4/17/24
Trying a new experiment here to see how it feels.
Every day I read all sorts of disaggregated pieces of content and collect my thoughts as they emerge across a consortium of notebooks, digital environments, and such. This will be a test to sort through that at some point during the day to aggregate, simplify, and structure my thinking around them. Additionally I’d like to include links to each item I read that impacted me, so my intellectual journey is vettable and I remain accountable to directional growth.
Also, I think it’d be good for me to practice writing with specified intention.
Today I’ve thought about:
Tradition as psycho-technology.
We are in majority indifferent from our ancestors in terms of our hardware. We have the same reward functions, organs, appendages, and senses. However, our ability to manipulate our internal and external environments have increased. Much of this is due to the rapid advance of technology and increase in availability of information - but an important component unconsidered by many is the advances in our cognitive technologies.
If the brain is hardware & thought is software, psychotechnologies are thought architectures that improve our ability to improve our cognition locally and coordination globally. Or more simply: processes that improve human information processing. Some examples:
Language
Literacy & numeracy
Meditation & contemplation
Exaptation of tools & organs
Coinage & currency (note that this is not a hard tech, because it’s utility comes from consensus)
Religion, mythology, narrative
Morality
Governance
(these things are not only psychotechnologies - not meaning to reduce the depth of these topics, but they fit the definition)
The relationships between personalities, cultures, meaning, and psychotechnologies are matrixed and not something I want to get into right now, but it’s important to note the relationships are there. Different personalities are predisposed to engage better with various PTs, same with cultures. Thus are varying levels of advancement of their use.
The note on the Puebloans climbing 5.10 routes to get to their homes every day piqued my imagination. “Advances in climbing are advances in tradition.” What a simple and beautiful example of how changes in tradition shift practical life. The best boulderers that have ever existed exist right now. They exist not because our climbing shoes rubber is getting sticker or our chalk more adhesive. They exist because it has never been easier for psycho-tech to spread. The availability of information decreases repeat experiments and allows for distributed sharing of learnings.
Tradition has been demonized in the west over the last 3 decades. In the last 3 years, I’ve noticed an overton window shift. People are realizing that we don’t like where we are. People are obese and addicted to technology, depressed and overprescribed.. We’ve lost touch with our inherent nature. The antithesis and revolt against this has been to return to ancient ways. Tradition is the compression of our species’ relationship with being. It is inherently ontological, because it connects with our genealogies and history of being. Makes sense why this is where we go. (side note - I think the synthesis of these things will be a sort of techno-traditionalist).
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” - Gustav Mahler paraphrasing Thomas More
There is also a moral argument to be made. If different cultures adopt and invent different tech at different speeds and depths, there are then there are differences in the advances of cultural & ontological efficacy. This directly affects quality of life for members’ and their moral landscape. Not all cultures are created equal. They can and do advance. Read that again. That is unfortunately a controversial statement these days. All should be valued and are worth study, in the same way that every personality is valuable. However, a narcissistic personality is not to be idealized or a person and their loved ones will suffer. In the same way, a society that permits slavery. Could go deep here on the second order affects of all this & how it forms - but today I mainly was thinking about information sharing.
Earlier I mentioned how psycho-technology advances faster now due to information availability (subtext is the internet exists). This is a spatio-informa unlock. Learning is not bound by space. A guy can try a new bouldering technique in Sweden, post it on Mountain Project, and I can try it in Mazama WA the next day. In the morality example, information is shared temporally through tradition. Tradition is temporal information processing in some sense.
A lot more thoughts here…
“Tradition is including the dead in democracy.” - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Thoughts initially prompted by this article. Good reads - The Sin of Moral Equivalence, 2001: What Now?,
The Jhanas
I’ve been a meditator since 16. I’ve had many pure consciousness events, out of body experiences, interconnected resonance occurences, etc while in the meditative space. I’ve dug into Buddhism and various structured meditative practices and have found them antiquated in their demands. I could get to the same ends through simplified, self-discovered means. Jhanic practices seem to be a toolkit very similar to what I’ve used to reach those states. I’m going to experiment and see how it goes.
Piece: Manufacturing Bliss
The CCP has been quite involved in the fentanyl crisis.
They provided subsidies/grants to and even took equity in companies that manufactured fentanyl. They prosecuted consumption with draconian rigor domestically and left exports untouched. This is the latest in a series of CCP initiatives that either clearly targeted or happenstantially have acceleration the destruction of youth in America.
Link to report by US congress.
Robots are so dope! & progressing very quickly.
New BD robot dropped today - video.
I’m going to start building some of my own w Orin devkits. First on the docket will be a simply robot that follows me around on 4 wheels and runs a basic fine-tuned LLM - or maybe will just use Pi? I want a real Jarvis.
Future of Humanity Institute shut down :(
I’ve wanted to go to Oxford for about 8 months now, FHI was one of the reasons. Lost a little but of respect for the philosophy faculty because of this move. RIP.
Long term ketamine abuse damages brain - study link
Surprise there is still no extrinsic one size fits all solution for spiritual unhealth.
I liked seeing Hayao Miyazaki in the Time 100, well deserved. Reminds me I want to see “The Boy and the Heron.”
Great stuff from Ryan Reynolds on Michael J Fox & what he wants to teach his daughter here.
Jensen was top of the innovators list again here.