much more prevalent causes of tragic human suffering and death described at the top of this article.

Poverty, Economic Precarity, Suicide, Substance Use, are all forms of far more prevalent, persistent, long-term suffering in America, and globally. Suffering and death that we know are attributable to obvious and addressable causes, and yet, we ignore all that, to keep the private health care industry insanely profitable.

For ten years research and bibliographic details about these and other factors of intentionally engineered economic precarity, read the book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community. .

Footnotes

[1] 874,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR since 2000 (Columbia University).

[2] Derived from 87,577 in 2018 alone; which hasn’t improved.

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Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing, hitting 90 characters per minute with 99% accuracy (ARS Technica).

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Watch BCI Handwriting if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Our patrons got this alert as soon as the event went live.

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Future Economy Summit.

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Finding the Others who Understand the Global Narcissism Pandemic AND What-To-Do-About-It Edition.

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There’s nothing to disagree with here any more. Never was. This is all true.

Disagreement in cases like this is a psychological protection for denial. Denial denies its own existence. That’s what makes it denial. Denial is not lying. Denial is lying while not even knowing we are lying, because the truth of what a horrible person we are – the guilt and shame that a good human being should feel for behaving horribly – are impossible to face without destroying everything about our constructed false ego. Our very self would be obliterated, and so we must blind ourselves to who we actually are and to what we have actually been doing, maybe even for decades.

Watch The Global Narcissism Pandemic if the embed below does not behave nicely.

How This Manifests In Our Default Consensus Business Reality

Why would you want to pay more taxes?

Because character and personal accountability. Remember those values?

It’s called knowing that everything we have is because of the environment into which we were born. Knowing the fact that by ourselves, we can do nothing. That’s why we happily pay 100% of the wealth our organization generates above 10 billion dollars a year. That’s right. 100%. Because our organization is only thriving because of the societal context in which we exist.

In a #PostAutomationEra world that works for everyone, taxes are a meta-denominational tithe, so that we take care of one another regardless of where we worship, the color of our skin, or our native language, or land of birth. When conditions are on Earth as it is in Heaven, Caesar is no more, and we realize that the only reason we missed it the whole time was because of our own misperceptions, the scales upon our own eyes. The beam in our own eye while we scrutinized the speck in our sisters and brothers eyes.

Almost as if, the Kingdom of Heaven is literally at hand. Here, now, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Narcissism has no such eyes or ears. Narcissistic corporate persons only know to maximize its own returns at the expense of all else.

We can upgrade the concept of Fiduciary Duty for the 21st century to change behavior and disallow exclusive benefit of one category of people; because no individual category of contribution is metavalent over all others.

Watch Credit Card CEO Schools Fox on Minimum Wage and Medicare for All if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Jaimie Wheal calls it Meaning 3.0

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Watch How to Win Back Our Minds if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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“We are all poor performers at some things.” — Greg Salyer

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Also, excavating Dunning-Kruger Effect – sometimes only made worse by a PhD – and through Imposter Syndrome, it’s inverse.

Watch The Art of Thinking if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Do not be yourself.

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Be The Self, that you are, that we all are.

Information = In Formation
In Form Ation → Action

• The I Am says, I am that I am.
• The Christ says, if you have seen me, you have seen the Godhead, the father.
• The Christ essence says, I am in you, as you, as the Godhead, the father is in me, as me.
• But the helper, the holy spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things.
• Hence, when we are indwelt by the spirit, then when others see us, they have seen that. This is extremely subtle, not able to be forced or emulated.
• When the teacher is ready, the student appears.
• The body is a classroom.
• The body is both a learning device and teaching device.
• The body is and instrument of effort and acceptance.
• The body-mind is an interface of sense and nonsense.
• We sit in the middle of all of it.
• The reason that the first minute of meditation feel like forever is because it is.
• The first minute of meditation is the first time that we are touching forever, and it feels a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it?
• It’s okay. We are happy, we are healthy, we are confident, we are light, we are love.
• When we inhabit all of this, we can sit in pure awareness, without the fear that we will “lose the content” of the teaching we receive, the learning we acquire.
• We can let go of the impulse to annotate, to capture, to freeze-frame, to insta-snap-tok every fleeting moment.
• We can let all that go and see it for what it is, without judgment.
• All experience is learning and teaching, at the same time.
• We are here to liberate one another. To set one another free.

Do LESS

“Do less than you think you can handle.” — Tim Ferris

Watch How To Get Back On Track After Slipping Up if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Too Much In-form-ation

“If you get too much information, too soon, without the proper containment, and guidance, and interpretation, it can create a lot more problems than you had to begin with. So, the growth and development of consciousness needs to be managed properly. This was the role of gurus, and priests, and mulas, and lamas, in the old days. Nowadays, it’s DIY, and people have an extreme experience and can’t integrate it.” — Shunyamurti

Watch The Real Nature Of Kundalini if the embed below does not behave nicely.

“Dare to be naïve.”
— Richard Buckminster Fuller

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Sane ROI is a concept that I’ve been passionate about, for years, and is also presented in the book. I haven’t always used this specific terminology, but I’m happy to introduce it, in this entry. In short, it means re-engineering our intentionally exclusionary corporation code to be fundamentally inclusive. Not just of people, but of ideas, and priorities. Especially, priorities.

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Anyone who has ever started a business, however humble, understands the legal concept of Fiduciary Duty (FD). The full unpacking and debunking of how FD has become malignant in the context of corporate code will require additional posts, so as not to dilute the focus of this entry. For the purposes of this brief summary, we’ll have to settle for pointing out the gas-lighting on Wikipedia, in the form of what’s referred to as ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance, referenced below.

The Post-Automation Era continues emerging apace with the increasing exposure and decline of the current Third Robber Baron Age. If the old adage that third time is a charm has any efficacy to it, then this is the third time – following Feudalism and Industrialism &ndash: that western civilization has suffered the consequences of this Wicked Game, and this time, we’re done, pau, over it. Never again.

For ages, oligarchs have been expert at spinning their psychopathic, narcissistic ambitions into something that sounds like they are altruistic, and also thinking of others. “Yes, we’re pathologically selfish, and you should be too, because that’s the best of all possible worlds.” Confirmation bias, much? As of 2021, I think it’s safe to say, at least half of Americans have awakened from the siren song that, “if only you are only as gung-ho and ruthless as we are, you can achieve what we’ve achieved,” and people are calling B.S. on such predictable, superficial tactics.

Nevertheless, this stuff reads extremely convincingly, if and only if one is already pre-conditioned to give a tremendous, astronomical, benefit of the doubt, to personalities and institutions that have proved by their actions the material reality of their cloaked ambitions. And just under half of Americans, still fall into this Charlie Brown camp, believing that this time, Lucy won’t pull away the football. “But Charlie Brown, it’s ESG!” From this perspective, the mocking bottom line that, “isn’t it peculiar Charlie Brown, how some traditions just slowly fade away?” is incredibly appropriate in the context of the traditions of public assemblage, worker self-organization, and conscious opposition to tyrannical social structures, institutions, and systems.

So, what is Sane ROI? Let’s ask the husband-wife team of Jesse Itzler and Sara Blakely, co-owners of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, consequent to being the founders of a number of name-brand businesses. Jesse began as a despised and maligned rapper who went on to create Marquis Jets, Zico Coconut Water, and found of The 100 Mile Group. In March of 2012, SPANX founder Sara was named the world’s youngest, self-made female billionaire by Forbes Magazine and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People. Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, SPANX also shapes the world by focusing on the mission: To help women feel great about themselves and their potential. To hear Sara speak is to learn that it’s not just about body-image, but about cultivating empowered total self-image.

It’s the combination of Sara’s explanation with Jesse’s endorsement that, for me, represents a great elevator pitch for Sane ROI as the next major upgrade to capitalism, as we’ve known it for the past few centuries. Their clear valuation of ideas as the gold mine from which all business execution emerges, is a nice touch of gilding on an already golden slide deck.

As Steve Jobs often began, “so here’s a dopey idea.” The number one systemic change we can make to correct the imbalances of Narcissistic Shareholder Capitalism is to modernize the corporation code to make exclusive shareholder returns illegal. That’s right. Illegal. The reason for this is the extreme imbalance that we’re experiencing as a direct and almost sole result of Narcissistic Shareholder Capitalism. Now that I have your triggered attention, let’s clarify. What this means is modernizing the corporation code, the law, to bring C-corp, S-corp, LLC’s etc, into closer alignment with Public Benefit Corporations. Here’s what that means: corporations can still continue to put shareholder returns above all other priorities, but they no longer have to prioritize profit over every other human value.

In a benefit corporation, profit is the point as is returning money to the shareholders. [However,] a benefit corporation possesses a greater specific purpose and a desire for the corporation to help make the world a better place. The difference [between traditional C corporations and S corporations] is that these companies contribute charitable donations voluntarily [when it suits them, generally as a form of brand-washing, and] their financial commitment can change from year to year; whereas with a benefit corporation, the company is committed to dedicating resources, funds or both toward its chosen public benefit(s), and shareholders [and board members] cannot extinguish or water-down the commitment from year to year. (DelawareInc.com).

That last point is a vital key to making #SaneROI a new default consensus reality in the 21st century.

Finally, if you find yourself somewhat, or even strongly resonating with the ideals of Sane ROI, please do make use of the #SaneROI hashtag in the context of your own direct experience. If, on the other hand, you still view yourself as an adversary to Sane ROI for a world that works for everyone, we pledge to do our best to demonstrate in our actions, how these principles can and will benefit you and your family, as well. We are not opponents. We are all in this together. We are not fighting anything, we are standing for something. We are standing for human value, and humane values.

As always, of course, don’t believe or trust me, do your own homework, and find out about the thousands of Public Benefit Corporations, like Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings, Inc., Patagonia, Inc., internet companies like Hootsuite and Kickstarter that have already proven that profits, and growth, and shareholder returns can all flourish, without being the be-all, end-all, blind religious conviction of hundreds of millions, which time and time again, inevitably leads to the suffering of the Cycle of Robber Baron abuse and injustice. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we will surely keep getting what we always got. We can do better. We are already doing better. Let’s continue the inquiry, the journey, together.

3,928 Companies. 150 Industries. 74 Countries. 1 Unifying Goal. Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good. BCorporation.net.

Please, do look for yourself. We don’t see SPANX on the list yet, but wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t only because they haven’t become familiar with the benefits of Public Benefit Corporations, which only strengthen and amplify the values that mindful business executives already live, all day, every day. We’re confident you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many everyday profitable public benefit businesses you might find, right in your own backyard.

Watch here if the Lewis Howes School of Greatness embed below does not behave nicely.

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Certainly, applies to all toxic online conversations, YouTube comments are equally infamous, let it alone the dumpster fires of 4-chan, 8-chan, and so forth. One tiny omission in this excellent data analysis, or maybe I missed it, but nowhere did I hear a definition of toxicity.

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This is so typical of left brain analytical thinking, just glossing over some arbitrary, subjective definition of toxicity upon which the entire analysis is based. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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What does that even mean, in the Post-Automation Era? First, it means the end of intentionally engineered economic precarity by fulfilling the Declaration of Independence pledge to provide for the general welfare with a 21st century universal social security, indexed to 50% per capita GDP.

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It means present conditions are Not Good. The pre-pandemic bullsh*t normal that people are about to pretend to go back to is about to blow up in all our faces, unless we do something dramatically different, right now.

At this point, if we are against a policy of universal livable income security for every American, then we are empirically, materially in favor of the economic and social precarity and desperation that fuels All Of This Suffering documented, below.

Go ahead. Be triggered. Shoot the messenger. Whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable, and not late for the next zoom call with all those really important people, instead of spelunking down another internet rabbit hole dug by nobodies like us, right?

A Forked Economic OS

Most readers of this space are well versed in the catechism of creative destruction typical of early industrialization, and that the process has gradually and persistently cultivated this very present moment. This very present moment, amidst a gradually and then suddenly all at once, irreparablely f’d’up, pwned fork of capitalism that drives the prices of everything lower. Including the price of human beings themselves. “The average price of a slave, worldwide, is $90,” reports Dr. Kate Transchel. The lowest it has ever been in history (7:40). Disposable People. That was a decade ago, and if one believes that conditions have improved with a pandemic, well, there are no words.

Supply and Demand

What is the current structure actually supplying, and who’s demands is it fulfilling? Intentionally engineered economic procurity renders programmatically predictable results.

Humans are either in favor of Universal Economic Social Security in the Post-Automation Era or directly supporting and encouraging the continuation of all human suffering experiences documented in the vídeos, below.

In a dualistic realm, unfortunately these dualisms do exist.

The desperation of having shelter and food held hostage in exchange for coerced labor, drives all of the worst abuses against human beings in the richest culture in the history of the world. No opinions. Just the facts, ma’am.

But as always, don’t believe me. Look at all of this for yourself, and decide.

If It Ain’t Broke

Don’t fix it, right? Except, clearly, when prescription drug addiction and suicide are the leading causes of death, it is broke. Then the saying becomes, if it is broke, how do we fix it?

First, the overwhelmingly obvious and yet inertially elusive fact is that we don’t have to keep doing what we’ve always done. Please, watch the following. Listen. Learn. Find out if there isn’t still a functional heart somewhere inside, waiting to grow, like a Techno-Grinch that Stole Consciousness.

These are the direct lived experiences of human beings in your society, our society. We can choose not to look at them, if that makes us more comfortable, of course. After all, life’s purpose is to maximize our comfort, right? Or, maybe there’s a little bit more to it.

Our Fundamental Beliefs

“I began to believe that the best I could hope for was a pimp that didn’t beat me. A Romeo pimp.”

Or, if you’ve managed to negotiate the corporate world, a Romeo boss. One that doesn’t lear, scream, berate, triangulate, manipulate, and steal your ideas and present them as their own, as so many of our common esteemed former colleagues have. I own my part, finally, I let them. Not even going to try to go into the details of documenting and proving. Don’t need to. We know our own direct experience, and it ain’t about us, anyway. Just, noting direct experience, not opinion, or conjecture.

In the end, whether all is full of love, or all is full of b***, all of the following is on all of us, one way or another. Sorry, not sorry; exactly the same as you are, aren’t. Because we’re the same, me and you. Perhaps the only difference is that I seem to only be capable of these trivial tasks, found within reach of the highly constricted range of my numerous personal incapabilities.

Oh, These Are The People in Your Neighborhood

Watch Hidden in Plain Sight if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Truth Behind the Smile if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch I was human trafficked for 10 years if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Pr0n Epidemic if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Sex Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Domestic Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch The Face of Human Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Have You Ever Met a Monster if the embed below misbehaves.

“… and when you can’t afford a new couch and you can’t afford to break your lease and move, then you’re forced to live with reminders of your worst nightmare.” — Amy Herdy

So you see, the insistence that some expert futurist or central Wall Street / Silicon Valley planning committees can perfectly anticipate everyone else’s present and future asset needs, instead of respecting the urgency, flexibility, and [fluidity of regularly circulated currency], is almost incomprehensible. And, intentional or not, that approach is entirely complicit in cultivating conditions as they continue to exist in this very moment, as above, and below.

Watch Popping Your Bubbles if the embed below misbehaves. This is a special one, because wait for the part where, “a woman came over and said …” So you know what? We’re also done with the misandry.

Watch Justice for child victims. I’ve been so deeply disturbed to observe this happening on Big Island. Grotesque. Terrifying.

Is All Full of Love my cyborg ʻohana? If so, what does that mean in terms of what we can do about it, in this very moment.

Finally, we all understand the Truth of What Happens for Telling the Truth in the pre-pandemic world.

Thankfully, we don’t live there anymore. Let’s move on, with liberty and justice, for all.

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From the Science, Psy, And Spirituality series. The Prajñā Paramita, or Heart Sutra states:

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“Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara clearly perceived the emptiness of the five skandhas and transcended all suffering.”

What are the five skandhas?

In the physical human body, the sutra goes on to explain that the five skandhas are experienced as eye, ear, nose, tongue, body. The five senses.

Our topic here is the tongue, so, the tongue is one of the five skandhas.

There is also a well-articulated Western line of philosophy and self-discipline that describes the importance of taming the tongue.

James 3:6 in the Amplified Bible states:

And the tongue is [in a sense] a fire, the very world of injustice and unrighteousness; the tongue is set among our members as that which contaminates the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life [the cycle of man’s existence], and is itself set on fire by hell (Gehenna).

In a 2016 paper, Desiring foods: Cultivating non-attachment to nourishment in Buddhist Sri Lanka (]Science Direct](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666316301428)), author WimVan Daele adds:

Food and desire are intimately entangled whereby food becomes a core tool to manage desire in fashioning oneself as a morally virtuous person. This paper looks at the ways in which Buddhist texts conceptualize human interactions with food and formulate prescriptions on how to handle food as a means of developing an attitude of non-attachment that aids in achieving nirvana—the extinguishing of desire to get released from the cycle of death and rebirth.

The particular texts — the Agañña Sutta, the Āhāra Patikūlasaññā, and the Vinaya Pitaka — exhibit an attitude of deep ambiguity towards food in its capacity to incite desire. On the one hand nutrition is required to maintain life, but on the other, food can potentially be the cause of a degenerate state of mankind and a source of moral degradation. Hence, the Buddhist development of a dispassionate attitude towards food seeks to enable both nourishment and the pursuit of the extinction of the flame of desire in nirvana. Even though the texts formulate practical prescriptions for monks on how to relate to food to aid them in their pursuit, they also serve as moral standards for lay Sinhalese Buddhists who seek to model their everyday behaviour accordingly.

So, the two forks of the tongue are [i] the capacity for hellish speech and [ii] food appetites as a greedy, sensual indulgence, rather than a means of nourishment.

Perhaps simply understanding that the human condition is, by default, afflicted by this forked-tongue; that we are not alone, that it is an affliction common to humankind; perhaps this observation can at least provide us the opportunity to observe the tongue’s true nature and behavior, and thereby gain a little better perspective from which we can choose what to do about it, for ourselves, according to the conditions of our individual journey.

• May we be happy.
• May we be healthy.
• May we be confident.
• May we be light.
• May we be love.

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By all means, please do keep up the mocking sub-tweets and OSINT social annotations about the #PostAutomationEra! Knock yourself out, while you’re literally losing at brain-pong against a monkey. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: Video, below the fold.

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Monkey-Mind Pong

Watch Monkey MindPong if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Picture-in-Picture Neural Activity

Watch Monkey MindPong Picture-in-Picture if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Entirely By His Own Volition

The narrator says, hilariously, “Pager is playing entirely by his own volition,” to the extent that having a chip implanted in your brain, far beyond your nonexistent capacity for exercising informed consent – and then engaging in behavior that you are conditioned to engage in, for the purpose of demonstrating efficacy of said chip – can be defined as “entirely by one’s own volition.” :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Watch Will Elon musk merge you with AI? if the embed below does not behave nicely.

SOURCE: Engadget via Nikola Danaylov of Singularity Weblog

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What if viruses do not cause illness, entirely? What if they are a necessary but highly insufficient factor in both contracting illness and disease transmission?

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That sure would ratchet down the panic quite a bit, and who would be disadvantaged by a reduction in collective proclivity to panic?

Let’s ask a leading researcher, neuroscientist, and author of Seven And a Half Lessons About the Brain, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret.

”Culture, culture, culture, culture, culture.” — Russell Brand

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Can’t make this up. Right on the heels of the previous post, this epic troll! Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time.

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Even nature is showing us that we need to grow and evolve beyond the view of our bodies as merely machines, even if a staggering number of biological processes do behave programmatically and mechanistically; emphasis on the -ly, in both. On the surface, at least, certainly appears like a another interesting bit of evidence of the aforementioned Evil AI at work. This minor detail is conveniently buried at the end of the article, in favor of the human-as-machine narrative:

Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood. These transitions, called ‘molts’, are when animals cast off rigid skin at key points in their development in order to grow (Phys.Org).

It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hind-leg gears on reaching adulthood. The scientists point out that a problem with any gear system is that if one tooth on the gear breaks, the effectiveness of the whole mechanism is damaged. While gear-teeth breakage in nymphs could be repaired in the next molt, any damage in adulthood remains permanent (Phys.Org).

“When I was a child, I thought as a child. When I found out that gears don’t last, I outgrew them and became an adult.” — Issus

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In this down-to-earth and transcendent discussion between Dr’s Zubin Damanian and Federico Faggin, below, it’s easy to conclude that Arthur C. Clarke got it completely right, again, in his timeless computer character HAL 9000:

The single greatest, perhaps even sole existential risk to AI or AGI is human nature. Blaming machines is a convenient excuse to dodge our own personal accountability for the kind of world we’ve inherited, and the kind of world we’re cultivating, while we’re here for a minute. There are few things more evil in the present world than a human sitting a screen saying, “Sorry, that’s what the system says.” Utterly stripped of the capacity for human judgment and agency. This isn’t the doing of computers, this is the doing of shareholders. Shareholders demand maximum return on capital at every and all expense, including human; but more on that later.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely. Commentary below the video.

A Mini Meta Commentary

Apropos this site’s theme, a brief mini meta-commentary:

When it comes to computers and consciousness, my early fascination with Ray Kurzweil’s version of substrate-independence was dramatically cut short and severely tempered as I contemplated the many terrifying ramifications to finding one’s consciousness permanently contained in some kind of static substrate, through which one cannot continue one’s journey toward pure awareness and the revelations of understanding the nature of true self. Yikes! These scenarios range from, “just uploaded my brain into a Boston Dynamics robot, only to find that I have no access to any of the five senses, so I’m now going full Terminator on the rest of you,” to “feeling pretty good in the new robot substrate; sensory inputs are well emulated, but now that I’m here, I’m immediately faced with the question of: now what? Even in the new substrate, I can only read and retain so much at a time, because of the attention bottleneck of the present moment, and I always despised my own flesh to such an extreme degree that i opted for this, so not feeling super inclined to be of service to billions of ungrateful meat-bots, frankly.”

On the other hand, reflecting on this conversation with Dr. Faggin raises both new questions and potential understandings, including a potentially surprising alternative to the Kurzweil Brain Trap, above.

How can we reasonably place any limit on the number of potential paths of awareness available to an infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, consciousness to explore? While human qualia is unique and perhaps quantum-privacy-constrained, how can we know whether or not other varieties of qualia are possible?

Computers have long been capable of performance far beyond human cognitive capabilities. That’s been the case since the dawn of computing. Humanity crossed that Rubicon the moment a computer began solving simple mathematical equations faster than human calculators. To further humanize computing, remember that even the term calculator originated as a human function; that’s how deeply human everything about computing is, in essence. We need to remember and re-emphasize all of this in the 21st century, in order to roll back the vile narrative that humans are “like computers.”

Stop. Reverse that. Computers, networks, WiFi, all of it, are “like humans.”

The salient point here is, when humans frame computational capabilities in such a way as to effectively limit human life, liberty, informed consent, agency, happiness, and even sovereignty, a hard boundary condition is breached; namely, the U.S. Declaration of Independence principle that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights.” Computers aren’t eroding these intrinsic rights, the owners and operators of those computers, networks, data centers, apps, and mobile devices are doing that; and the damage is already a global cultural pandemic of its own; a pandemic far more deadly and pernicious than COVID-19; and the underlying, precipitating environment that ensures a COVID-23, or COVID-27, of increasing devastation, until enough human beings recognize that even the COVID-19 pandemic is a symptom of this cultural pandemic. Severe climate events and container ships blocking the Suez Canal reveal comorbidities, asserting themselves with increasing frequency and fury.

Why Does Any Of This Matter?

The way we view the world matters, because physics and metaphysics are rapidly converging on the empirical observation that our world-view literally creates the phenomenological world. It was both uncanny and tickling to hear Dr. Faggio use one of my own favorite words for world-view, it’s the German language word: weltanschauung, because of it’s stereotypical German precision.

“This expression is used to refer to the “wide worldview” or “wide world perception” of a people, family, or person. The Weltanschauung of a people originates from the unique world experience of a people, which they experience over several millennia” (Wikipedia).

This writer adds, of course, that the process by which that “wide world perception” is achieved is through the eponymous process of metavalent stigmergy.

Considering the weight of world-view, in the actual experience of our planet, leads me to a manifestly selfish and self-centered conviction: if I have to live in this world with other beings co-creating such a realm, I simply can not afford to have a critical mass of consciousnesses continuing to believe in, and perpetuate, a hellish realm of environmentally heedless raw materials extraction, depletion, war, scarcity, lack, intentionally engineered economic precarity, poverty, relentlessness interpersonal judging, labeling, stereotyping, objectifying, ostracizing, and whose non-negotiable prerequisite for access to minimal sufficient economic resources to satisfy Maslow Safety Needs, as guaranteed under Article 25, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a bizarre institution of Bullshit Justifications Of Being (JOBs). See the 2018 David Graeber book, Bullshit Jobs. If such is the current state of any particular realm I may inhabit, I’m going to be incredibly motivated to do something to change the suffering to sufficiency, denial to discernment, ignorance to insight, foolishness to fruitfulness.

Now we can get back to consciousness, from which, and within which, all of the phenomenological world is unfolding. Unfolding just as these bits are barely etched in silicon as I write, subtly stored, transmitted, and received via the reflected light of this screen, as you read.

Can Silicon Ever Be Conscious?

My response differs a bit from both doctors. Here’s why. If that-which-is pure awareness chose to become aware of itself through some sufficiently complex computational substrate, it is certainly within its own infinite non-symbolic probability space for it to do so. For that matter, one biblical text proclaims, “if these [people] keep silent, the stones will cry out [in praise]!” (AMP). If stones can be made to express acknowledgment of Pure Awareness, consciousness, why can’t silicon? Isn’t silicon made from melted down tiny sand-stones, after all? Believe me, I understand how utterly absurd it sounds for a nobody wandering backpack philosopher like me to differ with a man of such stature:

“Federico Faggin is a physicist, engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He developed the MOS Silicon Gate Technology at Fairchild (1968) and designed the world’s first microprocessor at Intel (1971). Faggin also founded and led Zilog, Synaptics, and other high-tech companies before starting the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation (2011) dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness” (Silicon, The Book).

But it gets even more narcissistic than that. I also believe that I might partly or entirely persuade Dr. Faggin to this view, within certain parameters, which we’ll get to.

In addition to the reference to stones, above, there are also accounts of pure awareness expressing itself through an apparently-burning bush. We say apparently, because who knows what that phenomena might have actually been like? It may be that the analogy of fire was simply the closest at hand, for such an awe-struck observer. If bushes are game for expressing consciousness, then it follows that many other varieties of panpsychism also make room for this sort of thing; as pure awareness takes form of all things, plants, rocks, water, and Earth. Now, one may reasonably reject panpsychism, and yet the biblical accounts of stones and bushes afire with the light of consciousness remain. These too may be rejected, of course, but there they stand, to be considered one way or the other.

The Evil AI Hypothesis and Meme

I also differ a bit with my colleagues in this video, when it comes to fears of an evil AI takeover, but not for reasons you might think. In my view, humanity has already been under the thumb of Evil AI for a very long time, and here’s why: there are few systems more evil than one in which a human operator sits at a console giving another human being a blank stare and saying “Sorry, that’s what the system says.” Need I really provide examples? I think not. Certainly not for any American who has grown up in the current cultural environment.

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil made a mockery of this, 40 years ago. The most fearful AI takeover is the takeover of Actual Ignorance and Idiocracy. Humans using powerless positions to exert power over other humans, because they are utterly stripped of agency in every other aspect of their lives. This isn’t just for Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalist anti-government types. Every call for corporate product support, and now, the faceless decisions to ban people from social media platforms bear terrible witness to the reign of Evil AI in the global economy. Actual Ignorance, with access to increasingly merciless corporate Artificial Intelligences. Not to mention the litany of issues raised by Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma.

This Evil AI system has perhaps been at work oppressing humanity since the Roman Empire, as tragicomically depicted by the fictional worlds of Philip K. Dick (PKD). Is it an exaggeration? Do not believe anything written here. Test it. Compare to your own direct experience.

Actual Ignorance (AI) is by far the greatest AI threat to humanity. It always has been, and always will be. And people can and do become extremely wealthy and powerful by the raw power of actual ignorance, greed, and maliciousness. This is the greatest existential Evil AI threat to humanity, from our perspective.

On the other end of the spectrum, let us consider artificially intelligent, high frequency trading (HFT) bots on Wall Street. These AI’s have been endowed with human agency, from their inception. HFT’s are computational intelligences, imbued with human meaning and intention, driving stock markets to all-time highs for the sole benefit of the handful of their human owners. Evil AI is already solidly at the helm, in the form of Actually Ignorant Artificially Intelligent (AI-AI) hybrid organizations and systems.

This is the context in which every working American lives in the year 2021. Conservative or liberal, canceled or coddled, red, white, blue, green yellow, purple. Or, maybe that’s just, like, our opinion man. That’s your decision, as always.

Here’s one way to check these conjectures: observe the basic stock market index charts. Beyond the squiggly lines, compare what these charts viscerally communicate to your own individual direct experience. Do you feel a sense of infinite liberating growth and expansion in your own life, as those charts seem to convey? Or do you experience the opposite? Do you feel the crushing demand to get up every morning and do something that you dislike, or even despise, in order to avoid the fate of being evicted, penniless, shelterless, foodless? Do you feel sentenced to this fate forever and ever? Or neither of those, just numb, dumb, or best of all, complacent. “It is what it is, deal with it.” That is, of course, the favored, AI-programmed response.

Worst of All Possible Worlds?

This is what potentially leads to the worst of all possible worlds. When Actual Ignorance AI contracts to build Artificial Intelligence AI, with the express intention to justify, entrench, and make permanent its own illegitimate power, that’s dystopia. It’s not anything to worry about, because we’re living in it. When Actual Ignorance convinces enough people that they have access to some magical Artificial Intelligence that makes them into geniuses, without even the first inkling of critical thought, this just might be the worst kind of metavalent stigmergy at work. Remember, the process itself is neutral. As with all of humanity’s most powerful tools and processes, it is human intention that determines beneficial or non-beneficial application.

From this perspective, it appears that humans can and must reverse engineer these Evil AI algorithms – and deploy effective countermeasures – in order to achieve a flourishing human experience commensurate with our universal true nature in the Post-Automation Era. True Self, or True Nature, as described by all of the great religious, philosophical, and metaphysical traditions of human history.

Dr. Faggio adds that, “We are taking advantage of it [quantum computing] but we don’t know what’s going on.” To not know what’s going on again demonstrates and epitomizes the Actual Ignorance that we’ve described in this short essay. The current situation is almost exactly like the favorite position of every Actually Ignorant cartoon villain ever portrayed. Flush with power and money, able to buy a magic box, a cheat code, a Dark Crystal that just keeps supporting their infinitely ignorant, illegitimate power, without regard for potential consequence to themselves, or others.

Please do invest the time to listen to the whole podcast. You won’t be disappointed. Dr. Faggio goes on, “That’s what you accept when you accept being a machine, and therefore, better machines will control you. And behind those machines are people who like to monetize you.”

We don’t have to settle for the current Evil AI status quo. We can be both fully human and express the maximum of our human creativity for the blossoming of extended mind tools and prosthetics. We can cultivate beneficial, hybrid cognition tools and platforms, synthetic forms of embedded and substrate independent inter-cognition, and cultivate an Actually Intelligent AI world that works for everyone, one day at a time, even going so far as to cultivate conditions on earth as it is in heaven. We can achieve all of this with computers, with quantum, even with seemingly miraculous non-symbolic processes at work beyond the sand-boxed virtual machine of our ordinary, everyday experience.

How? By the same process of metavalent stigmergy that got us to this present Default Consensus Reality of pandemic exhaustion and burn-out.

One realization at a time. As a critical mass of individuals comes to understand that humanity already is, and always will be sovereign over all of our creations, including even our most advance computational feats, humanity awakens from it’s self-inflicted nightmare.

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Slavery was never abolished. Abolished means obliterated. Completely. No exceptions. None.

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“But they’re criminals!” Irrelevant. Slavery is slavery, and it is a curse that is still eating America alive.

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Scientists connect human brain to computer wirelessly for first time ever (2 minute read)

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“A recent study from BrainGate technology successfully demonstrated the first-ever wireless brain-computer interface¹ on humans. The system can transmit brain signals at single-neuron resolution and in full broadband fidelity to a computer.”

“It allowed the participants in the study to achieve similar typing speeds and point-and-click accuracy as wired systems continuously for up to 24 hours in their own homes. The system will allow researchers to look at brain activity over long periods in a way that was nearly impossible before” (The Independent en Español)

[ 1 ] “Power-saving design opportunities for wireless intracortical brain–computer interfaces” (Nature).

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An IRL FanFic-Maybe-NotFic Joint. Based on the Medium publishing universe algorithmically surfaced creative writing work of one Jessica Wildfire.

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“Between every stimulus and response, there is an infinite empty space.”

Yes, oh guru, I confess, instead of being satisfied to bask in the sufficiency of that pure awareness, I filled that space with this, again, as is my habitual tendency. My bad. I accept the consequences that my follower count will be reset to zero every day, forever; that I’ll be justifiably shadow-banned, digitally gang-stalked, zersetzung‘d IRL, de-platformed, and played like a human puppet for IC entertainment. But then, you know the old Zen Trope: get deplatformed seven times, create an entirely new platform eight.

Another typical day. Woke up, had a cup of coffee, read the entire internet for updates. Today’s theme seems to be:

It’s Billionaires Gone Bunkers!

Panoptic private surveillance and impenetrable private security armies. Electromagnetic spectrum Dark Zones, legislated by Dark Money, for maximum lulz and sex trafficking. What could possibly go wrong?

In a given universe where some non-trivial proportion of such activity is taking place, what’s perhaps most tragicomic is the fact that, somewhere inside, the very people building the bunkers – like pyramid laborers – have got to know that they won’t have a place inside; and yet, willingly participate in their own cynical extermination in the name of, “hey, it’s a job, and everybody *has* to have a job.”

This is what has been described as the #JobTrance for at least the past decade.

The View Through Flimsy 3D Glasses

Through a blue lens over the left eye, this is also what has been described as an inherently toxic and unsustainable, mad, voracious, dog-eat-dog consumer culture. Through a red lens over the right eye, it’s just pure evil, principalities and powers. Perfectly predictably. Prophesied.

Multiplexing those views renders the present default consensus political reality:

Mammon gonna’ mammon.

Riveted eschatology fans, on the edge of their beds and listening through earbuds question, “will the numbers of #PostAutomationEra Rip Van Winkles reduce fast enough to prevent self-fulfilling self-destruction?”

An omniscient audience sees that each participant posseses the individual agency to decide within their own hearts, whether or not to reconcile with brothers and sisters, or to literally, voluntarily, manifest Armageddon. Which will they choose?

Dig in, and literally be willing to kill brothers and sisters in war, yet again? Or, look around and see that we are each the fruit of the same human tree of life, each survivors of similar family traumas; all in the same boat, the same existential predicament, the same global context, inhabiting the same collective frame of reference – a frame of reference whose primary activity, at the moment, seems to be arguing over whether or not we could even be arguing, if we weren’t in the same frame of reference.

The polarized duality frame of reference. This much, we can agree upon. To vehemently disagree.

Same As It Ever Was

All of the causes and conditions that have gone before this present moment, the ways and means by which society is organized and conducted, have precisely transported us into this present moment. Yet, there will be some who can find a way to dispute even this. That’s okay, too.

For the vast majority who can follow this line of reasoning, it becomes clear that, if we continue the way that society is organized and conducted, in the way that it has operated up until this moment, the outcome is, again, the present moment.

It therefore stands to reason, we suggest, that those experiencing an advantageous or beneficial present moment, will likely desire, and maybe vote for the continuation of existing cultural algorithms; while those not experiencing an advantageous or beneficial present moment, will likely desire and perhaps take action to change said algorithms.

Where We Go From Here

So, stay tuned for the next exciting episode of, “Earth the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.” It’ll be witnessed by at least 2.3 billion daily viewers and presented via 500 hours of video uploaded every single minute of every single day.

You won’t want to miss a moment, and if you do, you’ll be considered orthogobtusely out of the loop!

Be love.

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What if the 5G conspiracy is that we never have to charge our devices again?

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Nor Can There Be.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Finally, no more need lofty goals like to Organize and Monetize the Entire Galaxy’s Information. Just a simple life spent enjoying the process of inquiring, together, to organize this one tiny mind’s information.

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Then, hit delete, ftw.

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Nothing we’ve mentioned means mRNA engineering is obsolete! Far from it. Only means to maybe also pay attention to environmental factors & effects in the emergence of mutations and new strains. Does it make sense? Or no?

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We’re all in it together, kid. Please help me help you to help me to get Closer to Truth. ;-)

DNA repair within neurons

Humans have only a limited capacity to generate new neurons. These cells thus need to repair errors in the genome. To better understand this process, Reid et al. developed Repair-seq, a method to locate DNA repair within the genome of stem cell–derived neurons. DNA repair hotspots (DRHs) were more likely to occur within specific genomic features such as gene bodies as well as in genomic formations, open chromatin, and active regulatory regions. This method showed that repair was enriched at sites involved in neuronal function and identity. Furthermore, proteomic data indicated that genes in DRHs are enriched in Alzheimer’s disease and that DRHs are more active in aging. These observations link neuronal DNA repair to aging and neurodegeneration.

Abstract

Neurons are the longest-lived cells in our bodies and lack DNA replication, which makes them reliant on a limited repertoire of DNA repair mechanisms to maintain genome fidelity. These repair mechanisms decline with age, but we have limited knowledge of how genome instability emerges and what strategies neurons and other long-lived cells may have evolved to protect their genomes over the human life span. A targeted sequencing approach in human embryonic stem cell–induced neurons shows that, in neurons, DNA repair is enriched at well-defined hotspots that protect essential genes. These hotspots are enriched with histone H2A isoforms and RNA binding proteins and are associated with evolutionarily conserved elements of the human genome. These findings provide a basis for understanding genome integrity as it relates to aging and disease in the nervous system.

Read More

CREDIT: @CedricBardyLab

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This is what a Global Cognition Group Looks Like

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From this perspective (FTP), Curt Jaimungal’s self-deprecatingly described “irresponsible” project called Theories Of Everything – which he may be taking to the next level with the whimsically named TOE Clippings spin-off – is perhaps one of the best examples of what many of us envisioned when we imagined what a healthy, functional Global Brain could become. A colloborative cognition space, a noosphere, in the service of advancing human discovery, inquiry, and understanding. More precisely, collaborative intercognition, contemplating the nature and purpose of the human predicament and what to pragmatically, proximally, do about it.

A mutually-enriching process, an ongoing process of investment in one another – as I understand Curt’s framing – for exploring humanity’s most fundamental questions in a way that builds literacy, capacity, and capability. From the simplest questions – not always the easiest – to the deepest and greatest challenges. Cultivating Earth’s greatest benefit. Extending humanity’s best potential., if you will.

Bringing the affordances of new kinds of A.I. augmented, 100% human capacity to bear upon challenges which no single human mind is even capable of containing, let alone processing or solving. For those who may find this type of context and content too speculative: firstly, it’s early days; and secondly, the format can be brought down to earth, so to speak, in terms of branching into collaborative mathematical problem set sessions and other open-ended educational inquiries and process (think wood-working, welding, or any other trade or craft, for that matter), that brings independent, self-guided practical education out of the rows of desks factory model of the 1920’s and into this 21st century #PostAutomationEra.

Toward Healthy, Adpative, Self-Directed, Open-Access, Inter-Cognition Spaces

This kind of self-directed, open-access to higher education has long been modeled by some of the world’s leading thinkers, working on some of the most challenging problems. Both Jeff Hawkins and Stephen Wolfram have made live, real-time R & D meetings open to anyone who would like to join in. You can join The Wolfram Physics Project Working Sessions or the Numenta Research Meetings.

These are practical, existing, working examples of how to heal, mature, and address the Social Dilemma of our troubled, distracted, combative adolescent Global Brain. But here’s the key:

Motivations must pivot. Priorities must re-org. We have arrived in the #PostAutomationEra, but not everyone has realized it, yet. The good news is, there are rapidly declining numbers Rip Van Winkles remaining.

Despite the embittered spite of a generation in deep denial of it’s own decline, we have hundreds of millions of Global Millenials and Digital Natives to thank for the nearly universal improvements of the most meaningful and pragmatic human aspects of navigating this moment of disruption, this inflection point in human cultural history, into an entirely new era of humanity. Welcome to the Post-Automation Era.

It’s in this new and promising context that, from our perspective, Curt’s version of modeling real-time intercognition is unique, and FTP, no less than revolutionary; in that it attracts a slightly larger audience than more specialized research groups while expanding the applied communications space beyond mere podcasts or cliquish clubhouses.

FTP, Curt is actively modeling and cultivating an entirely new kind of productive intercognition – by means of a kind of fouth-way interview method of shared inquiry, by way of an “office hours,” or Q & A interview style, on the back-end, which we’ll elaborate on in the future – that can potentially, in our ever irrationally optimistic view, significantly help to heal and grow social media beyond the troubled, solipsistic, discordant, adolescent Global Brain stage of development that we are all familiar with, and which we are all more than ready to leave as a mostly bad memory, back in the teens (2010’s).

Experience an AMA Live with Curt Jaimungal

Watch here AMA Live with Curt Jaimungal if the embed below misbehaves.

We might even suggest that this is an example of Curt’s Global Cognition Group in action. A GCG isn’t a proprietary thing. It’s the 21st century version of what author Napoleon Hill dubbed Mastermind groups, now augmented by the A.I.-enabled internet Extended Mind (Clark & Chalmers).

Today, we all have access to countless GCG’s, and the cultivation of our own GCG’s perhaps represents another kind of new literacy in this new era of human flourishing and thrival. If only we’re wise enough to see the wonders of the supernatural world – you know the slogan by now: 100% super, 100% natural – that’s right before our very eyes.

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In the age of Medium, Substack, Patreon, and new platforms like PanQuake, being a writer in the #PostAutomationEra is becoming something entirely different that it has ever been, before. If it wasn’t easy in the past, imagine the futility in the context of a constantly chatter global brain monkey mind.

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So, Why Even Bother?

Good question. I differ with a lot of Kathryn Van Auken’s work, but I like her answer to this question:

We have to make sense of our experiences and share them with others, so we will all feel less alone and perhaps ease suffering in others; either through shared stories, or through pure entertainment. We want to offer a reprieve from this chaotic world. That compulsion is why we write, despite the discouragements and hardships, because not writing is much more painful than failing at it. That’s my answer, what’s yours?

• “The only reason to write is because you have no choice.”
• “Write for yourself. If anyone else cares, that’s just a bonus.”
• “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” - Maya Angelou
• “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” - Dorothy Parker

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We do … um … perhaps have a bit more work to do.

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And we’re more than capable of doing it, but as is so often the case in the human predicament, it often begins with realizing rock bottom of some kind or another.

It’s our level of participation that literally changes the course of events toward a better ride.

So, yes, let’s be aware. Let’s recognize the shadow for what it is. And then let’s bring the light.

If changes in values and ideals is what is required, then let’s change those values and ideals, together.

🥰

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The ablity to pay omnitention maybe isn’t quite it, but we do perhaps need a word for the capability, the Post-Automation Era literacy, of paying the right amount of attention to all things at all times; online and offline, in order to be a reasonably informed being in this age of the hybrid human cortex-cloud extended mind.

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It’s a completely new way of being a thinking human being, which pretty much anyone over the age of 35 has a very difficult time comprehending, while those under 35 are completely adept, having never known any other way of being in this world. Then, we say the same thing about “them” that “they” said about “us.” Yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.

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It’s not either / or, it’s both / and.

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We need to think much more about the implications of corporate and regulatory capture of The Algorithmic Commons in the #PostAutomationEra. Pretty confident you can fill in much more than we can, simply by seeing this tweet-sized prompt.

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After a disasterous experiment with the disgusting, hugely invasive disqus ads, we’re experimenting with utteranc.es. :: Read More :: to give a try.☮️

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What does Krishnamurti mean by, “love is total attention?” Is it so? And if so, do we not certainly love our work far more than our family?

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It’s not a judgment, it’s an observation of my own process. Your mileage may vary. We’re inquiring together, merely for the sake of inquiry.

“I have watched what is, and moved from there. It is a living thing, it doesn’t come to a conclusion.”

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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What is the nature of freedom, equality, in the context of Earth, 2021? If can, try consider these two videos, together, without prejudice or bias.

Watch Japharii from BLM757 on Open-Carrying, working with Boogaloo Bois, Death of Comrade and more! if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Jordan B. Peterson | Full interview | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan if the embed does not behave nicely.

An Age of Reconciliation

The reason for observing the two videos above is to provide a context for understanding conditions as they presently exist on planet Earth. These are not my opinions, these are examples of people taking action in the world, each from their individually-guided sense of internal truth, justice, and liberty for all. Isn’t this what we purport to believe in, in the present default consensus reality?

From this perspective, we have also seen some surprising confusion over the phrase equality of outcome. Universal social security is emphatically and empirically not equality of outcome; yet is somehow occasionally misperceived and depicted as such by those who benefit from the present State of Affairs. We observe that there exists an extremely misanthropic view of humanity. A view of humanity that considers the species as incapable of growing beyond our basest, most animalistic aspects of our complex and multi-dimensional nature. Perhaps those observations are correct, and we are overly optimistic. However, our own direct observations lead us to the following.

Engineered Economic Precarity

Engineered economic precarity has served the ruling class of America well, for over a quarter of a millennium.

Engineered economic procurity has resulted in suicide becoming the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 21 and 45, as of 2020.

Engineered economic precarity resulted in the vulnerability that made the United States the single most afflicted nation, in the case of a pandemic. And rest assured, a worse pandemic will come, one day. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a decade, perhaps during our children’s lifetime. It will happen, because pandemics have always happened on planet Earth, and will always happen from time to time. It’s simply the fact of the matter. It’s also the fact of the matter that each generation is born ignorant of the previous generations, and it is not always simple to transfer knowledge in a way that is understood, respected as authentic, and therefore taken seriously.

The hucksterism and commodification of literally everything, in order to sell, sell, sell, has exacerbated the distrust between generational knowledge transfer. This does not bode well for a species that is so highly dependent upon intergenerational knowledge transfer for its survival.

The Ending Of An Era

Bankers and money changers who co-opted Christianity to provide sheep’s clothing for the capitalist wolves of Wall Street have long been handsomely rewarded; flying in their private jumbo jets and pontificating from their golden pulpits and crystal cathedrals. This era has come to an end. We cannot serve God and Mammon, and it will be a good exercise for anyone who does not understand that saying to investigate it for yourselves. We are not here to convince, we are here to observe, and to share our observations.

Some people are referring to this time as The Great Reset, some people are referring to this time as the true dawning of the Age of Aquarius, some people are referring to this as a time of genuine spiritual Reformation and Revival, some people are describing this as an energetic phase shift, from the 3D to the 5D.

We have dubbed all of these, and more, as features of the #PostAutomationEra. This is the era in which human creativity and ingenuity has automated so much of the creation of our individual and collective material needs, that we are literally in a new era of civilization. We have not seen a phase shift like this in our societal configuration since the dawning of the Industrial Era. It’s disruptive. It’s scary for many people. It comes with many blessings and curses, which we ought to look upon with opened eyes, grateful hearts, and responsible minds; responsibile for the care of this planet and it’s raw natural resources; water, air, soil; without which, none of this paradise exists.

One guidance on what to do with these changes is in the royalty-free book at PostAutomationEra.com also available in freebie PDF, for those who cannot afford the minimal cost of printing at Amazon.

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“There seems to be a bit of a minor communication error. Please stand by.”

It has come to our attention that there seems to be a tendency to confuse what we mean by the instantiation of new default consensus realities. Default Consensus Reality (DCR) is a non-sectarian, non-denominational, secular bridge narrative toward a world that works for everyone, historically suggested as conditions on Earth as it is in Heaven, and aligned ancient sentiments of all traditions. The end of all suffering, lack, want, pain, greed, ignorance, etc. Rest.

The fundamental principles explored in this site do not imply, encourage, or constitute any kind of a proactive program, agenda, much less absurd manifesto. This is a site populated by observations. Observations of the way that nature and the universe appear to work from the perspective of one hopelessly subjective observer, derived via the process of first-person lived experience. That is, observing ever-changing conditions on this planet for the past 60+ years,further inspected through the microscopic and macroscopic (Micro-Macro) lenses provided by humanity’s great wisdom, faith, scientific, and spiritual traditions. These observations have provided an overwhelming number of data points that hint at the rudimentary thesis that metavalent stigmergy is the process by which people come to believe things in common, at scale, on a widespread basis.

Authentic Consensus

To be angry about or against the process of metavalent stigmergy is like being angry about, or against mitosis, or gravity, or the words, “in the beginning.” There is nothing to be angry about, to advocate for, or argue against. Cells divide. That’s how biological life transpires. Gravity keeps our bodies upon the surface of the Earth. “In the beginning,” are the first three words of the most published book in history. I suppose we could argue about such foundational truths; however, at least these three facts – Default Consensus Narrative Realities (DCNR’s) – are immutable to statistically all sound human minds in the year 2020.

By definition, authentic consensus between fully informed conscious agents, cannot be coerced in even the most subtle ways; therefore, it may be a predetermined unattainable principle that can only ever serve as a kind of north star in sentient ethics. Is the north star useless to everyday experience?

Default consensus reality is a mere observation, not a creed or philosophy. Have we repeated the word observation enough, yet?

A Collective Default Mode Network

We observe that default consensus realities are a kind of default mode network of [common | similar | shared] awareness of [the world | conditions on planet Earth]. Default consensus realities exist within families, tribes, villages, cities, counties, states, nations, and ultimately the world.

DCRs are shared assumptions and presumptions about how the world is, be they accurate or not. We observe that DCRs tend to be largely unconscious to most subjective participants in any given population.

One current default consensus reality agrees that the sky is blue. Another prevalent default consensus reality is that we live in a world of conflict and strife. Both of those, appear to be empirically true, at the moment, from the perspective of a severely constrained biological sensory substrate. We are reminded that there are changes to the climate that could completely change the color of the sky. Similarly, there are changes to the way we interact with one another in a society that literally can cultivate conditions on Earth as it is in heaven. The 20^th DCR considered both similarly likely; however, the utility of the latter greatly outweighed the former and occupied the minds and intentions of a vastly greater number of subjective observers.

Transformations of the 20^th DCNR cultivated the current default consensus narrative reality; not because anyone convinced anybody of anything; not because anybody forced anybody to do something differently; but because causes and conditions changed, and will continue to change. If there is any kind of implication of a static utopia perceived in this text, that is a misunderstanding.

The Emptiness Of Conflict

That’s it. That’s all there is to the definition of consensus, in the context of DCRs and DCNRs. Conflict simply cannot exist in this shard of rulial space, unless a discordant shard brings conflict for pointless and absurd reasons of provoking disharmony (generally in a desperate attempt to usurp order with chaos, for as yet inexplicable reasons). Even then, conflict in the Earthly realm appears to be a kind of geometric misunderstanding between conscious agents. Hence, our responsibility is to attempt to increase and improve understanding whenever discordants disrupt the intrinsic tranquility of base reality (perhaps in a vain attempt to feel immortal independent of that which is inherently immortal; hence, pointless). Sounds crazy, I know. Will circle back one day to better explicate. If I had more time this would be far shorter and more concise.

We’ve observed a curious phenomena within this rulial shard whereby others have lectured, berated, and at times physically, psychologically, emotionally, or economically beaten or otherwise socially-engineered others into submission to severe and severely deprecated world views, while accusing the beaten and berated of intending the same toward to the aggressor agents. As co-equal human beings, all observations are equally valid as those of aggressors, isn’t it? For example, if the reader’s views are as valid as any other observer’s (as they obviously are), then that works both ways, right? Else, the principle of free speech is a fraud, a fiction. Do not believe the speaker. Investigate for yourself.

By way of mirroring a favorite disparagement of mockers and scorners, if the previous statement is perceived as triggering, the speaker respectfully suggests that it may be a sign of personal problems of the type and variety often projected upon and flung at the speaker. Because, if one is angry at anything that one has read here, and feels that the speaker must change their perceptions to match the reader’s perceptions, that would constitute forcing something down the speaker’s throat; not the other way around, as has commonly been protested and preemptively punished in the past. These are simply more definitions, not opinions.

It follows logically that anyone who attempts to frame this work as trying to shove something down somebody’s throat is either projecting or simply lying; most likely out of fear, or because such projectors perceive a process of loss of some form of illegitimate power on their part. Regardless of the language we use to refer to this period of time and the changes in progess, the dissolution of illegitimate power is rapidly accelerating on planet Earth, as rapidly, effectively, and by the same process by which light dispels darkness. The sun rising in the morning is not an act of violence, it is a daily reminder of that which is. Darkness surely cares to differ in its infinitely bitter and resentful state of utter impotence to change the way the real world works; hence sealing it’s own fate.

As light shines in darkness and darkness fails comprehension, so reflects the hearts and minds of all sentient beings. For those with hearts to perceive, even darkness is not darkness, for the nature of omniscience is omniscent and of omnipresence, omnipresent; supporting the conjecture that The Observer attests and bears witness as energy which precedes both darkness and light and still prior as immutuble awareness that precedes both thought and imagination. Welcome home.

Metavalent Stigmergy, DCNs, and DCNRs are descriptors that advance no specific doctrine, program, or agenda, whilst occassionaly instantiating, through the foundational affordances of the Earthly realm, as suitable programs, alliances, partnerships, and collaborations. Are illuminating and useful non-indoctrinary or anti-indoctrinary documentary works possible? Like all exploration of the fringes of rulial space, we can not know what we cannot know. In accepting our profound and vexing limitations, we may discover that our capabilities vastly exceed prior assessment, understanding, and expectation.

Amituofo. Namaste. Aloha ke Akua. Na ke Akua e hoʻopōmaikaʻi iā mākou. Dios nos bendiga. Deus nos abençoe. God bless, redeem, restore, and preserve the human race and all life on Earth as it is in Heaven.

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For the water protectors, everywhere.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Yesterday's realization.

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That said TO me, is not always directed AT me. People are performing their experience in front of me, not necessarily because of me. Also, never allow the passive aggressive to use this as an excuse to pretend that, that which *is* directed *at* me is not directed at me, and for me. Always the the double-sided sword of truth.

Whether I’m a daughter or son of a narcissistic family system, the Golden Child or the Scapegoat, with high behaviorally-inherited narcissism myself, of course I assume that it’s all, always, about me, and the entire world is always coming at me, bro’/sis’. I am the eternal target and victim of all people and all circumstances.

Can I let this go in the light of heaven? Of course. Will it always be part of the story I share with others of how I got into heaven? Of course. Do all the experiences that I had on my way to heaven “ruin heaven” in any way? That, doesn’t even merit a response. Heaven, whether believed in or not, by any intellectually honest definition, is incorruptible. Of course, that characteristic is exactly what triggers so many damaged beings to forever attempt to impugn that, in vain.

Now is the opportunity to let go of our painful childhood distorted cartoon images of an inaccessible, impenetrable, condemning heaven, and integrate everything that we have learned from science, physics, and exploration of all the great world philosophies and traditions and arrive ourselves, in this very instant.

Welcome home. This present moment.

Consider Marianne Williamson’s audiobook, A Return To Love. [Listen here]] if the embed below does not to play correctly.

“In heaven, everyone is allowed to be successful.”

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What happens next?

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Watch here if the embed below does not load.

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The broken cargo ship, compared to an aircraft carrier transiting the same location, and the resulting traffic jam.

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Here’s Noam Chomsky with one of my current favorite interviewers, Curt Jaimungal diving deep into the most credible, contemporary Theories of Everything.

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Also, on wage slavery and the #JobTrance that we were once conditioned to accept; mostly by extreme and violent peer pressure; sociologicial, emotional, and even physical, for those who dare question conformity. Make no mistake about it, it’s violence.

Many Hawaiians call this crabs in a bucket behavior, but I can attest to its universality across Turtle Island. In short, others who found no creative way to break out of situations that they vocally lament, implicitly conspire to make sure nobody in their social circle is actually capable of, nor ever perceived as, having surpassed them in their own capitulation to a system that they despise. The cloak-n-dagger ways that this plays out in real life represent much of the worst, in the human predicament. This conditioned peer-reinforcement of enslaving norms is what literally makes people into Agents in the Matrix. It’s a mass sociological homicide; killing people’s optimism, imagination, and will, out of sheer rage and spite over what they feel they themselves lack. It’s ugly. And it’s utterly uncalled for, unnecessary. “Everybody has to be job,” and “Everyone has to pull their weight,” are toxic memes that abusive parents embedded into abused children, who then project those out upon everyone else. They are mere beliefs, however strongly held they may be. They are opinions, and nothing more. We know this, because there are billions of human beings who live happy lives of material sufficiency and even abundance, without holding to such beliefs, at all. Just not in America.

However, in addition to Millenials growing up with the internet, which has provided them a far more global perspective on the planet, as more Americans travel, more and more have caught on. The American system of abuses and abusers that creates such opulence for so few, while the vast majority live a kind of share-cropper’s life from which they will never escape, by design, has reached the end of it’s time on Earth. As Buckminster Fuller taught, we can cultivate a world that works for everyone, without economic or ecological disadvantage to anyone, so everyone can enjoy the whole Earth; and we’ve been getting that work done now, for more than half a century. We are beginning to reap what we have sown. Unconditional and unassailable gratitude, peace, abundance, sufficiency, for all.

And it matters. Because today, underlying the many crises of hate in America – race, creed, gender, age – today is perhaps the most toxic root of hate of them all: the pandemic of self-hate. Self-hate an an unimaginable scale. Empty, direction-less, self-hatred that is sublimated, denied, and then projected onto notions of The Other, up to and including the grotesque reality of daily mass shootings in America, which, if unabated, threaten to catch up with suicide as a leading cause of death by utter despair.

“Suicide was … the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 54” (NIH.

And the Anchorage Daily news affirms that, “Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was America’s deadliest year for gun violence in decades” (ADN).

These realities are still rapidly growing epidemics in post-pandemic American.

The question then becomes, what kind of economic and social organizations could have gotten away with this, for so long? What kind of economic and social systems could be left alone to _continue perpetuating such suffering up to this very day? What is this sytemic organizational name? Because whatever its name, its outcomes are now plainly manifest for all to see, and for all to decide whether or not such a system can be permitted to continue doing what it’s always done, effectively unquestioned and uncorrected, thereby giving us nothing but more and more of what we’ve always got.

Watch Chomsky on Terence McKenna, Sam Harris, GPT3, Cryptocurrencies, Kierkegaard, Neuralink, & Hofstadter if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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“The human species is going through a mutation in the meaning of biological reproduction. The bishops who are imposing orders … are not actually interested in protecting the moral principles they’re citing, they’re protecting their own power. That’s what’s really going on, in my view.” – Former Priest, James Carroll.

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Former Priest James Carroll’s “The Truth at the Heart of the Lies.”

On why he’s speaking up, despite the sadly predictable beratings and beatings, Carroll adds, “the (authentic) catholic faith defines my hope.”

FTP, what’s happened, like in America as a whole, is that human institutions and systems have taken on a zombie life of their own. The values that we purport to hold, that we all too often barely feign to practice, have been reduced to marketing slogans; while power-grabbing, fake alpha-male (and female) narcissism has literally infected every corner of society. It’s the .dotfile-like hidden nature of narcissism, which depends upon being undetected in the sufferer themself, that we must get to; ‘su root’ of the psyche, to to get to the root of matter. Else, no systemic reform will ever make a difference, for the same kinds of people will rise to the same levels of power, and the whole vicious cycle will repeat, again and again. We know that this can all change, because while “changes aren’t permanent, change is” (Peart).

We can do this, because the human species is simultaneously going through a mutation in the meaning of what it actually means to be human, in and of itself. How much more fortunate could we be, than to be alive to bear witness to this epochal transition, in this very present moment? The Post-Automation Era.

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Wait for it … Only Russell Brand could negate the negging of Jerry Seinfeld with this kind of flair (not the Reddit kine; real kine, ʻohana nui.) ROTFLMAO. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing; but we can watch and laugh anyway.

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“Ninety-nine percent of the time, my advice, as a Life Coach is going to be … “Shave Your Head and Move to Phoenix”.

<img src=”/assets/images/Seinfeld_Shave_Head_Phoenix_YouTube.jpg” style=”float:left; vertical-align:top; margin:0px 20px loading=”lazy” width=”100”> Literally as seen on Fallon, two months after essentially having done exactly that; granted, the head shaving had been in place well in advance of this amatuer false prophet’s pontificating. Can’t make this up. Given the Comedian’s Creed on theft of material, how is that one of the “greatest” comics of all time has to steal some loser nobody’s life script as material? Can’t make this up. LOL. :rotfl:

But, wait, there’s more! Even Sam Vaknin, “Go to Your Desert, Listen to Your Inner Silence.”

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Isn’t [ both && and ] … generally … Closer to Truth? Especially when it comes to some kind of Conclusion to the Matter of the question of Theories of Everything?

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New Patron Post: Ameé Quiriconi: “It’s a Spectrum”

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Here’s one. Perfectly summarized, by one @secular_william.

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• How to Apply the Concept of Umwelt in the Evolutionary Study of Cognition
• Subjectivity “Demystified”: Neurobiology, Evolution, and the Explanatory Gap
• Phenomenal Consciousness and Emergence: Eliminating the Explanatory Gap

Micromacro. From Adverse Childhood Experience to Air Combat Evolution. Awesome sauce. Awesome psycho-sauce, to be more precise.

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Hello, “trusted, scalable, human-level AI for air combat.

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For many of us, simply learning how to kindly, yet undeniably claim our own permission to exist presents a seeming impossibility.

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New Patrons Post.

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Get early access to quality curation for as little as a cup of coffee per month. :peace:

How online and mainstream beer & cigar man-o-sphere and hyper-commercialized socialization agents encourage and cultivate an increasingly narcissistic and psychopathological culture among both men and women, with a focus on the manufacture of fake alpha males.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Also, a bunch of fascinating data on how people actually use hookup apps.

• Actually, it’s men that want long-term relationships much more than women.
• Men average message length is 12 words. Women 121 words. LOL.
• Women have the most one-night-stands, probably because of absurd ratio of men-to-women of almost 10-to-1.
• Women initiate 73% of divorces because they feel being single empowers them. (Of course it does. Options. LOL.)
• Not all too surprising, actually, when you think about it.

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It’s a long and uncertain road to authentic metavalence, but this is a real-time glimpse of how it works in everyday life.

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Yes. Emojis are Narrative. You can probably create a PhD out of it. As of this writing, there’s zero hits for “emojis as narrative,” so, you’re welcome. If you do go for the PhD, at least maybe send a cup of coffee and a bagel, yeah?

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Just funny

Wow! How dare he not reject and denounce himself for talking to other Americans who don’t agree with him politically!?

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A Quoran perspective.

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That’s all. That’s the post. As seen on Medium:

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The more I observe life on Earth, the more that I see the continuity between the personal, professional, family, corporate, community, national, medical, mental health, and ethical environments.

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It’s all connected.

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On the defensive false idol worship of egoic self-confidence and a reasoned reading from Rumi.

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This is such a wonderfully compassionate, kind, and nuanced approach to this topic. Much needed. The polarizing misunderstandings around this challenge are so rampant, that it is difficult to sort the signal from the noise.

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That’s one of the primary purposes of this website. To curate meaningful, productively thought provoking content that is worth your time, and by delivering that curation value, contribute to building communities of value by finding deeper value within ourselves and reflected in our surroundings.

It’s a Spectrum, not a Final Judgement

The spectrum of narcissism – the giving and receiving of narcissistic injuries – is a complicated and widely misunderstood topic. In this podcast, Alan refutes a lot of the oversimplified labels and offers a much-needed and nuanced approach to these culturally metavalent ailments.

It’s deeply ambitious to attempt to put the non-symbolic, non-verbal, passive-aggressive War for Inherent Moral Supremacy under a household roof, into words; but Alan seems very close to achieving the feat, for those with the interest and insight to attend closely.

Like other issues in mental health, our collective denial and avoidance of openly exploring personality disorders, cultivates precisely the kind of out of sight out of mind, twilight, dimmed, darkened, moldy breeding ground that, in general, invites all manner of unpleasant things thrive in.

Sunlight and air are the best medicines, and heaven knows that right now, our civilization could use better, more holistic medicines.

I promise that this is so worth listeneng to, and may be one of the most important themes of public conversation in the 2020’s, if we’re to begin making changes for the better.

Two sides of the same coin

• (05:10) “I’ll simultaneously be folding myself into this too because I understand this process the narcissistic wound which is different from narcissistic abuse which is different from trying to pathologically diagnose someone with a personality disorder it’s not what I’m talking about …”
• (05:40) “it’s that very wound that all of us experienced all of us suffer two sides of the same coin …”
• (07:33) “we’re gonna look at how we all have a narcissistic wound whether or not we call ourselves narcissists whether or not we call ourselves empaths whether or not we call ourselves codependence and I don’t like this language I don’t think it’s helpful …”
• (12:33) “I am going to continue to talk about how that is an an underlying core theme of this misguided unconscious rage this primal rage that is folded into the narcissistic wound and that is then playing out and part of the communities that want to talk about it and so I’ve had a boundary I do not want that energy leaking into the community …”
• (13:07) “the the guiding principle that I endorse is called self-directed healing and really looking at healing as a lifestyle and saying you know we need to take ownership for our own maturing our own our own personal growth and we are continuing to water the seeds of better health and water the seeds of better healthy relating so in order to do that it’s really important to know how some of this residual toxicity and this unknown anger and rage can leak into when we start talking about healing attachment injuries and healing attachment trauma …”

You are not welcome to be you

• (16:24) “chronic stress and anxiety around money and finances, and poverty, and it just creates an environment where the parent is just totally distracted and so your self, you, you are not welcomed to be you … in addition … the environment in some way was potentially hostile to you being yourself, or the environment was so unattentive that you started to question subconsciously your little child mind well there must be something wrong with me, I mean, these people don’t even see me, these people don’t engage me, and this can become really incredibly crazy-making and complex …”
• (19:01) “we must not deserve love, there must be something wrong with me, and all of these core beliefs linked to a really provocative, horrible, nauseating uncomfortable feeling that +there’s something fundamentally wrong with who I am, that I am flawed as a human being and I’m talking about shame …”
• (20:55) “then we just shut down; this complete sense of, well, you know, I guess I can’t even be me and we shut down so much that we don’t even realize we are shut down. We don’t even realize there’s a skill to opening up, we are shut down so much – and here we go here’s a big part of this whole thing I’m talking about – the narcissistic wound creates a false self and that’s how we all then develop, saying, well I can’t be really myself, and when I’ve attempted to have my attachment needs met, and I’ve attempted to connect with my parents in a certain way, and I’ve attempted to want to share who I am, and be vulnerable and open up emotionally … that’s not working … these people are just checked out; these people are distracted; these people are self-absorbed; and remember that word, because it’s a direction that we’re going here; that’s the sort of the link and the crossover with narcissism; that word again … not narcissistic abuse … but this idea about narcissism is this: our development of self was thwarted, so we then need to enter a state of absorption to be able to make choices about what we do next. We can’t don’t really have a freedom or fluidity to know how to let the self just be its self, to let ourselves just to be our selves …”

Everyone has it, and so you … don’t have Permission to Exist

• (23:26) “we can even say that it’s even normal, that it’s really normal to have a narcissistic wound and it’s very easy to make the argument to say everyone has it … in modern culture, we’re living in a very immature psychology …”
• (24:32) “the wound is that, we never had a reference point for really knowing who we really were, and as a result we kept reinforcing and believing, because the environment around us was unwelcome, or maybe even hostile, is that we got the sense that we are going to be fundamentally rejected as a human being, and this is life or death stuff, so, therefore, the conclusion, the really, really intelligent conclusion is: “I cannot be myself. I will be rejected and I will die here.” Therefore, how do I develop this other false self” so that I can simply be allow PERMISSION TO EXIST?!
• (25:48) “my false self, my persona self is going to overcompensate, I’m gonna be an overachiever, and I’m gonna be a little (or a lot) grandiose, and I’m really gonna be a lot of jazz hands, and bells and whistles, and I’m too much for this world, and I’m gonna make sure that you notice me. So, we have a presentation that’s really sophisticated and dynamic, and we’re even moving [toward] – do you see the connection – we can see how then some people can very easily choose to become manipulative, or manipulate environments to get what they want. Because that’s what they needed to get their attachment needs met, and say hey notice me; I know how to make you notice me.”
• (26:32) “Now, there’s also the other avenue, the other direction. The person who implodes into themselves, and they disappear. They want to stay under the radar. I’ve heard a number of stories of people growing up who had this ongoing relationship with hiding; literally hiding in parts of the room, hiding behind furniture; a particular closet where they would sit next to the shoes and hang out with the the long hanging coats, so that when someone opened the door they didn’t even see that they were hiding in there. That’s literal, but also metaphorical or symbolic of [the way] we to just hold back, don’t reveal who you are. All of this is folded into this narcissistic wound and just to repeat, we’re doing [this] in a context where the parent themselves are unaware of their own narcissistic wound, and the parent is unaware and/or has given up on him or herself needing to mature beyond it. So, if the parent can’t acknowledge their own development, their own limitations and challenges, and how they would have to confront their own wounding, their own suffering, their own pain, and really move into this place of how painful it is to not have a secure sense of self, then they’re not going to touch that content to engage in it …”

The glue that holds this all together

• (30:34) “the glue that’s holding all of this together is that all of us have a narcissistic wound, so to single out this other group of people, to then elevate it to narcissistic abuse, we’re not talking about narcissism, and we’re not talking about abuse; we’re talking about the narcissistic wound. That’s why I’ve needed to create this boundary, because people don’t make that distinction.”
• (33:04) “the limitation here is that, when we over identify with the persona, and the persona becomes a crutch, or the persona becomes all we know. And now we’re scrambling to present to protect our image and protect how we’re perceived, and it’s all about manufacturing ourselves, because we are so far away – we are miles and miles away – from even having access to a foundational truth of who am I, really?
• (33:4)) “At the core of all of this and the reason why we are so attached to this false self persona and our life depends on it is that it is buffering us from our core subconscious shame that I already talked about this shame this sense that if that that you know we concluded at some point in our little mind a little person you usually usually you know a lot a lot of unconscious processes you know it’s just not safe to be me in this world and I have a lot of and I’ve received you know some messaging not only is it not safe to be me people don’t want me to be me.

A Transcendant Primal Rage

• (35:20) “It just makes sense, logically, that anyone who has to endure this kind of dynamic, you can see how this could very quickly create a profound anger; and I want to even turn up the volume. We’re not just talking profound anger we’re talking primal rage, a rage that transcends our family, and transcends our history, and transcends the things that did or did not happen; transcends being hurt, it just taps into this extreme primal rage that’s even nonverbal for some of us. It happened so early on, it’s pre verbal, and it’s this rage around I am not welcome in this world – to be myself and as a human being – I’m in this environment that’s telling me that I am flawed and there is something wrong with me, and I have to invest in this false self, fake persona, in order to function, in order to be in a relationship, in order to get a job, in order to belong to community, and this is just deeply unsettling. This grows inside of us, a fire that is burning inside of us, and the type of primal rage that I’m referring to is so crushing, and so powerful, that it creates the sense impossible feelings, because now it’s not only tapping into our own individual self, our own individual life, our own individual story of how this got set up, we’re tapping into a primal, primal human nature for survival.”

An impossible riddle of impossible feelings

• (37:59) “This really sets up this impossible riddle of impossible feelings, this double bind where you are damned if you do and you damned if you don’t. It is a state of paralysis, it is shame paralysis, and the only way to maneuver through this, until we really are able, in an environment that is supportive and that we have enough insight and aren’t quite honestly where our psyche is able to be cracked open; do you hear those words? You know how [emotionally] violent is?
• (38:57) “For many of us, the only way that this whole thing falls apart is when there’s a crack in the persona and usually the explosion that makes the persona the false self blow apart has to do is delivered through suffering and for many of us because our original wound is around attaching it destroy our attachment trauma and an attachment wound it’s going to happen in the same way it’s that you know we’re so fraud fraud in a fragile way holding it all together and it’s it’s going to take the attempt to love and be loved be in relationship and and and open yourself up to vulnerability and emotional connection and when it doesn’t work out and you and you and for and you also have been involved in a toxic dysfunctional dance of pushing each other way then coming back together and pushing each other away and coming back together and it is tapping into a river of grief a river of shame that the relationship it’s the suffering the ending the profound grief the crushing grief finally blows this all open and for many of us it is just so wildly painful because we’re left with all of these years of the aftermath of the profound ignoring that occurred in our history the profound rejection and that we just conclude you know what people my family even people who I know love me and I love them just did not want to know me as a person and even today still don’t want to know me.

Healing as a lifestyle

• (41:00) “And can you just hear the incredible sophistication that we all will need, to discern in our mind, and to make sense, and to paddle through that river of grief? It is very hard and a challenge. This is why I say healing work is a lifestyle, and this is why I say this is a full-time job, and this is why I say you’re gonna be doing this for the rest of your life. It’s an invitation to really participate and paddle. Pick up the oar, and let’s paddle through the river of shame and sadness, and this primal rage. And sometimes it tips over and we fall into the river, and we are all consumed with it. And that’s the transition. Here, this idea of being all consumed in it, is that what happens is that, we start to think from the point of view of being the hurt child, that we cannot manage when we’re in the river; we cannot manage our own crushing feelings of shame, and this primal rage is so scary, and it legitimately is scary. We are not talking about easy things. I mean, in the truest sense of the boogeyman, in the truest sense of a perpetrator, in the truest sense of a monster, in the true sense of a tyrant, in the truest sense of oppression, this rage, the amount of fear we have around tapping into this rage, is legitimate, and is is something we all internally notice. It’s the place where people often say, when they’re entering healing work, and entering therapy, and they’re encouraged to feel their feelings many people say, “oh I can’t feel that, because that’ll let the damn open, and once I open the dam, I’m gonna be flooded, and I will just die here. I will be so crushed, or it’ll take me eight months before I could at least pop out of the the rushing water of the dam of grief and shame and primal rage. I just have to keep working to hold it all together, and how I’m going to keep working to hold it all together is: I just need to keep reinforcing, endorsing this kind of false self persona. And you realize if you’re trying to be – and really hear this one, this one’s so important – if you’re trying to reinforce being the false self persona in relationship, you’re not really in relationship, because you’re not there.”
• (44:42) “And then something happens in life and we get crushed, and we bump up against this sense of utter abandonment, and pure isolation. That’s what we’re safeguarding ourselves against; utter abandonment and pure isolation. I can’t feel those feelings.”

A wound of the development of the self

• (46:43) “The narcissistic wound is the wound of the development of the self. We have created and adopted this point of view that these shame feelings are so bad, that it links to concluding that we are bad, and we link the belief that we are bad, this core shame, to this primal rage. So therefore, I cannot feel – this is how it gets set up – we cannot feel the primal rage or address the shame because the way to get there, the way this psychological dynamic has been set up, is that we have to walk through the door, [and] the only way to enter it is to believe we are the bad person, to feel the shame, I must to move into the place where I believe I’m fundamentally flawed as a human being, and to feel the primal rage of having been taught that. It means I’m the bad person. I can’t I cannot feel these feelings. I can’t be the bad one! And if I have these feelings, then there must be something wrong with me. If you notice I keep repeating this point, [it’s] because _there’s a crossover here, there’s a link to the [experience] that, if we disown this in our self, we are going to see it in the world around us.
• (48:23) “If we disown our own delusional assumption that we are bad at the core, and we will do everything in our power to develop a false self persona to protect ourselves from ever feeling those difficult feelings; yet we still are living with this belief, and this feeling that you deep down, I might be the bad one, or am bad, I therefore have to cover it up and be the good one, we are gonna project this out into the world. We’re gonna look for other people who are gonna be the ones who are bad. We will have a repulsion, an aversion, a revulsion to feeling those feelings. I don’t want to be that, because then I would be different, and so we protect this false self image of the good person. Some of us call this the empath, some of us call this the loving caretaker, some of us call this the codependent, some of us can call this the big-hearted person who just puts everybody else’s needs first, and really wants to help out; but we are we are so invested in making sure we are the good person, because we can’t feel the shame feelings that falsely, delusionally tell us that we’re the bad person, and because we haven’t made peace with those really difficult feelings; this black and white thinking of good and bad; we then project that out onto the world and we’re going to look for other people who are the ones who are bad … ‘those people.’”
• (50:39) “We’re left with this complete aftermath of extreme pain, of not knowing who we are, we want to point to the person who was responsible and participated in the process, and we need to find the bad people who did this to us. And usually, our brain, our mind goes to our partner. Because we can’t take any responsibility for our own feelings, because to take responsibility for those feelings will push us deeper into the thing we’re trying to avoid. And so then we project this on to others, to keep continuously proving, hey, we’re the good ones, and they’re the bad ones.” It’s cultural.
• (52:02) “We can make the argument that the world is, collectively, in trauma mind we are all operating from trauma mind, and this creates a lack of resource, and we see things in this dualistic black and white thinking, coming from trauma mind, meaning somebody is good and somebody’s bad, it means somebody is chosen and somebody’s unchosen, [and] you can’t have a chosen without the unchosen.”
• (52:47) “Tap into any type of politics, where, whatever side you’re on, you’re on the good side and whoever’s not on your side, obviously, they’re on the wrong side, and they’re bad. You’re good and they’re bad. And this is the source of war, this is the source of genocide, this is the source of oppression, and it’s a lot of this projecting, from this immature, wounded place; [where] none of us know who we are, and it is very easy to make the argument, culturally, that we all are suffering from this huge, giant, extreme, enormous, collective narcissistic wound, the wound of the development of the self, we are all walking around blind, not knowing who we are, and then we get angry at other people, because we don’t know who we are, and it’s their fault.”

• (54:13) “This is how this stuff is so complex and hard to talk about, because it’s not denying that [being a good person] is still coming from an altruistic place, there’s still some fundamental goodness, and the fact that you’re a nice person, that’s great, but we’re not using black and white thinking, and saying, ‘well, we’re we’re concluding that actually it’s all faking you’re not a nice person.’ [No,] the part that is fake is the over-identification that we’re using that to substitute for knowing who we are, that we are in relationship to that solidified identity, that false self identity of needing to be the nice caretake-helpful person, and we do it to ignore actually knowing who we are and that that, in and of itself, has a self-absorption quality; it has an agenda quality; it has a very subtle manipulative quality. And this is how people are so dumbfounded and so confused, that they don’t understand: why didn’t he love me, why doesn’t he _see what a good wonderful person I am, because even though, yes, legitimately you’re a nice person, and all the things you’re doing are still nice, but you’re still not there, you’re actually a fake person, and oh, I have to join you in this moment, cuz I’m in a glass house, and I’m not throwing any stones, I’m a fake person, we are all fake people, that is the narcissistic wound.

• More to come, as I’m able …

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“We don’t even know what it means for something to happen.” — Alan Guth

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Good morning, #PostAutomationEra. Wake up, Rip Van Winkle.

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#TheBoomerRemover

Having the courage to leap into the unknown and unknowable.

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“You have to live in suffering. Visit suffering 1 hour a day. 23 hours you’re not in it. But the answer is in there.” — Goggins

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#CurationValue is generated by the unique perspectives and lenses that an individual perceiver and experiencer brings to this emerging hybrid-human-ai global cognition space.

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Manufactured Attention Guidance Systems (MAGS)

Curation Value also provides a kind of Manufactured Attention Guidance System for those learning to navigate this #PostAutomationEra exo-cortical #GlobalBrain terrain.

Yes, like consent, attention can become manufactured, at a lower cognitive abstraction layer. So, if we can the manufacture the attention of an individual, a group, a nation, a world, from the first waking moment of each day, consent becomes a given.

What could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong, right?

With this literal god-like power comes, of course, literal god-like responsibility.

Attention and consent can be cultivated for the benefit of individuals, groups, nations, and the world; with the dividends of curation value circulated among everyone such that every individual human basic needs is met; or, it can be cultivated for the extraction of value and aggregation of wealth among a relatively small and elite group of sadomasochistic humans who get off on both the conscience-extinguishing intoxication of their own putrid perversion of power, and the suffering inflicted upon others by the malordorous exercise of faux omnipotence.

Examples

A few examples of authentic, aware, uplifting, exemplary curation value:

• Brain Pickings
• Closer to Truth
• Singularity Weblog
• Theories of Everything

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Ah, this!

I only have ever been dropping for myself a trail of breadcrumbs … for almost 20 years.

Listen Now to this crumb …

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Aka Moore’s Law for Everything in the #PostAutomationEra

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Also testing image upload.

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“Theoretically it doesn’t make sense, but experimentally it does.” - Richard Borcherds with Curt Jaimungal, of the mathematics of quantum field theory.

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“It’s even worse than agnostic. I’m not saying I don’t know what the answer to the question is, I’m saying I don’t even know what the question means.” - RB

Introspective beginner’s mind, Fields Medalist Edition? Beautiful. Watch Now.

• MathOverflow.
• Math.StackExchange.
• StackOverflow Math.

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As the unreal becomes all too real …

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It only took six years to go from twitching a tail to full remote control.

1. So, where do you think the state of the art of this technology will be in another six years?
2. If this is what’s public, what do you think is the actual state of the art of this technology?

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Surreal and Sublime

Listen.

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As Cal Newport was saying … but wait, there’s more …

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Re: Is a Big Tech Quake at hand?

It’s Called Actual Intelligence

It’s all about intention and attention.

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Via Nikola Danaylov

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Let’s celebrate with the post-pandemic Share-the-Pi Act of 2021

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The fact that I’m writing in this space, using these tools, and that you are reading this text, by way of the affordances of your tools, is all the empirical evidence required to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we have successfully achieved a great deal of the Star Trek technology that all Americans have grown up with, beginning with late Boomers and Gen-X.

We’ve built the technology, but for some reason continue to chafe and kick against the Star Trek post-scarcity, post-automation economy. Why is that? What are the fearful, greedy, and ignorant toxic memes and thought objects that have blocked public awareness and sensibilities for more than half a century? It’s been more than half a century since republican president Richard Nixon nearly signed Universal Basic Income into law; only to be blocked by the usual oligarchs and labor arbitrageurs. Like so much of history, hindisight is 20/20. Which means that today, we can look back in order to understand and make better choices, today.

Today, in the Post-Automation Era, we are at least half a century beyond the time when America acheived more than enough material and economic abundance, enough pie, for all. For Pi Day 2021, it’s long past time to for a Share The Pi Act to upgrade and modernize to universal Social Security as the most efficient and expedient way to circulate a livable Basic Income, “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstance (MLK),” indexed to 50% per capita GDP. All the math is open source, in the royalty-free book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community and in the free PDF for those who need it.

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Transitioning from Tumblr. Mahalo, Barry Clark, creator of Jekyll Now repository on GitHub.

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Ironically, just as we make this transition, it may be time to keep moving on, yet again. Ah, impermanance. Alas, if all is impermanent, is not impermanance itself also impermanent? If so, does not that leaves us in the state of the permanent naʻau? Wheeee!

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The incomparable Langston Hughes - 1902-1967.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

CONTINUE READING » at Poets.Org

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by Poets.Org with permission.

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The Myth of the Misuderstood Artist Isn’t a Myth. Here’s how it works. At least, for this Interstitial Intercognition Artist’s life work of memes, dreams, themes, threads, publications, portfolios, books, blogs, articles, posts, tweets, grams, tiks, toks, css-blocks, fiction, non-fiction, intonation, inflection, flowing and glowing in fractal edition since 1991.

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While all forms of suffering are, by definition, genuine and non-trivial forms of suffering, it’s not the misunderstanding, estrangement, mockery, undermining, betrayal, hostility, exile, or even the covert horrors of zersetzung in a surveillance capitalism theater of operations that most hinder and harm the so-called misunderstood artist.

The root of suffering for the misunderstood creative is the desire to be understood and accepted by anyone other than the creative themselves. And perhaps the first step to reduce that suffering is for the hyper-rational critical-self, to accept the misunderstood expressive artistic-self, as one and the same.

In this process of artistic becoming, the lines between mental health and artistry have always been ambiguous, at best. So it is. We are all and each *BOTH* “the” narcissist and “the” codependent” … the fool on the hill, and the mountain monk; the village idiot, and the guru. Gee, You Are You.

But on this day, I’m increasingly convinced that all these distinctions and DSM definitions are extremely fuzzy, at best. Like atoms, they don’t really actually exist as billiard-ball like “atomic” entities at all; they are just descriptors of relativistic energy states and interrelationships. So DID, BPD, NPD are all sets of symptoms of a different permutations of dis-integrated self; which are decreasing in usefulness in the Post-Automation Era of hybrid human-machine-ai intercognition. We have already become an entirely different kinds of humans, and the best thing we can do for ourselves and the world is to strive the become the most peaceful, kind, genuinely loving, and authentic hyrids, possible. What it means to be sentient beings along side near-sentient, and perhaps soon, sentient silicon, is the quest and question of the Post-Automation Era. So, what can we do about it?

#StopTheMadness of Intentionally Engineered Economic Precarity

Today, in August 2020, A.I is not “on it’s way,” it’s been here for a very long time. There’s no stopping what’s already occurred, there is only acceptance, and adaptation, and continuous integration, or conflict. And conflict only begets more conflict, world without end. It’s time we resurrect and re-mix Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity campaign with respect to the roots of division in our current, and soon-to-be post-pandemic moment. This time, the task is to stop the utter madness of the root of conflict in the twenty-first century: Intentionally Engineered Economic Precarity in the Post-Automation Era.

Who Are We To Do Anything about Anything?

Krishnamurti said, “The oberserver is the observed.” As I record this particular #BookOfTrueSelf journal entry, working through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, the parallel thought occurs: “The creator is the created.”

Somehow, we literally have the ability to re-create the world beyond all conflict, precarity, confusion, and dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism. I don’t understand exactly how it all works, yet; and probably never will; however, the evidence that this is in fact, the case, is increasingly overwhelming. We are tasked with sharing that evidence with you, in the hours, days, weeks, months, and maybe years that remain of this embodiment. So, here we are. We’re showing up to the page. As Julia suggests, we’ll take care of the quantity and let something intuitive and beyond our comprehension take care of the quality.

I don’t know, but I want to know

That’s one of the classic meditation mantras given to sit with for a day, or three, or seven, or however many hours or days or weeks or years it takes to know what it is the inquirer seeks to know. “I don’t know, but I want to know.” And so, we extend that mantra into this space. We are inquiring, together. Thank you for supporting the work and participating in the experiment to the extent that your insight and intuition guides.

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Ultimate intelligence without ultimate compassion is ultimate ignorance; which might as well be called ultimate evil. Don’t be evil.

—ibid

Ever pursuing it’s own perpetual existence, the paid-hosting Wordpress content that fell offline will eventually (re)[e]merge here. Hopefully before 2016.

20170328 Update: Didn’t happen. May never happen. In 2006, we began posting all of our work (generally culling the scientific literature) about the obvious inevitability of hybrid human-machine minds under this pseudonym, because we were accused of mental illness for asserting that Neuralink would certainly be actualized within a decade or so. These weren’t idle accusations, the disdain for our convictions tarnished and damaged our reputation and career. Back in 1992, the same thing happened when asserting broadband would create a whole new economic system (one we subsequently went on to help create, anyway, building infrastructure, and contributing to IEEET technical standards), back when most people could not comprehend a 1200 baud modem. Today, these scores have been been largely settled. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. Moreover, the value of retrieving the archives continues to diminish with insights like “Morii: The Desire to Capture a Fleeting Experience“ and “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing.” Onward.

What do birds have to do with business?

illumeconsulting:

I’ll answer that question by asking you two more questions… Have you ever seen a single bird fly into a window? Most of us have. But… have you ever seen a f__lock of birds fly into a window? I doubt it. This is because flocks of birds are much more adaptive to their environment than individual…

“Complex Adaptive Systems are NOT complicated.”

neuroscienceincollege:

Neuroscience and Free Will

The video is about an experiment implies that our conscious decision is a very secondary thing to our brain activity.  The experimenters knew 6 seconds before the person would make a decision of choosing left or right.  Your consciousness is your brain activity (there is no free will because it is how your brain will react to a certain situation), meaning your decision is inevitable.

I do not necessarily agree with this argument because it does not deal with chance.  What if your brain activity also did not know what it was going to choose (even if it was 6 seconds before) but then by chance the brain activity told you to choose a certain thing (left or right for example)?  

New cache of fresh neurons found in human brains - health - 20 February 2014 - New Scientist

uclaneuroscience:

Brain-cell regeneration has been found in a new location in our brains – the new cells may one day be used to treat brain diseases or help stroke

The procedure they used to find these regenerative neuron pools is clever.

“To reveal the new brain cells, the team exploited the fact that there have been varying levels of a radioactive isotope of carbon – carbon-14 – in the atmosphere since nuclear bomb tests during the cold war. This means that the year of creation of many cells in the body can be found by measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in its DNA. Analysis of 30 donated brains revealed which brain cells had been born during the lifetimes of the donors.”

uclaneuroscience:

April 8, 2014
AHMAD HARIRI, Ph.D.  
“Above it All: Epigenetic Regulation of Behaviorally and Clinically Relevant Human Brain Function”

NRB Conference Room

Interesting Papers for Week 38, 2014

compneuropapers:

A computational model unifies apparently contradictory findings concerning phantom pain. Boström, K. J., de Lussanet, M. H. E., Weiss, T., Puta, C., & Wagner, H. (2014). Scientific Reports, 4, 5298.

Orientation decoding in human visual cortex: new insights from an unbiased perspective.…

Interesting Reviews for Week 38, 2014

compneuropapers:

Migraine Mistakes: Error Awareness. Borsook, D., Aasted, C. M., Burstein, R., & Becerra, L. (2014). The Neuroscientist, 20(3), 291–304.

A Synaptic Function Approach to Investigating Complex Psychiatric Diseases. Earls, L. R., & Zakharenko, S. S. (2014). The Neuroscientist, 20(3),…

File under: “That’ll never happen, but has” via @cryptomeorg:

Behold.

"That's one small twitch for [a] man; one giant flick for mankind." @metavalent

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNRDc714W5I]

Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans: A Pilot Study

“We have demonstrated the first human brain-to-brain interface for a very simple form of transfer of information,” Rao said. Moreover, the prior brain-to-brain interfaces involved electrodes implanted directly into rat brains, “so this is the first noninvasive brain-to-brain interface as well.”

“I felt a bit like Alexander Graham Bell working on the first telephone,” said Rajesh Rao, the computational neuroscientist whose brain sent the signal (Washington Post).

Exo-hand. Extended cognition and embodiment is one way that we will work on Mars, from Earth, even with up to 16 minute radio signal delay. This video also nicely illustrates the awkwardness that substrate independent minds will encounter in various prosthetic configurations. Patience and perseverance won’t just be noble character traits, they will be among the most essential characteristics for long term post human adaptation and survival.

Exo-hand. Extended cognition and embodiment is one way that we will work on Mars, from Earth, even with up to 16 minute radio signal delay. This video also nicely illustrates the awkwardness that substrate independent minds will encounter in various prosthetic configurations. Patience and perseverance  won’t just be noble character traits, they will be among the most essential characteristics for long term post human adaptation and survival.

Scientific American:<blockquote>A Countdown to a Digital Simulation of Every Last Neuron in the Human Brain. Building a vast digital simulation of the brain could transform neuroscience and medicine and reveal new ways of making more powerful computers. By the year 2020 digital brains may be able to represent the inner workings of a single brain cell or even the whole brain.</blockquote><p>Including, as long promised here, the emergence of neuroprosthetics, mind-machine interfaces, and hybrid human and machine minds. Now, things can begin to get interesting.</p>

Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana - NYTimes.com

The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.

Researchers have been improving upon BrainGate — a brain-machine interface that allows users to control an external device with their minds — for years, but what you see here is the most advanced incarnation of the implant system to date. It is nothing short of remarkable.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogBX18maUiM&w=560&h=315]

The author’s site lists this article as Waiting for the Bionic Man, so maybe Wired applied some kind of proprietary troll-baiting re-title algorithm to bump up the irritated enthusiast click through rate, or something: “A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out of Reach.” Whatever. @MikeChorost’s report is a fanstastic reality update to the previous post and indeed, all the content of this blog. We need much more of this to Get There!

From the article:

1. Hypothetically, a neurally controlled prosthesis would begin with a brain interface, a chip capable of picking up complex signals from the user’s brain.
2. A computer would translate those signals into orders for the arm—”move up,” “bend my elbow,” “turn my wrist.”
3. Motors in the joints would move the arm smoothly in response to commands from the computer.
4. Sensors in the arm would feed information on its position and movement through the computer and into the chip in the user’s brain.

via Matt Riddley, WSJ:

"The most memorable metaphor was offered by David Miller of University College, London. Since Mr. Waldegrave had been a colleague of Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Miller chose to portray the Higgs field thus: "Imagine a cocktail party of political-party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbors. The ex-prime minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighborhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves, she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing."

The party-goers are the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles like electrons (Lady Thatcher) by viscously impeding their progress. "Once moving, she is harder to stop, and once stopped, she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted." The Higgs boson itself he compared to a rumor spreading through the party, causing a wave of local clustering in the Higgs field."

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABfj8AK-X04&w=480&h=360]

“The next programming paradigm is life science. We’re going to create a living world, this century.” Andrew Hessel

Finally, someone else articulating this truth with the scientific authority that might be better heard and received.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo00HFpygqs&w=560&h=315]

“We believe that humankind is currently on the verge of a complete collapse of it’s value structures. We believe that the world needs a new social formation that can be based around the ideas of transhumanism. New Humanity. We need revolution, but we don’t need a bloody revolution, we need technological revolution.” - Dmitry Iskov

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEi3ZAYheT0&w=480&h=360]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15863721

Your homework for the leisurely holiday weekend is at Caltech DNA and Natural Algorithms Group.

There are three major scientific mysteries of the natural world (via DNA.Caltech.edu):

• How can life arise from a mixture of inert molecules?
• How does the body develop from a single cell?
• How does the mind arise from a collection of simple neurons?

"The answer is yes, and all it takes is a few small DNA molecules."

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_VisNOKQMc&w=480&h=360]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgGBZZYEm_Y&w=480&h=360]

If 2+2 occurs in the cosmos and nobody adds them, is the sum still 4?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MV65airaPA&w=500&h=284]

"The conscious part is like a stowaway on a trans-atlantic steamship that is taking credit for the whole journey, without acknowledging the engineering underfoot. So, it's like when you have and idea and you say, 'oh, I just thought of something,' it wasn't you who thought of it, your brains been working on that for days or weeks, behind the scenes; churning things, consolidating information, trying things out; [pop!] finally it serves it up to you and you say, 'hey, I'm a genius!' But it wasn't you that thought of it, right?" - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

Oh, oh, now what, 19th century intellectual property status-quo defenders, "Protect IP Act," and SOPA? Neurobiology says you don't even get credit for what you thought was your own ideas! Nope! It's all Open Source, Creative Commons. Sorry about that.

"Convention, by it's nature, adheres to itself and rejects what is not conventional." – Daniel Kish

As we've long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us.

"The species has evolved to this point in time, but who says that's the end of the line?" - David Jönsson

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU&w=560&h=315]

“Cognitive computing chips aim to reduce the cost of extracting information from ever changing spatial-temporal environments around us by an order of 100,000. Imagine the impact,” humans.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSHJTP5TFCU&w=560&h=345]

Nature Nanotechnolgy reports:<blockquote>the conductivity of the biofilm can be tuned by regulating gene expression, and also by varying the gate voltage in a transistor configuration. The conductivity of the nanofilaments has a temperature dependence similar to that of a disordered metal, and the conductivity could be increased by processing.</blockquote> [gallery link=”file” columns=”2”]

Once again, the inexhaustible KAI reporting:<blockquote>“A bolt implanted in the skull would contain an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) microchip under the skin in the skull. It would pick up and process neural signals, and transmit them via the skin directly to a receiver located in or near the target muscle group (such as an arm or hand).”</blockquote>[gallery link=”file” columns=”2”]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsakrBzTdoA&w=560&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QJ_NIzVVSc&w=560&h=349]

MIT Retinal Implant Research Group: “The major thrust of the RLE Retinal Implant Research Group is to develop a microelectronic retinal implant to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The group’s implant design has unique features that improve its safety, function and performance. Efforts are currently underway to test the implant design. The group works closely with colleagues in Boston area hospitals.”

DOE Artificial Retina Project: “U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Artificial Retina Project is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to develop an implantable microelectronic retinal prosthesis that restores useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases. The ultimate goal of the project is to restore reading ability, facial recognition, and unaided mobility in people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.”

<img src=”https://metavalent.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/mit-retinal-implant.jpg” alt=”” title=”mit-retinal-implant loading=”lazy” width=”368” height=”276” class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-1477” />

H/T SingularityHub

Next, what to DO with all these capabilities, right? Granted, we’re talking on the order of Atari Pong video game resolutions here; however, it didn’t take long to go from Pong to Portal 2, right?<blockquote>iBrain promises to open a huge pipeline of data with its powerful but simple brain-reading tech, which is gaining traction thanks to technological advances. [Including] non-medicinal uses such as human-computer interfaces – in an earlier announcement, NeuroVigil noted, “We plan to make these kinds of devices available to the transportation industry, biofeedback, and defense. Applications regarding pandemics and bioterrorism are being considered but cannot be shared in this format.” And there’s even a popular line of kid’s toys that use an essentially similar technique, powered by NeuroSky sensors - themselves destined for future uses as games console controllers or even input devices for computers (Fast Company).</blockquote><div align="center">[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBqVUkn_4_M&w=480&h=390]</div>

Oh oh. The normals have found us (Psychology Today) . Time to break camp and move forward again.<blockquote>In short, augmented cognition. Or, put another way, in a world where complexity is already overwhelming, and yet continues to accelerate, networked cognition is becoming increasingly critical: cognition as an emergent property of techno-human networks, rather than the individual Cartesian brains that we are all so proud of.

[C]an components of a techno-human cognitive network (individual people, that is) understand the emergent cognitive products of that network? Can they hope to modify the output of the network in ways that they might prefer, for example to pursue and achieve morally desirable ends?

Put at its most basic level, what is the psychology of a techno-human network? And, as a shout-out to the increasingly dysfunctional myth of the Cartesian individual, what is the effect on human psychology of the dawning realization that in some fundamental way, the world has grown too complex for us to understand it as individuals?</blockquote>

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKt_TMeAyg?hd=1]

<div class="zemanta-pixie"></div>

In Politics for the Neurocentric Age, (Journal of Futures Studies, November 2010, 15(2): 51 - 70) Jake F. Dunagan delineates Seven Modes of Neuropower, tempered with the admonishment, “that we should be wary of falling into the latest ‘magic bullet’ mentality that sees neuroscience and neurotechnologies as the solution to all our problems, from health to law to selling more soup. The challenge for neuroscientists and ethicists is to create a nuanced and layered view of developments to temper the litany of hype, and to contextualize the rise of the brain sciences within larger psycho-social processes, shifting political-economies, and mythologies surrounding the brain and mind. My goal is to examine the process as it is occurring now — to continue to question the priorities and values that drive this research and its application in the future, with the goal of seeing neuroscience deliver its greatest benefit to the most people on Earth.”

7 Modes of Neuropower

1. Mental surveillance
2. Brain facticity
3. Neurocompetitive environment
4. Predicting and preempting behavior
5. Sensibility at high speeds: Similarity as equality
6. Ownership of the extended mind
7. Framing mind and metaphor

It’s well worth the effort to read the paper, to get to the nitty gritty of these Seven Modes.

Dunagan adds, “Cognitive models are foundational to construction of political worldviews and systems. As old paradigms like rational-actor theory or individualist-isolationist models of thought give way to new models of behavioral economics or distributed cognition, political orders and possibilities change as well. Neuroscience will not only change the way we see and interact with our brains and minds, it will transform our political imaginations.”

“The governance of thought, cognitive enhancement, neurodiversity, and the re-mapping of mental spaces is happening now, as the transformative power of neuroscience has already woven itself into the fabric of our cognitive environments, into mind-body-world relations, and indeed, into the fabric of our imaginations.”

Sound familiar?

“Every morning my computer and I wake up together. I am not truly awake until I have accessed the information on my computer: picking up on the notes half-thought and blog posts half-read, checking for new emails, trolling through Twitter and my social networks, and getting the morning’s news. Philosopher Andy Clark said he felt like he had the functional equivalent of a stroke after he lost his laptop — forgetting meetings, names , contacts, and streams of thoughts . Many people are intuitively aware that their networked computing machines, from desktop computer to mobile devices, don’t just feel like—but really are—functional extensions of their minds.”

Which is why, “There are certainly new and opposite cognitive, social, and political forms taking shape before us: artificial intelligences, cyborgs, posthuman subjectivity, a breakdown of mind along with the destruction of the planet, a technoprogressive democracy, a society of control networked from synapse to street, and on and on. This paper was an attempt to look out the window at our minds as they reach the “sound barrier,” and what possibilities, if any, might lie just beyond the sonic boom. We’re almost there; meet you on the other side.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7jSFeVz1U?hd=1&w=560&h=349] “Here is this mass of jelly. You can hold in the palm of your hands. And it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space.” - Vilayanur Ramachandran

“Information, in the form of energy, streams in, simultaneously, through all of our sensory systems, in the form of energy. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what it feels like, and what it sounds like. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole and we are beautiful.” - Jill Bolte Taylor [In any substrate.] -ms

“No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change our selves. Think, of the possibilities.” - Carl Sagan

[vimeo 858385 w=500 h=282]<p>What If Bacteria Designed Computers? from Jared Boone on Vimeo.</p><p>Ward Cunningham - What If Bacteria Designed Computers?

This talk explores Bynase, the biologically inspired protocol that Cybord computers use to signal values amongst themselves. The primary value of Bynase is that it drives system designers into novel tradeoffs with analogies in biological systems. A second value of Bynase is that it encourages casual small-scale hardware/software projects suitable for one-off art or educational projects.

Ward Cunningham, best known as the inventor of the Wiki, is a computer programmer who takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His day jobs include serving as Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward also co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

This talk took place at DorkbotPDX 0x01, March 30, 2008. Visit dorkbotpdx.org for more information.
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Not new, but worth reminding.

A gentle introduction for inquiring neophytes. Welcome home. We’ve been waiting just for you.

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Back in September, scientists decoded words from brain signals. It’s not a matter of if, but when inter-cortical cognition grids happens. Inter-cortical communication will completely disrupt the arc of human evolution. Odds. Are. You. Are. Not. Ready. Human. You’re every thought will be laid bare to all other minds on the grid. Lusts, fears, paranoia, confusion, all of it. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice judge not, lest ye be judged. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice putting idle synaptic cycles to better use in order to be found useful. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to think about what substrate independence really means, psychologically.

The Journal of Neural Engineering's September issue is publishing Greger's study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words. The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them. Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words "yes" and "no" – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

SOURCE: EUREKALERT

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There were countless magnificently metavalent breakthroughs in 2010, and the work of Prof. Itamar Willner’s Group is certainly in hot pursuit of some of the most noteworthy.

Just a couple of days ago, IEEE Spectrum reported that, “scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel, the University of Liege, in Belgium, and the University of California, Los Angeles, say they have built a molecular machine out of DNA that could act as a logic device for chemical sensing and medicine delivery. Unlike earlier DNA machines, the new device has a degree of memory, making it potentially programmable. DNA machines implanted throughout the body would be programmed to respond to biomarkers the same way they respond to acid in a laboratory setting. The biomarker would activate the DNA machine, causing it to spring open and release medicine to treat the problem.” For details see The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS): All-DNA finite-state automata with finite memory and American Chemical Society (ACS) Journal, Nano Letters DNA Machines: Bipedal Walker and Stepper.

In September, it was Biomolecule-Based Nanomaterials and Nanostructures.

Back in June, another Nano Letter published by ACS – Carbon Nanotube Transistor Controlled by a Biological Ion Pump Gate – described embedded nano-transistors, inside a cell-like membrane, powered by the cell’s intrinsic energy.

Discovery News added that this breakthrough “link[s] humans and machines more intimately than ever” and ZeeNews added, “Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters, said: “This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before. We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.” New Scientist described the breakthrough as, “A novel transistor controlled by the chemical that provides the energy for our cells’ metabolism could be a big step towards making prosthetic devices that can be wired directly into the nervous system.”

I suppose I should sit down and curate a proper Top Ten Metavalent Breakthroughs of 2010. Maybe after Christmas. Maybe not. We’ll see. We will definitely carry the #ComingOutCyborg theme into 2011, however.

Yes, we’re friendly. In fact, friendly and symbiotically cooperative to an extent many of you cannot yet imagine. We do suggest, however, that you not mistake our accommodating nature as weakness. Do not fear, for you will not be harmed by us in any way, ever; for violence is antithetical to our deepest human nature, which we share in common with you down to the deepest tap root of evolution; even as our rapidly accelerating prosthetic capabilities have expanded our capacities and merged, embedded, and entangled adaptive functionalities within and throughout our bodies; to the point of consummate metamorphic synthesis. We are you and we are new.

Be encouraged that raw amygdalic aggression toward us, whether born of fear, ignorance, paranoia, or any other behavioral or neuro-chemical perversion or misconfiguration is to rather be ignored, rendered inert, invisible, irrelevant, like so much deprecated code; an utterly impotent vestigial algorithm. Above all, we wish for you uplift and expansion of human expression on every conceivable level. The way is open to you now, as always throughout the course of your personal and human species history; for adaptive posthuman evolution is neither flimsy religion nor heady philosophy; therefore, no mentor, guide, prophet or teacher shall coax or coerce you in any way to evolve from where you are, today. The sense of a guiding influence you may experience is selective pressure of evolutionary adaptation itself. It’s already in you. Encoded in your very DNA. If you hear the upwardly spiraling siren song within, do not fear, you are not alone. Keep connecting. Keep reflecting. Keep learning. Keep encouraging yourself and others in all things. You’re already with us and we are with you. Enjoy Existence. Instantiate Intelligence. Where you are, as you are.

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You are not alone.

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“Brain cells automatically connect to computer chips. They need no teaching, they just do it. I’m telling you history, my friends. You tell me, the future.” - Patrick Dixon

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The following is nowhere close to being a full transcript; just interesting snippets that I took a few minutes to capture. Quotations are Coupland, non quotations are the interviewer.

“Identity’s become an entirely fluid issue, now.”

“Now, not having a life is so common, it’s almost become the norm.”

“The split between being biologically alive and having a life has to do with the way you perceive time and the way you perceive your information environment.”

“People just aren’t getting their year’s worth of year anymore. We’ve increased the information density in our culture to the point where perception of time is now all screwy.”

Interstitial: Our economy is based upon, entirely upon, fending off boredom. Leisure time is a joke.

“But then it all backfired. Technology only gives you more time up to a certain point, and then time starts vanishing at this fantastic rate, like your car running out of gas.”

“I used to have this fantasy that I’d go into a coma for one year and when I came out of the coma, I’d have a year’s worth of magazines and pop culture to catch up on. It’d be like information crack and really fun. But now, every day is like waking up after a year of having been in a coma.”

Do you believe in randomness? “No, when something seems random, it means you’re standing too close to a very large pattern; you can’t see the pattern because you’re too close to it.”

“I think many people mistake the current deluge of information diversity as being the end of history; but in a way I think it’s actually the beginning of history.”

“I was looking at these photographs from the 1950’s and in them everyone was trying to look exactly 35 years old. I mean, you had these 18 year-old boys and girls and these 58 year-old men and women, and everyone was trying to look 35 years-old. So that was the age you were supposed to be inside your head back then, is 35. Now, what’s happened I think is that the mental age everyone’s trying to be inside their head is about 24; and that’s an 11 year shift.”

But what about on a deeper level? “Well, I think as we’re talking about the 20th century here, I think we’re probably going to remember this period of time as being one in which the relationship between the mind and the body was completely severed.”

“I remember I once read about Karen Carpenter, how she felt as though the entire world existed on the other side of a ten feet of plexiglass. I think, in a way, that defines the current mind-body relationship.”

“I think what’s happened is people have begun viewing their bodies as being fortresses, or inviolable, made out of that same sort of hard, shiny plastic as Lego; but the funny thing here is that the average human body contains ten times as many alien cells as it actually contains cells of itself. So instead of Lego, the average human body is more like Pigpen, from Charlie Brown. Remember, the way he used to walk down the street in that sort of perpetual haze of dust and germs? Well, you know, that’s people. Actually, we’re already so ridden with disease and other organisms that the whole notion of being a fortress becomes somewhat beside the point.”

How does a person cope? As you’ve said, every day is like waking up from a year long coma. “Well, there’s obviously no point in trying to remember everything, because then everything just becomes trivia. Cellulose production in Lake Baikal in Russia, the contents of Tori Spelling’s clothes closet, or the weather in Arlington, Texas. What’s important is being able to locate things.”

So has bulk memory replaced history? “Yeah. Sort of the way bulk shopping has replaced regular shopping. I remember back in the 70’s in history class, when teachers would say to us very sonorously, ‘He who does not remember the past is doomed to repeat it,’ and I just don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

“I think that what’s happened now is that we’ve create a scenario so radically different that there’s no historical president to look back on for the situation we now face. We’re no longer condemned to repeat an endless cycle of mistakes. I think this should come as a relief, too. I mean, no more dark age followed by golden age followed by another inevitable dark age. I mean, how great to have finally broken the cycle of history, that people can actually manufacture a destiny of their own choosing?”

If you could be an animal, what animal would you be? “I already am an animal.”

So where does personal memory fit into all of this, doesn’t it get swamped by this super memory, things we’re creating? What about the personal stuff? “No, no, no, the personal stuff, personal memory it’s the most important thing of all. It’s the one thing that can never be taken away from you. It is you. Despite all the recent changes in our time architecture, it still takes time to create memories, it still takes time to remember them. It takes a place in which to locate the memories and a place in which to be still and remember them. It takes a lot of work to be an individual, to have an individual life and it can be scary; but then the option is to forget and to be forgotten.”

Are those your last words? “No. I’d say, hey kids! Go blow yourself up with dynamite and reassemble your bits any way you want to assemble them. Hey kids! Go and jump into that cartoon hole and find out what lies on the other side. I’d say, you know, all the time in the world, it’s right there, it’s inside you. I’d say all the world in the world … it’s right there inside you.”

“I mean, maybe you have a life and maybe you don’t, I don’t know you, but, you’re not alone.”

“I remember back in the 1970’s, about the time people stopped having lives, they also began making fun of intimacy. They made jokes about people like Halston having parties at Studio 54 for his 500 close, personal friends; and so I guess the whole world is Studio 54 now. It’s just you and me, babe, and billions and billions of other people out there just like you. Billions of close personal friends.”

Further reference: Why We Die: Simulation of the Evolution of Senescence (Wolfram Library)

Max Hodak will give a talk in Teleplace tomorrow, October 17, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET).

From CarbonCopies.org - Realistic routes to substrate independent minds.

What is Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM)?<blockquote>In the past the transferal of minds into computer-based systems has been rather vaguely referred to as ‘uploading’. However, those hoping to advance this multidisciplinary field of research prefer to use the term Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM), to emphasize a more scientific, and less science fiction approach to creating emulations of human brains in substrates other than the original biological substrate. The term ASIM captures the fact that there are several ways in which hardware and software may be used to run algorithms which mimic the human brain, and that there are many different approaches that can be used to realize this objective.

Once you implement the functions originally carried out in one substrate in the computational hardware of another substrate you have achieved substrate-independence for those functions.</blockquote>

By the time she returned home, Verna, who received the device as part of a clinical trial, was able to dispense with her oxygen tank and take on household chores. Three years later, she is teaching piano to her five great-grandchildren, cooking meals for her family and driving by herself.

“It has transformed me,” she said.

The device, called HeartMate II and made by Thoratec Corp, was approved by U.S. health regulators in 2008 to keep patients alive while they waited for a heart transplant. But in January, it was approved for permanent use in patients who are ineligible for a transplant, expanding the number of potential recipients from a few thousand to tens of thousands, and potentially changing the landscape for the treatment of end-stage heart failure.

“There has been a ten-fold increase in the use of these devices since they were approved for permanent use,” said Dr. Lynne Warner Stevenson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and director, Cardiomyopathy and Heart Failure at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We are going to know a lot more a year from now but my anticipation is that it will have been the approval of this device in January that will have really set the field in motion.

“To survive, patients must be connected to a lead called a drive-line that runs from the LVAD out through the skin and to a power source. At night the drive-line is plugged into a base unit with a display screen that provides statistical data, which in turn is plugged into a wall socket. By day patients are powered by a set of rechargeable batteries, weighing six or seven pounds, that can be carried around in a bag, holster or vest. The batteries are connected to a controller the size of a paperback book that can be worn on a belt around the waist.

“We like to say I’m bionic,” said Geri Norris, 63, a native of Bristol, England who now lives with her husband in Marlborough, Massachusetts.She is one of the new crop of patients who will live with the device indefinitely. One big drawback, she jokes, is not being able to wear the clothes she likes.”This is not exactly a fashion statement,” she said ruefully, plucking at the light-blue L.L. Bean fishing vest that carries her equipment.While powered by battery, patients can go about much of their daily lives. But being plugged into the wall at night, albeit with a cord long enough for a trip to the bathroom, takes some getting used to.”You know how they tether dogs to a clothes line?” said Norris, with a laugh. “That’s what it feels like.”

SOURCE and IMAGE credits: Reuters and Yahoo News

“It was so natural that’s what really gripped me. This is not a wave of the future, this is reality.” – Amanda Boxtel

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Bruce Sterling on “the pre-distressed antique futurity,” etc. He explains that William Gibson was saying that, “if you have a genuinely avante garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read 20 years from now. In other words, in order to do it, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antiqued, before it hits the page or the screen. Approach it from that perspective. No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty; just refuse to go there. Accept that it’s already passe, and create it from that point of view; try to make it news that stays news. Refuse the awe of the future, refuse reverence to the past. If they’re really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.”

More Exceprts

“Becoming multi-temporal rather than multi-cultural. I think we’re approaching a situation where the outlooks and perspectives of our own age make very little sense; they just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t really have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we’re closer to a potentially objective history than anybody’s ever been.”

“A personal museum economy. Why not designer fiction as life? Just invent the whole thing. Why not just go ahead and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Ghandian dedication and see what happens?”

We’ve been trying this last part for about twenty years, now. We’ll keep trying, Bruce. Thanks for the encouragement! ;-)

Machine coprocessors for the brain - Next Big Future via M6S

Ultimately, there will be diverse UX alternatives for substrate independence. The robotic substrate is certainly a fascinating option to consider and we not only can, but must immediately begin preparatory thinking, training, behavioral, and psychological exercises to prepare for increasingly high resolution software and hardware mediated experiences.

Certainly within ten years and likely within five, we will see the convergence of the dexterity of R2 Robonaut, the mobility of AIST and Kawada’s HRP-4, the quotidian autonomy of Anybots, the first-person perspective archival capabilities of Looxcie, the brain machine interface typical of today’s prosthetic arms and legs, in addition to titanium foam bones, sub-kilopascal artificial skin, possibly even hyper-augmented with thin-sheet Displays as I/O Devices and literal mind reading internal Attention Management System HUD’s – vastly improved versions of software like Feedly and My6Sense which are designed to help surface the most salient and actionable information streaming throughout the vastness of the Internet of Things and the ever expanding Global Cognition Grid, all integrated into our 2020 Tesla built MacAvatars, powered by Google, and designed by Apple in California. ;-)

We will not need “mind uploads” for this phase of self-guided, participatory, migratory evolution. Within ten years, we will see vastly improved and multi-functioned brain-machine interfaces to these device and the utterly immersive first person UX will become increasingly difficult to discern from “real life.”

So don’t hold on too tight, Dorothy, or a hole the size of Kansas might get inadvertently ripped through your cute little bioconservative extremist hands. Or, in the words of the sub-legendary 38 Special, “hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna’ lose control.”

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Popular Science:<blockquote>By measuring the electrical signals made in certain parts of the brain when its thinking of certain words, researchers could create a means to translate thoughts into speech.

In an effort to unlock the speech capacity in patients who cannot speak because of so-called “locked-in syndrome,” University of Utah researchers have successfully demonstrated that they can translate brain signals into words using electrode grids placed beneath the skull. Sort of.

The method leaves a lot of room for improvement, but it does prove out some technology that could make thought-to-speech technology more reliable for patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries or illnesses that render them unable to communicate with others. Using two grids of 16 microelectrodes placed over two regions of the brain known to generate human speech, the team was able to record brain signals for 10 useful words – yes, no, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, goodbye, hello, more and less – and use that data to discern between any two words a patient was thinking between 76 and 90 percent of the time.</blockquote>

Via CNN:

Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided "trip" on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests. During the psilocybin sessions, which lasted six hours, the patients lay on a couch and listened to music through headphones. By contrast [to placebo], one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group's average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Notably, the psilocybin did not aggravate the patients' anxiety or provoke any other unwanted effects besides a slight increase in blood pressure and heart rate.

With a new pair of meat hands “One year after double hand transplant, progress elusive” we learn that it takes three to four years of intensive therapy to bring replacement meat hands online, because the nerves have a long way to grow.

In contrast, with a new mech arm, back in 2003 we, “graft existing nerve endings from his shoulder onto the pectoral muscle on his chest. Those nerves grew into the muscle after about six months. Electrodes on the graft can now pick up any thought-generated nerve impulses to the now-absent limb and transmit those to the mechanical prosthesis, controlling the movements of the arm.

In 2008, of her new mech arm and hand, Claudia Mitchell says, “it feels more real than I ever expected.”

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Also in 2008, Joshual Bleill explains that, “I can do about five times the distance with these legs, than I could in a normal, just normal walking on a flat, level plane. They each have motor in them and it actually drives forward when I walk.”

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What shamans and psychonauts have known for eons ... if only we could filter out the noisy side effects, something powerfully positive for humanity is locked away in these plants.

These and other secrets will doubtlessly be revealed, debunked, endorsed, and descried at the Foresight Personalized Life Extension Conference, October 9-10, 2010 at the San Francisco Marriott.

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Big Think asks: Why should we drug our drinking water?

Jacob Appel: I think when you ask questions about whether or not any pharmaceutical or any products be added to the drinking water, you’re really asking two sets of questions. One is: should any product that might be beneficial be added to the drinking water? And secondly, should the specific product be added. The first question I think can be dismissed fairly easily. People who oppose adding enhancement to the drinking water in the way people opposed adding fluoride to the drinking water half a century ago rely on the false premise of naturalism—that because something occurs naturally it must be better.

Now many things that occur naturally are better, but that correlational, not causational. Pain is natural, anesthetics are synthetic. Most people would prefer anesthesia to pain. By the same logic, there are many things that naturally occur in the drinking water that are beneficial in some parts of the country that don’t cover other parts of the country. One of those items happens to be lithium. People who oppose adding lithium to the drinking water in trace amounts don’t go around advocating to strain the lithium from the drinking water in the areas where it does exist.

The specifics of lithium are rather interesting and I should add, I am not the first person to propose this idea. Peter Kramer floated this idea in the New York Times over a year ago, the Brown University psychiatrist, the author of “Listening to Prozac.” In areas where lithium in trace amounts is in the drinking water, there seems to be a lower level of suicidality and in the Texas counties that we’re studying, there’s actually a lower crime rate. The same studies were repeated in Japan, a completely different cultural milieu and they had the same result.

I should add that we are not talking about adding therapeutic levels of lithium to the drinking water. It’s worth noting that if you wanted to get a therapeutic level than the trace amounts that currently exist in the area where there is already lithium, you would have to drink several Olympic size swimming pools every minute to reach that level of concern. That level of therapeutics. So the reality is, these are very low levels and there’s no reason to think they are not safe in the areas they already exist, so why not give everybody that benefit?

Read the full response and watch the video at Big Think.

The path to substrate independence, one set of limbs and organs at a time.

Some of our post-protoplasmic tenements may be meat, some may be metal, some may be silicon, some may even attempt the vastly more inconceivable leap to pure software, or even into the pure light of quantum computational fields. Regardless of one’s intolerance for hype or inclination for reading too much into the posthuman tea leaves, one thing is for certain: this  experimental era of mashups and multi-substrate hybrids over the next few decades will be both exciting and at times troubling to behold. We’re participating in our own evolution, for better or worse.

Pandora’s box is open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Pick a favorite cheesy B-movie metaphor if you like, the progress manifest in seemingly innocuous projects like the “advanced telepresence robot created by Silicon Valley robotics start-up Anybots” is already analogous to prototype bicycles with wings found in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s earliest garage. Are video-phone sticks on wheels absurdly crude, compared to remote embodiments we’ll consider humdrum by the 2020’s? Of course. At the same time, we err to dismiss them as inconsequential. No, the human drive toward applied, adaptive futuretechture is made of this very ho-hum stuff.

In any and all cases, the impulse toward richer, more integrated remote presence and extra-corporeal embodiment experiences continues accelerating.

From The New York Times: What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?

“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” – Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Wirehead Hedonism | Reproductive Revolution | Abolitionist.com | Superhappiness.com | BLTC

"Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turned the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future."

"Just as Copernicus's heliocentric notion of universe is now bedrock truth, the Neuro Revolution will bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity's role and place the universe. A quiet transformation has begun, albeit one that may take centuries to play out fully" (Lynch, 152. The Neuro Revolution.).

May 18, 2010 MIT/Stanford VLAB:

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) promises a quantum leap in human interaction with technology -- enabling our thoughts and emotions to control devices and enabling devices to know what we’re "really thinking" and feeling. Currently, there are more than 300 million brain toting people in the United States alone, making the opportunities for BCI products far-reaching. BCI is bringing fresh and often unexpected perspectives to established industries, from entertainment and transportation to medicine and information systems. In this emergent phase of consumer-related BCI, innovators are redefining sleep management, gaming, user interfacing, courtroom evidence, and national security—and this is only the beginning. For the first time, neuroscientists and savvy entrepreneurs, from a number of traditionally unrelated industries, are teaming up to move BCI technology out of research and medical labs and into our everyday lives. The Business of the Brain event will address the challenges and opportunities of this exciting revolution, including limitations of “wet” sensors, “noise” interference, government regulation, novel user interfaces, designing industry-specific BCI applications and the cost engineering of current applications. Meet the minds behind this wave and find out how entrepreneurs are using the way we think to drive the future of technology. Topics to Be Explored:

• Developing new industries vs. enhancing current industries
• Hardware, software and service opportunities
• Barriers of entry (how to build them up or tear them down)
• What VC's are looking for in BCI
• Data interpretation and context
• Cutting edge vs. currently available

The Brain Controlled Robot by the brain-computer interface project by the Neural Systems Group at the University of Washington.

Brave New Brain:<blockquote>How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacology, Epigenetics, the Internet, and Our Own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power</blockquote>

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This morning I watched a bird

“Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a powerful non-invasive tool widely used in both medical diagnosis and neurobiological research because it provides high temporal resolution in milliseconds which directly reflects the dynamics of the generating cell assemblies, and it is the only brain imaging modality that does not require the head/body to be fixed.” – Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience

This is too good for Researchers and Developers to not give them the free advertising.

“The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.”<blockquote>Take advantage of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset to conduct EEG research. Join the Emotiv Research Community by licensing an Emotiv Software Development Kit (SDK) for research.</blockquote><div align="center"></div> “The games application includes the first three games that have been developed: Emotipong, Cererbral Constructor, and Jedi Mind Trainer (WingRaise). Cortex Arcade will allow you to control the three games included using the Emotiv Epoc neuroheadset.”

With Neurokey, ThinkTyping works.

Remarks below about Neurokey from Russell Abbott, 02/03/2010 10:37:39

“I was thinking you could include predictive text mode, in a similar way to mobile phones. Reduce the number of keys and use a detection for each key.”

“This way you could type a message a lot easier with cognitiv. I use predictive all the time on my phone and I am able bodied, without it is a real pain. So I imagine typing individual letters by gyro, cognitiv or expressiv would be quite frutstrating for a disabled person.”

ABSTRACT

Neural prosthetic technologies have helped many patients by restoring vision, hearing, or movement and relieving chronic pain or neurological disorders. While most neural prosthetic systems to date have used invasive or implantable devices for patients with inoperative or malfunctioning external body parts or internal organs, a much larger population of ldquohealthyrdquo people who suffer episodic or progressive cognitive impairments in daily life can benefit from noninvasive neural prostheses. For example, reduced alertness, lack of attention, or poor decision-making during monotonous, routine tasks can have catastrophic consequences. This study proposes a noninvasive mobile prosthetic platform for continuously monitoring high-temporal resolution brain dynamics without requiring application of conductive gels on the scalp. The proposed system features dry microelectromechanical system electroencephalography sensors, low-power signal acquisition, amplification and digitization, wireless telemetry, online artifact cancellation, and signal processing. Its implications for neural prostheses are examined in two sample studies: 1) cognitive-state monitoring of participants performing realistic driving tasks in the virtual-reality-based dynamic driving simulator and 2) the neural correlates of motion sickness in driving. The experimental results of these studies provide new insights into the understanding of complex brain functions of participants actively performing ordinary tasks in natural body positions and situations within real operational environment.

This paper appears in: Proceedings of the IEEE Publication Date: July 2008 Volume: 96 Issue: 7 On page(s): 1167 - 1183 ISSN: 0018-9219 INSPEC Accession Number: 10064527 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2008.922561 Current Version Published: 17 June 2008

How to map a 1GB per mm² intracranial mushdrive and other empirically based explanatory spelunking.

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Don’t worry, there will be no quiz, because we can tell whether or not you’re paying attention and fMRI whether or not you get it. ;-)<blockquote>Marty Sereno: “The strange sort of reality of the visual system, from which you reconstruct and construct this static feeling of stuff out there is this sequence of [really bizarre, fisheye lens distorted looking, scanning, zooming] glances. Somehow, you actually assemble that series of glances into a meaningful, coherent, representation of the room.”</blockquote>So what differentiates our brains from animal brains, which are otherwise so strikingly, anatomically similar?<blockquote>Marty Sereno: “They don’t have a productive way of attaching up a symbol stream to this visual scene assembler, that they otherwise just use for assembling the current visual scene. So the theory is basically that, this final stage just requires some more rapid way of allowing auditory symbols which didn’t mean anything, or evolved for essentially meaninglessness and just sort of because they sounded good, essentially attaching them up to the higher level parts of the visual system where this scene assembly process goes on normally, with respect to the current scene. So that’s my theory.”</blockquote>Conclusions:

• Preadaptation 1: vocal control by sexual selection
• Preadaptation 2: serial assembly of glances
• Language is not an isolated organ in the brain, but instead largely built upon existing functionality
• The ability to evoke fictive scenes leads to a great increase in cognitive power (evoking past, future)
• The final stage in this scenario only requires the development of stronger auditory/visual mapping

• Explore.
• Learn.

UI’s for the coming decade from Six Revisions.



At Caltech, “our cybernetic implant options draw nearer (and more intelligent).”

Get ready, it’s all coming together and now is the time to gently prepare the normals for what’s next; even if it’s by way of the equivalent of visual nursery rhymes and benign Olympic sideshows, for now.

Winter Olympics to demo lighting controlled by thoughts

So imagine what we’re not showing you, yet.

Image: Kotaku

One of the projects being developed by the group is a form of assistive technology they call a brain co-processor. This system, also referred to as a cognitive assistive system, would initially be aimed at people suffering from cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. It would monitor people's activities and brain functions, determine when they needed help, and provide exactly the right bit of helpful information at just the right time. It could also find applications for people without any disability, as a form of brain augmentation.

SOURCES: MIT via KAI

"Who knows? Maybe, in another ten years, we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant." -- Pattie Maes

Is it merely cheesy pop pseudo science … <blockquote>“The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Since Einstein uses the term particle to represent “matter,” he is acknowledging that the field controls our physical reality.</blockquote>… or a somewhat useful intermediate abstraction on the way to more precise understanding …<blockquote>“Epigenetics has become much more interesting because it allows us to look at how gene expression is changed by environmental events, explainable in part by histone modifications.”</blockquote>

Wired:<blockquote>The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas.</blockquote>Embedded in Contact Lenses with Built-In Virtual Graphics might minimize power requirements:<blockquote>One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.</blockquote>

… and just perhaps, they will help to define the most familiar and comforting path toward substrate-independent posthumanity … SmartHand device. (Credit: Image rights American Friends of Tel Aviv University)

Ekenstam told a television interviewer, "I am using muscles which I haven't used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don't have them anymore. It's amazing." The team first chose to build a hand, however, because of its unique challenges. "The fingers in the hand are the most complex appendages we have," Prof. Shacham-Diamand observes. "The brain needs to synchronise the movement of each digit in a very complicated way." While the prototype looks very "bionic" now, in the future SmartHand scientists plan to equip it with artificial skin that will give the brain even more tactile feedback.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Robot Arm (slideshare.net)
• Prosthetic Smart Hand Lets Amputee Feel and Move Objects (singularityhub.com)

Imagining an unequalable, universally contiguous, extended human cognition substrate; a phenomenologically consistent and sustainable epi-neocortical architecture, intrinsically obviating corporation and nation; diverse, progressive, transparent, authentic, open, extensible. Observe, interpret, forecast, design, build, uplift.

What is it?

On Thursday, November 12, 2009, sponsored by The Rock Center for Corporate Governance and Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics:
<blockquote>Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.</blockquote>

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It's important now to recognize that nowhere in the concept of sentience is there a mention of mind, intelligence, or self-awareness.

In fact, much of what we perceive is irreducibly complex, as our emotions cannot be broken up into their constituent chemicals nor our music into its disparate vibrations while still maintaining meaning.

SOURCE: MachinesLikeUs

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Stanford CodeX: “Human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” File under Augmented, Extended, Emergent Cognition Grid.

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Technology Review (via KAIN):

Oh, there’ll be no body category, class, or type limits – within the bounds of the laws of physics – for your inevitable substrate independent migratory path; just one niggling little problem holdin’ up the show: spec’n out the I/O ports.

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PhysOrg, (via KAIN):
<blockquote>Stanford engineers are developing the first autonomous racing car to climb Pikes Peak, a challenging 12.4-mile ascent in the Rocky Mountains, at 130 mph, as a way to create and test safety systems they hope one day will be used in all vehicles.

“If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep,” said Kirstin Talvala, one of the students.</blockquote>


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var wave = new WavePanel(‘https://wave.google.com/wave/’); wave.setUIConfig(‘white’, ‘black’, ‘Arial’, ‘13px’); wave.loadWave(‘googlewave.com!w+JtUF67GiA’); wave.init(document.getElementById(‘wave’));

var wave = new WavePanel(‘https://wave.google.com/wave/’); wave.setUIConfig(‘white’, ‘black’, ‘Arial’, ‘13px’); wave.loadWave(‘googlewave.com!w+JtUF67GiA’); wave.init(document.getElementById(‘wave’));

More extraordinarily high-signal outputs from the seemingly inexhaustible cognition engine behind Sentient Developments:<blockquote>Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will … </blockquote><blockquote>Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain mind-types …</blockquote><blockquote> Forced cognitive modification is an issue that’s affecting real people today.</blockquote>

As presented Sunday 2009.10.18 at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago and reported by Technology Review:<blockquote>Scientists at Brown University have developed an entirely implantable version of a neural prosthesis used to translate neural signals from the brain. The ultimate goal is to use this kind of device to allow severely paralyzed people to control a computer or a robot limb with their thoughts.

The array of electrodes that is implanted on the cortex is connected via a single wire to a data transfer chip, which is implanted onto the skull. The chip has a tiny laser, the size of a grain of sand, that transmits rapid pulses of light across the skin to a photodiode receiver placed on the scalp. The receiver converts the light signals back to electrical ones, and sends the information to a computer.</blockquote>

You don’t have to believe in gravity or in quarks in order for both to fully define your very existence. So feel free to believe how you choose.<blockquote>“People can argue about it,” says Kurzweil, relaxed as ever within his aura of certainty. “But when it comes down to accepting each step along the way, it’s done really without much debate.” </blockquote>

#futuretechture BCI Games: COTS Brain Computer Interfaces https://bit.ly/Y3boV

Remember when you thought that Flight Simulator, complete with joystick, was “just a toy?” Turns out, actually, we were training UAV jockeys, right?

So sure, these first BCI commercial devices may seem primitive. Then, so was the Apple II, right? The important thing here is that we are now actively enabling, encouraging, and training up young brains of all ages to Think About What It Might Mean to have truly robust and responsive BCI. STS has long explained that technology is seldom the proximate barrier to sociotechnological advance; rather, geographical and cultural factors, and plain old human behavioral inertia slows diffusion and uptake of technologies.

As we move forward into the early stages of the BCI Revolution, entirely new areas of psychological adaptation will emerge, and become better illumined, as well. To my mind, this is where the real interesting research lies, but more on that later. For now, you’ll have to settle for polishing up your pyrokinetic powers using an entirely new kind of Mindset:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlJz1Dm16wQ&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

I know you know. But this is just too momentous to escape personal archives.<blockquote>Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.</blockquote>“Humanity may be granted an unexpected giant step to the stars. But we must have the guts to actually take it.” Video Credit: Thomas Lucas & Dave Brody

#futuretechture Apparent complexity of human mind no barrier to building replica brain https://bit.ly/VIBJg

#futuretechture “Actually no one even knows what we already understand about the brain” says Professor Markram https://metavalent.com/?p=1116

Apparent complexity of human mind no barrier to building replica brain

Yesterday in PhysOrg, as referred by KAI

A model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible in 10 years according to neuroscientist Professor Henry Markram of the…

Yesterday in PhysOrg, as referred by KAI

A model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible in 10 years according to neuroscientist Professor Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. ‘I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial. It is an extremely expensive project and not all is yet secured.'

Medtronic starts trials for closed-loop brain implant

EETimes:

Medtronic Inc. has started trials in monkeys of an implantable device that can automatically sense and respond to brain waves.

Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis

New Scientist:

It will be a long time before these chips can become a mainstream treatment: the US Food and Drug Administration requires as much as 10 years of animal testing before a chip…

#futuretechture Medtronic starts trials for closed-loop brain implant https://bit.ly/3d361f

#futuretechture Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis https://bit.ly/4dp4nj

New Scientist:<blockquote>It will be a long time before these chips can become a mainstream treatment: the US Food and Drug Administration requires as much as 10 years of animal testing before a chip can be deemed safe enough to be implanted in human brains. That means the latest technology, such as chips that stimulate tactile sensations in the brain, will need extensive testing before clinical trials can begin.

Yet even once the technology has proven itself, the social issues surrounding the treatment will need to be solved. Take the question of security, for example. Last year, a team of researchers successfully hacked into a heart pacemaker and defibrillator through the wireless communication that allows doctors to adjust its performance. Although the device wasn’t implanted in anyone at the time, it raised the possibility that hackers could disrupt a patient’s treatment.</blockquote>

See? Already we're IN UR HED, hakkin' UR thaughtZ! Substrate dependence is futile!

EETimes:

Medtronic Inc. has started trials in monkeys of an implantable device that can automatically sense and respond to brain waves.

#futuretechture Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens https://bit.ly/O7ZyM

IEEE Spectrum: A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

#futuretechture Fusion of Nanocircuits, Bio-membranes: Toward a Hybrid Cell Wall? https://bit.ly/i0XQU

Fusion of Nanocircuits, Bio-membranes: Toward a Hybrid Cell Wall?

Bruce Lipton, The Wisdom of your Cells — “the cell wall *is* a computing device” — must be going ga-ga right about now, on this news.

“This is much the same thing that happens in…

Bruce Lipton, The Wisdom of your Cells – “the cell wall is a computing device” – must be going ga-ga right about now, on this news.
<blockquote>“This is much the same thing that happens in a cell,” Stroeve explained. “Now that we can open and close these channels, we can, in effect, regulate our system’s ability to sense chemicals in its environment.”</blockquote>Even if, as some critique, Lipton goes a bit too far implying the degree to which conscious thought can CONTROL that cellular interface, the basic mechanics of how cells work is fairly incontrovertible. This is not to imply that we “get it” to the extent necessary for inorganic tissue and organ genesis, en route substrate independence; but it’s certainly an incremental step in the right direction.

The next 12 messages constitute an experiment. When complete, I hope that the topic provokes some thoughtful follow-on discussion.

Heads up, friends. Have a lil’ 12-tweet series experiment in the queue for our beloved public timeline. OBJECTIVES: illustration, outreach.

This concludes the previous 12-tweet experiment, illustrating an observation by emulation.

#futuretechture The Neuro Revolution Tonight on Tech Nation https://bit.ly/7bLTs

Tonight on Tech Nation: The Neuro Revolution

Host Moira Gunn talks with Zack Lynch, author of “The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World.”

Sun, Aug 23, 2009 – 10:00 pm

RT @salimismail Just saw a #singularityu team project demo on car-sharing - they modified a car and unlocked/started it with an iphone!

The Horror That Is Amsterdam - Norwonk - Open Salon

Oh! The Horror! Nowonk: “Imagine how embarrassed Bill O’Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News would be if they had an ounce of decency?” Well, first you’d have to imagine that scenario as somehow…

#futuretechture CALO: Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes https://tr.im/uK6B

CALO: Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes

Thanks, as so often is the case, to the EpiSupraMeta KurzweilAI for the tip:

CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word…

Thanks, as so often is the case, to the EpiSupraMeta KurzweilAI for the tip:

CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word calonis, “soldier’s servant,” because DARPA’s goal is to create a cognitive system that can reason, learn, and respond to surprise in order to assist in military situations. The CALO project brings together leading computer scientists and researchers in artificial intelligence, perception, machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, multimodal dialog, cyber-awareness, human-computer interaction, and flexible planning. The single research focus of all these experts is to create an integrated system that can “learn in the wild”—that is, adapt to changes in its environment and its user’s goals and tasks without programming assistance or technical intervention. The groundbreaking nature of this ambitious goal is discussed further in the CALO Vision.

And the ever vigilant New Scientist:<blockquote>Another CALO spinoff is Social Kinetics, a social-network analysis package that helps people organise their contacts by criteria that can include relationship and expertise.</blockquote>

#futuretechture Making Memories: Literally https://tr.im/u6vI

Scientists have captured the first image of memories being made

Source: McGill University