Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob:

What I like about this book and this writer in particular is he'll offer an insightful and somewhat scathing critique of a deeply entrenched institution and then wrap it up with, "but this is how we all understand how to do this right now, so here's a few ways we could change things up to move back in the correct direction." He doesn't offer much in the way of a program directive back to the goal state of no separation.

In terms of community, I agree with your statement. The point of the book is not that pre historic humans had community so if we force ourselves to copy a few of their traits, we will have community. The point is that community was an emergent property of these people based on the times they lived in. It is also suggesting that the human animal is designed to function best as part of a community with certain parameters. The disintegration of this (long ago) is an emergent property of the time we live in. So if we wanted to "go back" (which is impossible due to technological lock-ins) or move forward towards a state with more community, we need to focus on what the properties are that cause community to emerge organically.

Top down enforcement has failed over and over again. The hypothesis is that top down enforcement has failed because we lack the emergent properties of community, one of which is community members depending upon each other. It will not solve the problem to institute top down dependence (or top down "equality").

On the equality note, I believe pre-historic societies still had leadership roles as well as acknowledgement of different skills for different people. These skills and hierarchies were more "equal" in that one couldn't climb 10x higher on the social or economic chain than someone else and since there is a lack of specialization, because it is actually pointless for them to specialize, each member of the culture ends up participating in cultural activities and boring work activities in roughly the same proportion.




The main theme of Eisenstein's work is that we suffer because of "separation" the opposite of which I call "unseparateness."

Eisenstein for sure hypothesizes that pre-historic humans had more "unseparatness' than modern humans. While he feels a major driver of separateness is technology, he also traces the possible origins of separateness back to the formation of the cell wall in single-celled organisms. Important in his theory is that separateness, at some point for either life or mammals or primates or people became an emergent property and the mechanisms of separateness slowly but surely amplified themselves. As such, there was no one change or technological or ideological advance that brought about separateness, nor were pre-historic humans free of it. So there is no one magical talking stick we can fine to bring us out of separateness.

He takes this idea and draws it out to come up with an ideal state, which could in certain ways be roughly described as "there is no separation between work and play," which is a state he hypothesizes pre-historic humans held, at least to a much stronger degree than we did. The state of unseparateness he ends up describing sounds a lot like buddhist enlightenment or human self-actualization.


If this all sounds a bit woo think of it like this: Imagine you are born in a place where you are trained from birth to meet all of your own basic needs in a way that meets all of your human needs and allows you to contribute to a community where you help meet the needs of others. Imagine that you make everything yourself or with your tribe members from the landscape around you. These resources are abundantly available to you. Does this not roughly describe WL8 where we exit the cave of consumer praxis? Can we maybe suppose these people did not have trouble figuring out or expressing who they truly are because no other options were available and there is no larger cultural narrative to tell them opposing things they "should" be doing? The point isn't that we should go back pre-historic times, which even if it were desirable, is impossible. The point is there existed a time and place where people were born with a bunch of stuff our society lacks and didn't need to go through a de-brainwashing and reskilling phase in adulthood to figure out how to live without instagram and food delivery. Perhaps it is worth ruminating on what these people had that we lack and what properties made them emergent?


Some suggestions from the book are: 1) take the time to notice the abundance that still exists around you, even as we have been separated by it with all of these new technological "needs" (is this not ERE?) and 2) be more generous towards your friends, family and community members, as you are able, as a way to strengthen relationships and rebuild some emergent dependence among communities without increasing resentment (this will take practice).

There is more to the book than this. There is a section of the book and another book ("Sacred Economics") about how to change the money system, with the idea that a different money system would decrease separateness (as well as other ideas on how to achieve this, none of which involve sitting in a circle with a talking stick).

[Jin+Guice]

"Ascent" and Needs

Thinking about "Ascent of Humanity" through Maslow's Hierarchy and "pathological culture" as discussed in the previous series of posts, pathological culture is akin to arrested development. It's a culture stuck in the adolescent/ ego phase of human development. The dominant cultural paradigm is developmentally a modern teenager. We are individually trapped in adult bodies while the culture around us robs us of the opportunity to take care of ourselves, telling us how lucky we are to be taken care of. We long for things we can not have and ignore the consequences of our actions, both of which we feel are ultimately not controlled by us.

In terms of Maslow's Hierarchy, my interpretation of pathological culture/ the myth of money is that it sets a trap in the bottom two levels of the hierarchy ("physiological needs" and "safety"). We believe we are unable to meet our physiological needs due to scarcity. If we are lucky enough to be able to meet physiological needs because we are at the top of the financial and technological spectrum (not only in terms of geographical and demographic luck, but also in terms of history) we should feel guilty about our "privilege" (to have access to the resources that make us able to meet the basic physiological needs of a human to remain biologically alive!) and second realize that we are not safe.

One can never have enough money to be safe. The myth of safety through money is the paradox that there is an amount of money which makes us safe and that amount is always and forever "at least a little bit more than we already have." Since we should already feel guilty for meeting our biological needs and we impossibly attempt to meet our need for safety with money, considering any higher level need is an absurd luxury afforded to only those money hoarding pricks who have attained safety by having at least a little bit more money than us.

An enforcer of this belief is what I call "needs of modernity." These are needs imposed on us by modern society which make it more difficult to meet our biological needs.

I grace you with a shelter, which you did not build, are unable to assess the quality of and are unable to purchase without financing through debt. Because you are free, you are allowed to spend as much time as you wish waiting for favorable borrowing conditions, comparing small differences in loans and trying to manipulate a semi-secret formula. If you are savvy, it will cost you at minimum, twice as much as I determined the shelter is worth. The house is located on land I have poisoned with pesticides so I could mono crop a fast growing weed which produces nothing of practical use to you or anyone you know. You are legally and socially required to both promote and impede its growth within a narrow range.

To acquire food you must use a car. I will spend billions of dollars to convince you to purchase something you cannot pay for in cash through debt-finance. You will need it to drive to a storage facility where all food is held. In order to earn food, you must drive to another storage facility to do a repetitive task which I have coerced your people to do since before you were born. I have manipulated you since birth to accept this as a necessary and beneficial sacrifice to the gods of progress and consumption. You should feel thankful that I convinced your distant ancestors to adopt this lifestyle, as the road to this excellent life is most painful for those whose forebears have not sacrificed enough to the gods.

You are welcome.

Or, to paraphrase Jacob because I can't find the quote, "each technological advance that has increased economic efficiency is met with an equal and opposite increase in waste."

In spite of all this waste, many of us still possess the financial and economic tools to fulfill the needs of modernity in order to meet our biological needs in this new and improved modern way. Trapping us with the myth of monetary safety would probably be sufficient to convince us of scarcity; however, the myth of money adds another viscous story.

Ensconced in our culture's view of money and flagrantly promoted, particularly in advertisement, is the idea that money can satisfy all of our needs. That is, given enough money we will fulfill our emotional, social, intellectual and aesthetic needs as well as reaching self-actualization and transcendence. Needless to say, money will not meet any of these needs satisfactorily.

It would however be convenient for this myth if we found a way to ensure that every feeling, social interaction, intellectual and aesthetic pursuit and religious and cultural experience is viewed through an economic lens of how much money it generates, perhaps through a single statistic we could use as a proxy for national happiness... but that would be gross.

[Jin+Guice]

"Ascent" and Reunion (Unseparation)

"Ascent of Humanity" describes how humanity lost its way into the world of separation. Knowing this story allows us to generate ideas about how to unseparate.

The idea of separation first proposes that we are all part of one thing at our core. There is no separation between you and me, no separation between me and anything, no me. Something feels really nice about this concept, but beyond maybe going "OH... WOW' if I was on way too many psychedelics, I'm so far away from this state of being as to render all of the above paragraph effectively meaningless.

The idea becomes useful to me when I examine the symptoms of separation we experience. The main symptom is anxiety, coming from fear of scarcity. This fear of scarcity exists in all human realms, not just the material.

So separation causes anxiety about scarcity. So if we become cognizant of our anxiety about scarcity and start to notice abundance, we can move towards unseparation (unity?). If you find this idea interesting, I recommend reading "Ascent of Humanity," because the ways in which we experience separation and this anxiety, many of which at least I was unaware of, are covered in detail.

How to decrease this anxiety? The first thing we can do is notice the abundance around us. ERE helps us do this, by revealing the excess financial and economic wealth. We can also recognize the beauty and intrigue that surrounds us in both the human and non-human world.

The world we live in is profoundly amazing. We are surrounded by so many technological wonders we take for granted, but don't understand, so much material abundance, so much cultural abundance, so much social abundance. Even things which I think of as negative, such as a highly manicured lawn, are in fact beautiful. So many parts of everyday life are extraordinary. We lack the awareness to appreciate the things in front of us.

Another way to reduce separation is to pursue creativity and beauty. These things can manifest in any form. A useful perspective is removing the separation between form and function. Find a beautiful and creative way to wash the floor and recognize the function of an abstract painting or free jazz.

[Jin+Guice]

Efficiency, Resiliency and Quasi-Actualization; a Needs Perspective

Efficiency

Hypothesis: Maximum efficiency is only desirable in things we don't enjoy. If one enjoys something to some degree, the personally-efficient level of doing it maximizes all parts they enjoy, while minimizing the parts of it they don't.

For example, if one enjoys kneading bread, because of the way the dough feels, because of the physicality involved, because of the smell, because of flow experienced in the process, but does not enjoy using a stand mixer, because of the noise, the use of resources, the lack of engagement with the process of feeding oneself that would come with using one's hands...

Then kneading bread dough by hand is more efficient for that person then using a stand mixer even if it takes more time and life energy.

Resiliency
Assumption: Resiliency is positive.

We achieve resilience in needs when we have multiple ways of meeting a need. If we need to eat, we can get that food with money, by growing it, by doing a valuable favor for a friend, as a gift from our social network or by dumpster diving it. If one of these options vanishes or becomes intolerably more difficult (in terms of financial thinking, too expensive), we are able to meet our need through the other routes.

Maintaining resilience takes effort. Eventually this effort is not worth the resiliency. Subject to the hypothesis of efficiency above, we want to gain resiliency as efficiently as possible.

Quasi-Actualization

Maslow's top two needs states are "self-actualization" and "transcendence."
Self-actualization is defined as "what one can be, he must be" or discovering and reaching one's potential.

Or:

Actualizers have internalized systems thinking to the point of unconscious competence. The remaining systems focus is on closing the loops and reducing waste, as the major forms of capital are freely available (within reason). As such, money becomes more and more irrelevant in that its main use is in buying off head/poll taxes or costs that are impossible to escape or incorporate into the system. Since the system now meets all the lower needs and wants (shelter, food, transport, stuff) without much effort and attention, the focus switches to maximizing the person's potential as a human being on a full time basis by increasing capital in the form of skills and access.
(From "Actualization" Wheaton-Level in the ERE WL Table)

Or:

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."
(quote from Lawrence Pearsall Jacks found on ERE "about me" blog page).


Transcendence is "the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos." In this stage, one transcendes themselves into a higher purpose, beyond their own potential as an individual (but while also fully realizing their own potential as an individual).
I don't feel like I'm anywhere near either of these so it's hard for me to comment.

Instead I'm going to hypothesize a state called "quasi-actualization." My assumption is that actualization is an emergent property of satisfying all needs below actualization. Since the hierarchy as a hierarchy is known to break down as a pathway where one must TOTALLY complete a prior level need to access the next need, I think we can actualize or quasi-actualize at certain times and in certain areas of our life, while not doing so in others.

What the Fuck are you Talking About?

I'm assuming that actualization is desirable, and that my theory of quasi-actualization is correct. Much like the Wheaton table, if we aren't close to a certain level, it's a better strategy to fuck around at the level we are at, rather than a level we do not yet comprehend.

So how to efficiently meet all of these needs and then build resiliency in those needs? One possibility is to try to meet each need at every level.

The most basic physiological need is said to be air. At the physiological level we breathe in air, at the safety level (which could almost be called the resiliency level in this context) we try to protect our supply of clean air, at the emotional level we feel the calmness induced by breathing deeply, at the social level we, uh, breathe with our friends?, at the intellectual level we can learn how our bodies remove oxygen from the air during breathing and at the aesthetic level we can enjoy the beauty in the process that nature has given us as well as feel the air in our lungs.

Thus form meets function and breathing becomes an art. Aside from using this as a poem to seduce attractive yoga practitioners, how does this help us?
In terms of quasi-actualization, each individual need we meet now helps us meet every level of need. Thus we don't need to be a breather and a painter and scientist, we just need to be a breather. If we seek to reach actualization, where we fulfill our potential, instead of quasi-actualization, we may wish to do more than just be a breather (though I think there is some value in imagining your life if you did the absolute minimum).

In terms of efficiency, we gain efficiency by removing the separation between different areas. If we decide that in order to actualize, we think we want to do some science stuff in order to fulfill our intellectual curiosity, we are able to slightly meet this need even as we just breathe.
In terms of resiliency, we gain resilience by removing the separation between different areas. Now you can connect your "breathe air" node to your "science" node on your WoGs.

I'm not suggesting that many or any people's efficiently resilient quasi-actualization system will be built out of just breathing (again, imagine giving yourself permission to do the bare minimum!), but I am suggesting that thinking in this way may help those of us who suffer from lack of direction or ennui during any part of the ERE journey.

[7Wannabe5]

Great post! Ken Wilber writes a bit about how transcendence can take on "depth" as well and/or "height." Transcendent "height" is akin to going up and beyond your own ego-state, and "depth" is more akin to opening in compassion to the universe. Sometimes we enter into transcendent states "accidentally." For example, in Jenny Wade's work of research on "Transcendent Sexuality", she reports that transcendent events during sex occur in a wide variety of sexual contexts, although most frequently when the human is in passive/receptive mode, and this form of transcendent sexuality is usually more of a "height" experience. OTOH, Deida in his work on "Transcendent Sexuality" describes more of a "depth" experience achieved when the individuals engaged are most polarized in their sexual dichotomies, resulting in deeply erotic "big love." So, even though Sex is generally listed at bottom Physiological level need on Maslow-like Hierarchies, although many/most Moderns would also include it under Love and Belonging, it can also be a means of actualization in terms of both "height" and "depth." In sexual context, "resiliency" may relate to some sort of graph of "height" and "depth" over "time" and "partner." For example, if you are polyamorous and have three partners, the extent to which you can be sexually "present" with each of them would be a measure of depthXresilience. IME, and as Deida has noted, it is more difficult to achieve maximum depth with more than one partner "simultaneously", but the "height" of transcendence one is able to achieve in sexual context actually has little correlation with "depth"; it's more about you and the Universe in the moment than you and your partner in the moment; we all die alone and this form of sexual transcendence is akin to a very big "little death." Wilber, in his forward to Deida's book, states that in theory sexual transcendence could even be achieved solo, but he does not personally vouch for this experience.

[Jin+Guice]

thanks @7, as always your comments are appreciated! My sexual resilience has been rather low throughout my life.

But, don't worry everybody, I have a "needs" spreadsheet where "sex" is highlighted in the color red, indicating low resiliency, so I'm working on it!



I'm on a bit of a quest recently and I figured out a simple, ERE, way to explain it.


As we rise through the Wheaton Levels, we seek to make heterotelic goals and behaviors (where the outcome of one action detracts from the outcome of another) and move towards homeotelic goals and behaviors (where the outcome of one action has positively effects the outcome of another). The book covers how one might do this.

What I am also trying to figure out is why it's so damn hard to even identify those rascal heterotelic behaviors. Why is it so hard to change them? Why did we even develop them in the first place?

[ertyu]

Bc our nervous system optimizes only in the immediate present based on very simple heuristics:

- if find food, eat
- if has sugar, good
- if easy, do it that way (least resistance)
- if shorter way, ocd compells you (desire paths)
- conserve energy. if physically hard, avoid
- if dopamine, yes
- if it might make me feel bad, no (eg school paper)
- if it makes my peepee tingle and i wish to mate it, yes

not that different from an amoeba, really. we don't have an innate program for "this sugar-laden food that capitalism has placed in my immediate trajectory will give me pimples and increase the likelihood i get dementia in 25 years."

[thef0x]

You said "why did we develop them [rascal heterotelic behaviors] in the first place" as if we were all born pure.

Why shouldn't default human be incoherent and contradictory? Why should our morality perfectly line up in each instance? Why should we make sense in some internally consistent way or be homeotelic by default? Why should we be happy?

I'd push you on the idea that we're born homeotelic (insert any other normative term here) and we fail ourselves when we're not.

It's easy to feel guilt or shame for failure when you buy into the myth that XYZ should have ABC outcome/intention/design intrinsically. "I should be born with an intrinsic motivation to maximize only actions that contain this property of multiple good actions but instead I'm born in a body that", as @ertyu aptly put it, "if dopamine, yes and I suck because of it". Another way to say this is "I'm mad that I like cheetos when I know they're the worst*" or "I am a sinner".

We were programmed, like all living things, through evolution by natural selection. Our contemporary existence is the reward of dna-replication, not happiness or satisfaction. It doesn't mean that happiness or homeotelic behavior isn't available to us, certainly it is, but the idea that it's natural or easy or part of our nature *is an assumption*. I think it's wrong.

Fortunately, when you walk through the world actually living life with happiness, satisfaction, and intention, hey, in my opinion you're kinda kicking nature's ass. Default human is not an integrated, systems thinking, financially independent dumpster diving sex wizard.

I'd ditch the "default human is" thinking in general. All of us are thrown into irrational, hungry, angry, imperfect being (alongside all the peak good stuff). I bet even the most put together of us, the guy who wrote the book, would agree.

It just looks easier for some folks than others, is the thing, especially from the vantage point that we're all stuck in (ourselves).

I bet to someone else reading your journal, they'd do anything to become a dumpster diving poly sex wizard.

*"..but are they? They are. ....but.. are they? Yes. Yes, they are really bad. I don't like cheetos... even though I do. But I don't. They're disgusting. And yet so crunchy. No, I can't. Why do I like cheetos, fuck." VS "Cheetos are engineered by well paid people to rock my flippin socks but I choose to abstain because $values".

tldr: no one said it was supposed to be easy.

[zbigi]

I bet to someone else reading your journal, they'd do anything to become a dumpster diving poly sex wizard.

*"..but are they? They are. ....but.. are they? Yes. Yes, they are really bad. I don't like cheetos... even though I do. But I don't. They're disgusting. And yet so crunchy. No, I can't. Why do I like cheetos, fuck." VS "Cheetos are engineered by well paid people to rock my flippin socks but I choose to abstain because $values".

tldr: no one said it was supposed to be easy.

It's interesting that people [1] seem to have some innate drive to aspire to things that they perceive as higher ideals, which are also difficult and unpleasant. For centuries, it was to be closer to God, via trying to be a good human being and doing good things, despite our base programming. Now, it's self-actualization/ecology/whatever-else (the buffet menu of values and ideals got rather large in XXI century), again despite our base programming.

[1] In Western/Christian culture only?

[chenda]

In Western/Christian culture only?

No it's a fairly universal phenomena I think.

[guitarplayer]

@guitarplayer: That is achievable with email if everyone has their own recordings setup. There can be some file/ alignment issues, but I'm happy to help facilitate and participate if people are interested.

@JnG what free software for recording music would you recommend? I have Line6 Pod UX2 and in the recording setup manual see that Cakewalk is cited as second on their list. I read that this software can be had for free so will go with Cakewalk unless you tell me to go with something else.

[zbigi]

No it's a fairly universal phenomena I think.

Ancient people (e.g. Greeks, Romans, not to mention various "barbarians") didn't seem so ideal-driven. Or maybe their ideals were just simpler, reflecting lower sophistication of their beliefs or culture? In their cultures, doing right by Apollo/Baal/... and not making him angry might have been the pain-in-the-ass ideal to aspire to.

[loutfard]

@JnG what free software for recording music would you recommend? I have Line6 Pod UX2 and in the recording setup manual see that Cakewalk is cited as second on their list. I read that this software can be had for free so will go with Cakewalk unless you tell me to go with something else.

The easy and low-end answer is Audacity.

The slightly more involved and probably overkill answer is Ardour.

[guitarplayer]

Thanks @loutfard, and do you know / have any opinion on Cakewalk? Asking because meanwhile I managed to install it and integrate with my Line6 interface. Tried recording and sounds good.

I should mention I am bound to Windows on this one as there are no Line6 drivers for Linux sadly.

Regardless, @J&G I'd still be keen to hear your view!

ETA: ok I like that Ardour is on masstodon this tells me something maybe I should go down that route.

[Jin+Guice]

@guitarplayer: Does the pod come with any software? All recording software will act as a tape machine and allow you to edit what you've recorded digitally. After that it comes down to how much you like the software and what you're trying to do. I haven't used a free DAW for 20 years.

I used Pro Tools until a few years ago and now I use Reaper (made by programmers so it's open source and you can edit the code easily. So far it appears you only have to buy a $60 license once). I changed from PT bc PT knows it is the industry standard and extracts money from its users regularly. I'm frustrated bc I know how to use PT extremely well and I'm much slower in Reaper.

The less shit the software can do, the easier it is to learn and get started. I'm not advising against free software, I just can't give a good recommendation. For what I think you're trying to do right now, anything should work. My only warning is it's very annoying to switch software if you are familiar with one (but, like, the kind of familiarity that comes with a few years of use).




Thanks everyone for the comments! I love a lively debate!


@thef0x: Heterotelic and homeotelic goals only presume that each person subjectively chooses goals for themselves. We pick the goals. Thus we definitionally fail ourselves when we are not homeotelic, because we have created two goals for ourselves which, at least partially, oppose each other.

It seems the assumption is that heterotelic goals are a natural state?

My question is not "what is the natural state of humans?" (if one believes in a natural state, this would answer my question though). Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems we are in agreement that the observed state of most humans is "heterotelic goals?"

If there is no way a "default human is," no natural state at all, then why does it appear that we almost uniformly develop heterotelic goals? To restate, I am not disagreeing that there is no "natural state" of goals, what I am curious about is, lacking a natural state, why do we all seem to have heterotelic goals and need to work towards homeotelic goals?



@ertyu: What you said possibly answers my question above. You are saying "the built environment we encounter causes many of our goals to be heterotelic." Please correct me if I am misunderstanding you!


For me, the key here is built. It's an environment built by humans for humans.

Why did we collectively build an environment that induces heterotelic goals?

There is an innate conflict suggested. We are programmed to eat food if we find it, but live in a world where we can get more food than we "should" eat.

Where does the programming come from?

Why do we mostly seem to agree that eating as much food as we are programmed to want is "bad" (=heterotelic, in this case)*?

Where does the "should" come from (who has decreed the perfect level of food from which we shall not deviate)?


*I like that you initially frame this in terms of consequences instead of good vs. bad. This question could also be:

"Why are we programmed to want something which has an outcome we don't desire?" (assuming you agree that pimples and increased likelihood of dementia work against most people's subjective goals for themselves).

Or, if I am understanding what I believe you are getting at (pls correct if wrong):

"Why are we programmed so our short-term goals work against our long-term goals?"

[thef0x]

I see your distinction and it's well made.

I think the boring answer to your Q is simply evolution (and thus rejecting teleology).

I don't think we really exist in a built up system that makes us heterotelic, rather our default nature is simply that way. Clickbait, porn, fast food, etc are an effect, not a cause. I'm more on the side of nature (evolution by natural selection) than nurture ('the world is built to make us heterotelic') here.

\\

I'd poke at the idea that we should be internally aligned in any state, default or otherwise.

In philosophy talk, that person is considered a "rational agent". They are who we talk about in class when we're all sitting there not being rational agents. They are an ideal conception for a reason.

I don't think any of us are rational agents even at our best*; we're all just kinda fumbling through the contradictory, paradoxically motivated mud that is being human. The french existentialists make this sound romantic, lol.

I listened to your pod w Axel and laughed in sympathy with your frustration(dont want to put words in your mouth) that Jacob seems aligned in every way. He makes it look easy.

I guess my general point is that even Jacob would prob agree that, yes, he's "advanced" at alignment/homeotelic overlap at this point in life, and hey maybe it is much easier for him by nature, but I doubt he'd say every decision he's made in life has been flawless, without reconsideration, etc.

Interesting mini-thread here, cheers.



*All those morality puzzles we suck at && some basic edu on neuroscience perception/reaction vs subject experience stuff is what's informing my impressions here.



\\

Addendum:

The question I'd ask next is not so much "why" but "what next?".

How do we develop systems to make life more homeotelic by default?

Seems like a meta-skill worth developing.

[7Wannabe5]

I vote for innately heterotelic goals, because one of the first (and still quite significant) splits which was Survive/Reproduce first appeared around 2 billion years ago in our evolutionary heritage. If we were still asexually reproducing, eating all the Cheetos you like while you hide out in a dank basement until you grow large and then fission into two copies of you would be internal conflict free. In objective general systems/mathematical terms, sexual reproduction can be shown to be much more efficient than random mutation alone at providing survival benefit for future generations, so this heterotelic conflict will likely come into being in any evolutionary-like process. IOW, seemingly unavoidable in any situation in which there also exists any form of intelligence able to reflect upon it.

Obviously, even within the level of pure Survival, a behavior that may have 80% likelihood of providing you with more food, may also have 65% more likelihood of taking you too far away from the shelter of your rock. Eating as many Cheetos as you can right now, would make Survival sense if you believed that there was a 90% chance that you were going to be forced at gun-point on a slow 3 month death march while pregnant tomorrow morning, but less Survival sense if you think there is an 85% chance that you may have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with muscular foe within the next 5 minutes. Rationality is often equated with rigid "objective" linear behavior towards goal, but it's actually better represented by inherently subjective Bayesian update of probability inclusive of internal psychological/neuro-biochemical environment. For example, it's simplistic-rational to put $200 in your savings account every week when you are 19 towards buying a flashy red car and not spend that money on Cheetos instead, but it's more wise-rational to periodically question yourself in a manner that may preclude still having "flashy red car" as your un-reflected-upon goal at age 59.

Thus the "freedom from" vs. "freedom to" conflict some experience with the higher order goal of FIRE. A number of years ago I did an experiment in which I tracked my daily Happiness level along with my daily activities in order to detect any significant correlations. Lately, I've been doing a rougher version of this with Freedom, and I think this is where/how heterotelic behaviors can be most clearly revealed and ameliorated, especially if we remove the false blockade of two choice dichotomy*. For example, you don't actually necessarily have to give up buying fancy coffee beverages in order to no longer have to work a 40 hour/week corporate job which you hate in order to survive or even to get your spending in alignment with ecological limits. You possess the freedom to be your own flavor of frugal (rational expressed in terms of $$.)

*IOW, because you are an ingenius human, whenever you detect a heterotelic conflict, you can attempt to brainstorm a bunch of other possibilities towards ideal lifestyle desig

[Jin+Guice]

@thef0X:

Thanks for your response!

It seems like what you are saying is that humanity is heterotelic by nature? It seems that you are defining "by nature" as "by result of the evolutionary process."

Please tell me if I'm misunderstanding you?

What is the evolutionary advantage in having heterotelic goals*?



I disagree that an internally aligned individual is the classic rational actor, where my understanding of a rational actor is defined as a utility maximizing individual, subject to assumptions about what increases utility.

To be clear, I think that all strictly rational actors are internally aligned and that the rational actor is a made up character of fantasy. What I do not think is that the only possibility for an internally aligned individual is to be a rational actor.

[This point may be irrelevant]


Before we ask "what comes next in building systems that induce more homeotelicity ?" I think it's important to ask "why did we construct systems that induce heterotlicity in the first place?"




*I wrote this before @7 responded, but became distracted by something that was heterotelic to my goal of finishing my thought, editing and hitting submit. Much to my delight @7 provides an answer to a question which I had yet to ask!

Sadly @7, I'm not 100% sure I understand your answer. It seems that you are saying "humans are inherently heterotelic because survival (=evolutionary programming) is inherently heterotelic because survival is a multi-goal optimization problem where the effect of the input variables on outcome is partially unknown?"

This is a bit of a mindful, and I'm also not sure I'm correct in my interpretation of what you are saying.


Survival is a multi-goal optimization problem, but the assumed outcome variable of evolution is usually taken to be univariate and binary. Did we survive, pass on our genes, and raise our children so they may pass on their genes (and ensure that they raise their children so they can pass on their dreams x infinity). While defining the exact outcome objective is a little tricky, the question can be answered with a yes or a no. How does having heterotelic goals help us get to yes?


The evolutionary actor still experiences this as a complex multi-variate optimization problem where the answer is unknown. But, what is the advantage of having heterotelic goals in this scenario?

If food effects survival->reproduction-> successful iteration positively in a goldilocks range and negatively if we have too little OR too much food, why did evolution program many of us to eat too much? Why did evolution program us to eat too much to such a degree that even if we identify the problem and scientifically identify the goldilocks range, we are often unable to stop ourselves?

[daylen]

Evolution happens; Involution deals with what happens as it unfolds through goal alignment. An external view of an embodied creature reveals no goals but may tell a story of how the creature became what it is. An internal view of an embodied creature reveals goals through rationality which can be defined as the proper proportioning of problems. Intelligence is necessary though not sufficient for rationality.

Volution is that which unites evolution with involution, but I don't know how. The universe might know.

Michael Levin's concept of a cognitive light cone meshes well with this. A cognitive light cone is formed by the largest goal in spacetime an embodied creature can pursue. Generally smaller creatures have smaller light cones but not always. Migratory birds might have larger light cones on average than herding cows. This concept can be extended to deeper branches of the tree of life. For instance, at the level of the species a collective of creatures may share a light cone based on the largest goal that collective can pursue (e.g. planet exploitation or solar system exploration). The scaling of light cones is always at odds with clarity. A large light cone without clarity has difficulty with relevance realization (meshing with John Vervaeke's work).

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ps ... 02688/full

[loutfard]

Thanks @loutfard, and do you know / have any opinion on Cakewalk?

Sorry, I don't run non-free software, so I couldn't tell.

I should mention I am bound to Windows on this one as there are no Line6 drivers for Linux sadly.

Not trying to convert you, but there are. Chances are it's a bog standard generic usb alsa driver, mostly the usb id. Some bells and whistles might not be perfect. Some people seem to have had troubles getting sound out of them in the past, just like on any platform.

ETA: ok I like that Ardour is on masstodon this tells me something maybe I should go down that route.

Ardour is great, but if you just want to combine two tracks, Audacity will be just fine really with less of a learning curve.