Stephanie Jo Kent has penned a thoughtful essay at Reflexivity. The final paragraph includes a comment and a question for me: “I have been listening and watching for ways to stimulate robust processes of social resilience. One idea is to talk about the difference between hope and hopium. Would you be willing to elaborate?”
I assume Steph’s reference to “social resilience” includes the desire to maintain industrial civilization, which I think is a terrible idea for many reasons. But perhaps I’m jumping to an incorrect conclusion. Steph, will you clarify?
With respect to the question, I spoke and wrote about hope way back in August 2007, when this website was launched. In that long essay — the bloated, unedited, transcript of a presentation I had delivered a few days earlier — I described hope as follows:
I view hope as the left-brain product of love, analogous to democracy as the product of freedom, or liberty. Notably, Patrick Henry did not say, “Give me democracy or give me death.” Like the rest of the founding fathers, Henry knew that freedom was primary to democracy; without the guiding light of freedom, or liberty, democracy breaks up on the shoals. Love keeps our left brain in check — that’s the message of the world’s religions. But our right-brain love creates the foundation for hope: love for nature, love for our children and grandchildren, love for each other. Without love to light the way, hope breaks up on the shoals.
Mind you, hope is not simply wishful thinking. And that’s a problem, considering we’re immersed in the ultimate “wishful thinking, something-for-nothing” culture. How else to explain books such as The Secret, which proclaims that happy thoughts will generate happy results, including personal wealth? How else to explain the prevalence of, and widespread acceptance of, casinos? And it’s not just acceptance: it’s adoration, if the boob tube and the local movie theater are to be believed. Not so long ago, gambling was frowned upon because, instead of adhering to a culture of an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, it reflects the expectation that a person can get something for nothing. No, hope is not wishful thinking.
And another thing: hope is not a consumer product. You can’t walk into Wal-Mart and order up a carton of hope. Indeed, given the demise of cheap oil, there’s unlikely to be a Wal-Mart — or any other large institution, for that matter — to walk into at all within a few years. Even if Wal-Mart, the federal government, or the University of Arizona somehow find a way to survive, we’re going to have to generate our own hope, one person at a time. Just as an economic collapse happens one person at a time, so too must hope happen one person at a time.
Many years later, after much time reflecting, I’m caught between my earlier description and the gradual merging of my view with the definition offered by Derrick Jensen: “hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
In other words, my earlier description of hope is giving way to the notion of hope as wishful thinking, also known as hopium. I’m certainly not willing to give up, and I constantly encourage acts of resistance that will allow opportunities for the living planet to persist into the future. In so doing, I’m channeling iconoclastic author Edward Abbey: “Action is the antidote to despair.”
Hopium is the drug to which we’re addicted. It’s the desire to have our problems solved by others, instead of by ourselves. It’s why we keep electing politicians while knowing they won’t keep their promises, but finding ourselves too fearful to give up the much-promised future of never-ending growth on a finite planet.
Knowing we cannot occupy this finite world without adverse consequences for humans or other animals, but afraid to face that truth, we turn away. We watch the television, go to the movies, gamble at casinos, play on Facebook, and generally applauding while the world burns we take a flame-thrower to the planet. Nietzsche nailed it: “Hope is the most evil of evils, because it prolongs man’s torment.”
Finally, Steph, I’ve come to the conclusion that Nietzsche was right. I used to think hope differed from hopium, back when I had hope. Gradually, I’ve come to see hope and hopium as one. Let’s get off the crack pipe, and onto reality. May Pandora release the final gift from her container.
This essay is not intended to suggest we abandon (1) resistance or (2) joy-filled lives. Life, including human life, is a gift. Let’s live as if we appreciate the gift. Let’s live as if we appreciate the others in our lives, human and otherwise. Let’s live as if there is more to life than the treadmill onto which we were born.
Let’s live.
_________________
Please note upcoming events in Bradford, Vermont and Tucson, Arizona:
4 March 2013, 6:30 p.m., Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin (video linked here), upstairs Colatina Exit, Main Street, Bradford, Vermont. After the video, McPherson will join for a live Q & A session via Skype.
4 May 2013, 7:00 p.m., premiere showing of Mike Sosebee’s film, Somewhere in New Mexico before the End of Time, Gallagher Theater, Memorial Student Union, 1303 East University Boulevard, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona (Q & A to follow)
February 28th, 2013 at 7:53 am
Hope? the majority of humankind since the onset of “civilization” has lived in misery. they were fed a steady diet of hope – hope for a less brutal life. Those of us who have lived better than the rest are never satisfied, we hope for more, more, more.
February 28th, 2013 at 7:58 am
There are some bad people on the RIGHT
There are some bad people on the RIGHT
They’re saving their own skins by
Ruining other people’s lives
Bad, bad people on the RIGHT
Young married couple in debt
- ever felt had ?
Young married couple in debt
- ever felt had ?
On a government scheme
Designed to kill your dream
Oh mum, oh dad
Once poor, always poor
La la la la la
Interesting drug
The one that you took
TELL THE TRUTH – IT REALLY HELPED YOU
An interesting drug
The one that you took
God, it really really helped you
You wonder why we’re only half-ashamed ?
“Because ENOUGH is TOO MUCH!
…and look around …
…can you blame us ? CAN you blame us ? “
February 28th, 2013 at 8:32 am
Pat – poetically passionate good point.
Guy: yeah, i always thought that “hopium” was like a Steven Colbert word – at once pointing out the drug-like quality of engaging in that coping-mechanism of a feeling while accepting the status quo and sitting idly by, suffering in silence, frozen into inaction and thereby practically inviting the dreaded change to happen, so that, contrary to the movie title, hope drowns (us) as a result.
February 28th, 2013 at 9:39 am
From Sam Ewing, the baseball player:
“On the plains of hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the dawn of decision, sat down to wait, and waiting died…”
Speaking of …hesitation…
The company (http://www.facebook.com/LawEnforcementTargets)that makes paper shooting range targets came out with a new line of ‘non traditional’ targets recently, specifically designed for government agencies called,”“No More Hesitation” targets (NMH). These are to ostensibly train federal agents, police and military personnel not to ‘hesitate’ to shoot the type of individual in the target, to ‘desensitize’ them doing so.
The targets are life sized photos of: a hostile pregnant woman in a nursery, a hostile older woman in her home, a hostile young mother surrounded by children on a playground, a hostile school aged girl on street, a very young boy holding a real gun, and last but not least, drum roll, a hostile older man in his home holding a shotgun (he is not in a reclining chair at least)
Some people are apparently training not to hesitate, too bad it wasn’t about climate change and gluttonous western life styles.
February 28th, 2013 at 9:53 am
Hey, I almost forgot, the target company also has just for fun full sized ‘Zombie’ targets that actually ‘bleed’ when you shoot them, I kid you not. What will they think of next, progress is our most important product!
http://www.letargets.com/estylez_ps.aspx?searchmode=category&searchcatcontext=~010000~010106
I know where my spare time is going! With zombies, always remember
ZOMBIELAND Rule #2: Double Tap
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sWxsrEFFs
February 28th, 2013 at 9:56 am
What I am getting from Guys Essay, and this is very much in line with my own beliefs, is that the loss of hope, or the rejection of hope, does not absolve us from responsibility. Not the responsibility foisted upon us by a warped system. To produce, consume, work hard and pay taxes. But rather, the responsibility to resist, to build something better, and to live in gratitude and joy for our lives.
Rejection of hope is not rejection of action. Guy it seems is working on creating community under principles of agrarian anarchy having walked away from a failed and harmful system. He also manages this blog and takes public speaking engagements encouraging people to see the truth of their predicament.
This is something I can understand having walked away from a lucrative IT career 9 years ago to bounce around the country as an anarchist, environmentalist and anarchist. This happened at the age of 53, I am now about to turn 62 and have slept outside 6 of the past 9 winters. Sounds like hardship, but it’s been the happiest time of my life.
All of this, what Guy, myself, and many others have done, looks to many like a lack of responsibility. But it is, in fact, the most responsible thing that can be done given the circumstances. Hope is paralyzing, it causes people to hold back and to cling to a mode of living that is essentially unworkable in the long run.
As for holding on to stuff. I have a habit of giving stuff away when my back pack gets to heavy. If I can’t walk 20 miles with my stuff on my back, I own to much.
What we do matters. Even if the only thing our actions can accomplish is the difference between the end of all life on earth and a few surviving species, or even a few surviving pockets of humans.
Fighting extreme extraction that destroys the land base makes the survival of at least something much more likely. Teaching people how to grow there own food and adapt in extreme conditions also makes a difference as to whether pockets of humanity might survive.
If all of that fails, and it well may, as good old Ed Abby once said: “Revenge is not a reason, it is the only reason”. Reason for resistance that is.
By the way, the occupation is still alive and well in DC. We got kicked out of McPherson park. Then Kicked out of our tents on 15th near K, then kicked out of the occusquat in Petworth and are spending the winter on various floors, couches, basements etc. in the city. We have stormed the Klanadian embassy, Lawyers for Transcanada, various oil interests and other somewhat antisocial organizations in and around town. We will be taking strong actions in mid march in support of the tar sands blockade. Chesapeake Earth First! and Rising Tide are both active and strongly augmented by Occupiers who, contrary to popular belief, have not gone away.
Many of us plan to head out to some land we can live on and grow food about an hour and a half bus ride from town while still maintaining a radical presence in DC. So I guess that also makes us transitioners.
I find it interesting that Guy Mcpherson and Derrick Jensen actively recommend each others work while following seemingly different courses of action. Maybe not so different. Their are many paths of resistance.
So I guess I am writhing this because I so often see lack of hope used as an excuse for inaction. There is no excuse for inaction. If we know whats happening, we must take action. We must resist. What the action or resistance looks like will be different in every case. We need it all, we need what is appropriate for each person, but there is nor excuse for doing nothing.
February 28th, 2013 at 9:57 am
Salutations! Thank you for the opportunity to join the conversation. And how to begin?
I don’t know if being taught to duck under my desk in case of nuclear attack back in 1958 made me believe our days were surely numbered, or perhaps it was my Native American heritage that instilled a religious perspective of the planet’s overall health and well-being that convinced me were in the worst trouble possible, or possibly it is because spirituality is real and we all knew we were getting into this mess before we got here, i.e., before we were born; I don’t know.
I just know I’ve lived with the fear of the sky falling, and fear of a lot of other things, ever since I can remember. And now it’s here. The sky is falling. The earth is dying. The animals and plants are dying. Irony of ironies, my great-great-uncle told me this was going to happen when I was nineteen.
I grew up with subsistence gardens and chickens and rabbits and sometimes geese in the back yard. Flowers, too. The horticulturally gifted Indians of the Southeast United States loved their flowers. My great-grandmother grew irises, and my grandmother loved roses. I, too, have become a prodigious grower of plants, something I began at age three during the mid-fifties. One of my earliest memories is of my small, child-sized trowel and spade and my energetic use of them in the strawberry patch. The other thing I remember is homemade ice cream that we had to turn by hand, alternating the ice and salt. In August we made peach ice cream with peaches from our tree, and it was my grandfather’s favorite.
I remember in the seventies thinking that our whole situation was terrifying. We knew then where things were going, that the whole world was in terrible trouble, or I thought we knew. Our way of life was not manageable or sustainable or workable. More than that, I never could see the pay-off. What was the motive? Killing things is fun? It seems to come down to that to me now. As dumbfounding as it is, I used to believe that other people believed in “progress.” I’m not sure I believe that anymore. I think human beings as a group are just too stupid and cruel to live, and that’s really all there is to it.
I’m not sure there ever was “hope” in the sense that most people think of it. The world is as good as it is, and any intellectual musing that it could be better if only has always been a future promise, never a present reality. At the moment I’m in a dark and hopeless place. This has not been the norm for most of my life, although I have to admit that I always believed that human beings were far better than I currently believe they are, self included. I have had hope because I had genuine faith in spiritual realities that transcend this world. I had this hope because I’d had many genuine spiritual experiences that I believed with all my heart were real experiences and not hallucinations or delusions or wishful and highly imaginative thinking.
I still have some hope, because I do believe there may very well be much more to reality than what we can see here. But God, this is hard, and I don’t have hope for our world. At age sixty, based on what I see of most people older than the age of twelve, maybe it’s better if it all does end. We are no prize, and if the unbelievable suffering so many human beings create comes to an end, maybe it’s best. I do hope there is more, because that’s the only hope I have left.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:12 am
@Jesse:
Your description of your path reminds me of Peace Pilgrim.
I, too, just a short time from my sixtieth birthday, am considering what radical rabble-rousing I might be able to accomplish in my old age. I quit a very good-paying job in community health, not by choice; I guess you could say I quit by psychopath – my boss.
I’m going south soon to consider a future in hemp. CO2 does improve marijuana, and vice versa.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:25 am
Thinking about hope. Hope is another attempt for the ego to take credit and therefore control of a natural process. Everything we think is reference to past experience, i.e. reaction. The neurological lag between NOW and our experience of NOW allows us to delude ourselves that time moves. All time just like all space is here and now. Hope is nothing more than the feeling of self-congratulation at having survived the gap between NOW and our perception of NOW. Each moment that we survive strengthens the narrative of time moving forward. The continuity of our personal narrative tells us that we are strong, canny, and capable. It also allows us to predict our continued survival in the coming moment and the one after that. We confuse the continuity of scenery, gravity, temperature, breathable air, etc. with our fictitious narrative and derive egoistic hope from the story we tell ourselves. NOW is devoid of hope or any other aftertaste. It simply is.
Our neverending self delusion of nobility is:
…a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Well, really, signifying our mastery of a seamless bullshit narrative.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:34 am
One more thing, Stephanie wrote, “stimulate robust processes of social resilience.”
I don’t even know what things like that mean anymore.
For me, it comes down to, plant something that grows; help someone or something that’s suffering; first, do no harm; walk; wear more – or less and be more and use less.
None of it is really complicated. But it is not easy. It’s not a “process.”
It matters what we do even if we and everything else alive are going to die any minute because we there is quality to being that is part of quality of doing. What we do creates self, and what and who we create of our ‘self’ matters to us. I, and only I, will live with me, from the beginning until the end.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:38 am
Nice to see us Ol’ guys (people, actually) flocking together in support of keeping up the effort – despite the hopelessness and misery ahead (and in our own lives now).
February 28th, 2013 at 10:42 am
For the person who brought up the subject of hydrogen sulfide, here is a TED talk that expresses a novel hypothesis about the bacteria that produce it. I have posted this before, and I just watched it again. There is so much information here.
http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_mass_extinctions.html
February 28th, 2013 at 10:46 am
Then, here is a reveiw of the evidence in Peter Ward’s presentation since the TED talk:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.ca/2012/01/risk-of-mass-death-like-pt-repeating.html
February 28th, 2013 at 10:48 am
“A Better Fix On Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky”
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=10
February 28th, 2013 at 10:57 am
to Jesse Schultz
I did want you do now back in the 60′s. From the Freedom of Information lawsuits released on reports about dissident groups of the day, it seems in many smaller instances, there where more government agents and provocateurs at the protests than there were real protesters. I witnessed this first hand one time by following a ‘hippie’ guy who had just throne a brick through a plate glass window back to…the po-lice station where he removed his ‘hippie wig’ and costume and joked with follow officers about what he did. I was in a business suit at the time and so seemed to them a ‘respectable’ citizen.
I can’t imagine the protest scene is not equally ‘infiltrated’ today, if not ten times worse with electronic surveillance.
I’m not saying don’t do what you are doing but bare in mind if there were no protesters, the Owners would invent them as a foil, a straw-man, to flog in the MSM for the Propaganda 101 course.
Social media not withstanding (even that is full of mis-directors and time-wasters and obfuscators), no message of substance ever gets through the MSM that does not serve the Owners.
The protest pieces I glance at occasionally in MSM pressititude rags use ‘protestors’ as incarnate evil or harmless mental cases.
The real news on blogs and tweets and such is usually preaching to the choir, the people involved already known most of it, the vast majority of Sheeple just stare into space on anti-anxiety drugs and tune out all awareness, it’s Bliss you know.
Your withdrawing your ‘money’ from the charade of an economy is more potent in my mind than manning the barricades.
Dmitri Orlov asked an uncle, on the cusp of the USSR collapse, what the state of the State was and he said [paraphrase], “The Soviet Union is like a dildo that still buzzes but no longer vibrates.”
There’s Livin in the U.S.A.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:08 am
@ Speak Softly
I posted a link to those ‘non traditional’ targets a few days ago.
Here’s some more background info. It’s part of the conditioning that is required to overcome the natural abhorrence towards killing. Such training improves efficiency :
The development of a psychological conditioning process to enable an individual to overcome the average, healthy, deep-rooted aversion to close-range killing of one’s own species is a true revolution. By changing from bulls-eye targets to pop-up, human-shaped targets that fall when hit, modern armies and police forces have learned to operantly condition their combatants to respond reflexively even when literally frightened out of their wits. This process has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to raise the firing rate among individual riflemen from a baseline of around 20% in World War 11 to over 90% today. This is a revolution on the battlefield, and it is a revolution that has also had an absolutely unprecedented influence on civilian violence and domestic violent crimes.
Also from the same page :
Dr. Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, has summarized the overwhelming nature of this body of evidence. His research demonstrates that anywhere in the world that television is introduced, within 15 years the murder rate will double. (And remember, across 15 years, the murder rate will significantly underrepresent the problem because medical technology will be saving ever more lives each year.)
Centerwall concludes that if television technology had never been introduced in the U.S, then there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States; 70,000 fewer rapes; and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Overall violent crime would be half of what it is.
Centerwall notes that the net effect of television has been to increase the aggressive predisposition of approximately 8% of the population, which is all that is required to double the murder rate. Statistically speaking 8% is a very small increase. Anything less than 5% is not even considered to be statistically significant. But in human terms, the impact of doubling the homicide rate is enormous.
http://www.killology.com/Weaponry.htm
February 28th, 2013 at 11:16 am
Very interesting. I quit watching television in 1969. I always believed if anyone was going to burn in hell, it was going to be the people who brought us television.
Can you imagine if they had used television differently?
What a dream.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:24 am
Arnie Gundersen and Helen Caldicott discuss medical issues in Fukushima, and the symposium she will have on Fukushima on March 11 and 12 in NYC. It will be livestreamed and hopefully available after the fact to watch later.
http://fairewinds.com/content/forgotten-fukushima-japan-two-years-after-daiichi-accident
February 28th, 2013 at 11:24 am
Symposium: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident l March 11-12, 2013
The New York Academy of Medicine, New York City, NY
A unique, two-day symposium at which an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts will make presentations on and discuss the bio-medical and ecological consequences of the Fukushima disaster, will be held at The New York Academy of Medicine on March 11-12, 2013, the second anniversary of the accident. The public is welcome.
http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/symposium.html
February 28th, 2013 at 11:30 am
I sent Arnie Gundersen an e-mail asking him to address the issues raised in 400 Chernobyls, ie the meltdown of all the world’s nuclear power plants when the grids fail. We have only seen what happens in a nuclear accident when huge numbers of sacrificial lambs and lots of money is poured into containing it. We have not seen even one nuclear accident that has had no response – but we will – or those of us alive when the grid fails will. I hope Gundersen is open to hearing the concern.
For those who haven’t read it http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon It covers grid collapse by solar flare or EMP – the author perhaps not knowing that in the end Peak Oil will collapse the grids one way or another – lack of fuel, lack of maintenance of infrastructure. Thus we know for a fact that all the nuclear power plants not decommissioned at that time will blow and no one will do a thing other than run.
Hope, the only hope is that you can end your life feeling that you have lived by the principles you choose to follow. The hope that you don’t breathe your last breath ashamed of yourself.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:31 am
To end on a positive note an uplifting song that is bound to cheer you up. http://youtu.be/TIoBrob3bjI
February 28th, 2013 at 11:35 am
Speaking of.. Hope
Hope on the Battlefield
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hope_on_the_battlefield
A piece on how a majority of combat soldiers aim not to hit.
During WWII, U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, U.S. Army historian in the Pacific theater, discovered;
“Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide—in many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”
This was consistently true, “whether the action was spread over a day, or two days, or three.”
People naturally don’t want to kill, it is done by a smaller sub-set of individuals within the group.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:52 am
.
Fire and Ice
Predictions can be imprecise:
Global warming, nuclear device,
Plus a very long list,
But you get the gist;
“It’s over,” would also suffice.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:53 am
@ Ess
Can you imagine if they had used television differently?
Yes ! What an incredible potential tool for educating people. Instead it was corrupted, used for ads for rubbish and for propaganda.
http://youtu.be/Hh_Kx7UKndI
February 28th, 2013 at 12:03 pm
from the facebook page:
We apologize for the offensive nature of our “No More Hesitation” products. These products have been taken offline due to the opinions expressed by so many, including members of the law enforcement community.
This product line was originally requested and designed by the law enforcement community to train police officers for unusually complex situations where split-second decisions could lead to unnecessary loss of life.
Consistent with our company mission as a training supplier (not a training methods company), we will continue to seek input from law enforcement professionals to better serve their training objectives and qualification needs. We sincerely appreciate law enforcement professionals for the risks they take in providing safety and defending freedom.
February 28th, 2013 at 12:35 pm
To speak softly.
You are indeed right. The undercovers, provocateurs, and infiltrators are still out there and many friends are doing serious time because of them. There was a time when I would have vouched for one individual (fortunately I did not), who turned out to be in the pay of the FBI and gave some crazy ideas to some people who are now in jail. I met a couple of victims before they were incarcerated, but screw them, they turned states evidence and as a result, someone got 20 years. Have no sympathy for traitors.
The most important principle of security culture is knowing when to use it. Don’t worry about cops during open organizing. Assume they are there, go about your business of organizing the march or whatever relatively benign action you are taking. Is what you are doing felony level? Then you should not be doing open organizing, you should not be organizing with anyone you have not known for years.
As for street provocateurs. If someone suggests you throw a rock, let them do it, and don’t let their actions influence you. Know, personally, how far you want to go before you attend an action. Making a sudden decision, based on the actions of others, is not going to accomplish your goals, especially if it gets you incarcerated. Getting taken off the street does not help the cause.
Also, what is the moral integrity of the people you are organizing with? Jake was not a cop, but he was a heroine addict so he could be turned by the cops. He caused people to spend years in jail. Try to organize with people of moderate habits. The cause should be more important than alcohol or drugs. Some have even been lured in by sexual relations with informants.
I have eight arrests, always some version of a considered decision to stand my ground. I only have one conviction, a misdemeanor for unlawful entry. (It kept me from getting a job though) I have no arrests for covert actions. I have, of course been hit with sticks, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, dragged on the end of a rope and locked in a refrigerated cell in my underwear. I have many friends who have gone through much much worse. As the cops say, you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.
Yeah, it’s dangerous out there. Follow your own path. If you choose a dangerous path, be prepared for the possible consequences. As the system becomes threatened, what will constitute a dangerous path will change. In fact, it already has. at some point, just speaking out may have lethal consequences.
February 28th, 2013 at 12:39 pm
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/02/28/172951757/the-napoleon-chagnon-wars-flare-up-again-in-anthropology
“This is no mere ego contest between two alpha-male primates of academic anthropology: instead it’s a meaningful, if startlingly angry, discussion about the responsibility of scientists to the people they study and (the factor I will focus on here) the contribution of biology, particularly genetics, to understanding human behavior.”
Can’t wait to see where hope fits in…
February 28th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Benjamin, I have often tried to do something updated with Fire and Ice and always failed. You succeeded!
I’ve been mulling a limerick on hope all morning – should be easy, lots of rhymes, but this is all I have managed so far.
Without hope how do we cope
Resign from the scene like the pope
Should we just give up
Say its over, yup
Or smile and refuse to mope.
February 28th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
I know this topic is now gone, but here’s a handy diagram:
http://cheezburger.com/7081658624
Know Your Space Rocks!
February 28th, 2013 at 2:48 pm
Guy you wrote “Life, including human life, is a gift.”
Yep its a gift in the sense that someone gave it to us without our even asking for it. Its a gift with a death sentence attached (using the meaning of the word death that applies to that type of event which if it occurred in a desert would attract vultures).
But as you note since we have been given the gift of life we might as well do whatever good we can with it. For some the “gift of life” is worse than a treadmill – as the song says “tired of living and scared of dying” or There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History
Ben Skinner spent four years inside the world of modern-day slavery; an industry that produces huge profits and countless wasted lives.
The world suffers global recession, enormous inequity, hunger, deforestation, pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc. To those who say we’re not really making progress, many might point to the fact that at least we’ve eliminated slavery. But sadly that is not the truth. http://www.alternet.org/story/142171/there_are_more_slaves_today_than_at_any_time_in_human_history?paging=off
I wonder if the slaves of this modern world consider their life a gift?
Some say you have to take the bad with the good. After extinction the bad disappears with the good. No more children will be raped after extinction…..no more wives battered…..no more limbs blown off on battle fields….no more DU babies…..no more thyroid cancers from radiation….no more torture….no more priests buggering little young boys…..the evils we did not succeed in eliminating will end with extinction, perhaps we are extincting ourselves because deep down we know what a vile species we are. We are the species that knows what we do. The fox eats the rabbit because it is food. I does not know what the rabbit feels or fears. The bastards at Gitmo they know exactly what their prisoner feels eh? The priest, how can he not know what the boy feels. The people who put DU on the weapons, how can they not know what horrors they have visited on the people of Iraq. The Nuclear Regulators, how can they not know about the children of Chernobyl. The bastards in Japan, how can they not know how they have poisoned the world. Homo sapiens sapiens – man who knows.
February 28th, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Walmart seems to be in deep doo-doo:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/28/1190556/-Wal-Mart-Disaster-Deepens-Shelves-Empty-as-Sales-Decline
February 28th, 2013 at 3:30 pm
I’m giving a talk next week on the issues we’re facing: peak oil/climate change/overpopulation/collapse, etc. Earlier in the month I put up a couple of flyers in my clinic announcing the talk and inviting anyone interested in the topics to attend.
Amazingly, more than 20 people have signed up so far and many others have spoken to me about it in the exam rooms. It’s been quite surprising how many people are thinking about these topics. I suspect it’s all the attention paid to doomsday scenarios in the popular media. Nonetheless, that so many would be willing to take time out of their schedules to come here and listen to me blather on is quite remarkable. Even if half of them show up I’ll be quite pleased.
If I were a smarter man and could see a way for all of this to work out without so much pain and suffering perhaps this level of interest would give me hope. But, as it is, the response thus far, while also stoking my ego a little bit, confirms in me that more and more people are waking up to the fact that something is wrong. They don’t know what it is, but they’re willing to learn.
At the end of the talk I’m going to offer to work with others toward building local communities to see if we can break down some walls. Am I hopeful? I don’t know but it’s something for me to do that gives me pleasure. So, I’m going to do it. I’ll let you know if it changes the world.
February 28th, 2013 at 3:39 pm
Someone else may have posted this already. If so, apologies for duplication. I just find it interesting that so many different “prophecies” appear to be reaching their climax, like this one about the pope:
http://articles.marketwatch.com/2013-02-12/commentary/37036847_1_john-paul-benedict-xvi-labore-solis
February 28th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
I have been brutally disabused of the notion that there is progress, and I’m leaning more towards the idea that there is no hope, for our species and most others, based on our genetically determined nature. And I’m fully aware of the human capacity to deny the evil we perpetrate.
On the other hand, life may still be a gift. No matter how bad it is – for slaves, or my poor ensnared tropical birds (obtained for my children in a prior, shameful episode of my life) very few choose to end it. So maybe there is enough in small pleasures – eating, mating, looking at the stars – to make it worthwhile, even when most of it is awful.
Then again, it has been claimed that dolphins deliberately beach themselves to expire from suffocation, when isolation is unbearable…but perhaps, they are especially sensitive.
February 28th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
How about this song to go with the theme:
HOPE IN A HOPELESS WORLD – WIDESPREAD PANIC
Baby born in New York city
Wrapped in a blanket all tattered and worn
Mama’s doing the best that she can
It takes hope in a hopeless world
Her eldest son, he stayed in school
Listened to his mother, he never drank or used
And every job he wants he gets refused
It takes hope in a hopeless world
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Trying to find love in these hateful times
Trying to stay strong but my mind is weak
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Churches are full, but the prayers are not heard
Saturday’s child don’t wanna to go to Sunday school
Whatever happened to the golden rule
It takes hope in a hopeless world
Do you got a quarter for the homeless man
Spare some change for the soldiers who fought the war
Put a little money in those hats and those tins
Give them hope in a hopeless world
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Trying to find love in these hateful times
Trying to stay strong but my mind is weak
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Ooh, somebody out there gotta listen
Somebody out there got to know what pops been talking about
Raise your hand, raise your hands if you’re with him
Give us hope in a hopeless world
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Trying to find love in these hateful times
Trying to stay strong but my mind is weak
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Trying to find love in these hateful times
Trying to stay strong but my mind is weak
Looking for hope in a hopeless world
Can’t be standing still
February 28th, 2013 at 4:54 pm
financial end times signs
http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/how-you-know-the-end-is-nigh/
February 28th, 2013 at 5:15 pm
“I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony.”
- William S. Burroughs, American
February 28th, 2013 at 5:34 pm
Kathy C Says: I have often tried to do something updated with Fire and Ice….
Me too!
Thanks, and thanks for all you bring here.
February 28th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
I just became aware of this site and your work by reading an article at Orion magazine by Paul Kingsworth – “Dark Ecology”, see:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277. You share much in common with his point of view. I have also been recently reading about a new initiative that seeks to address GCC by rectifying the chasm between post-modernity (ecologists/environmentalists) and modenity – the industrial
economy, rationalism, scientific materialism. This work discusses three categories of environmentalists and their values and points of view: Activist Alarmists, Carbon Realists, and Strategic Persuaders. The latter two would fall into the category of “neo-environmentalists” by Kingsworth. The initiaive asserts that the solution to GCC (and other “wicked” problems) will only occur if the worldviews held by modernity and post-modernity (as well as
tradtional beliefs) can be honored – transcended and included. I agree with this assertion.
After reading Kingsworth’s paper, and briefly going through some of your work, I decided I needed to go re-visit another article I read that addresses the topic of optimism. It was written by Bert Parlee in Kosmos magazine, the title is “Integral Optimism” and in the article, Bert lays out a “Spectrum of Optimism” that ranges from “Apocalyptic Pessimism” to “Cautious Optimism.” I would say that your view and the view of Kingsworth would seem to fall
into the Apocolyptic category. It is not an unreasonable place to be given the reality of our current situation. However, another place we could all strive to be is the category of “Inspired Optimism”, where the purpose of each and every one of us is “to create new worlds by challenging established maxims and reaching beyond what seems possible. The belief is that strong convictions, powerful purpose, and bold action give birth to new emergence,
overcoming great odds… Combining the opposites of striving and surrender, we arrive at a place that is at once sober, spiritually grounded, positively engaged, ‘unreasonably’ ambitious, and yet realistic and open to whatever may come.”
This Inspired Optimism both strives towards higher expectations while also surrendering to the possibilies of Life itself. You can find the article and a radio interview at the following links. http://www.kosmosjournal.org/issue/fall-winter-2010 http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/50071/integral-optimism.
PS – As a longtime softball player and fan of baseball, I love your “Nature Bats Last” turn of phrase. In softball, we also refer to that as “Having the Hammer.” As in Nature will “Have the Hammer” (to whollop all the nails of our evolutionary decisions). Thanks for what you are doing.
February 28th, 2013 at 7:14 pm
I am getting ready to go on vacation. My wife and I are leaving next week for two weeks in Belize and Guatemala in luxury eco-lodges owned by the legendary movie director Francis Ford Coppola. The airliners we fly in will emit huge amounts of CO2 into the upper atmosphere. There is nothing we can do about it. Those planes will be flying anyway with or without us on them. We will enjoy good food and wine and when we come back deal will the the daily frustrations of rural homesteading: all the insects and garden pests, climate change and so on. We can afford the trip so we are doing it. I am 53 years old and I have produced no offspring nor do I intend to.
February 28th, 2013 at 7:15 pm
Gail “very few choose to end it.”
So true
But none chose to start it, it is chosen for them. If we had little souls in waiting who could say yes, I’m ready to be born and who could see what their whole life would be, I wonder how many would chose to be born. Ah well, we will never know for the unborn can’t chose to be born for they don’t exist.
And you wrote “Then again, it has been claimed that dolphins deliberately beach themselves to expire from suffocation, when isolation is unbearable…but perhaps, they are especially sensitive.”
I took Paxil for a while for depression. It was fascinating. Changing my serotonin levels didn’t change any thoughts I had about the state of the world, it just allowed me to not care about the state of the world. I began to wonder if fishes in the sea knew that they would spend their whole lives eating other fishes and running from bigger fishes, might they not just beach themselves and get it over with. It seemed to me that humans, being able to remember the past and imagine the future, had to have some chemicals like serotonin and denial programs to keep themselves from figuratively beaching themselves.
On the whole my life has had enough good to make up for the bad. But I can’t answer that question for others. I wonder what these children would say KHLIEHRIAT, India — After descending 70 feet on a wobbly bamboo staircase into a dank pit, the teenage miners ducked into a black hole about two feet high and crawled 100 yards through mud before starting their day digging coal.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/world/asia/in-india-missing-school-to-work-in-the-mine.html?pagewanted=all
February 28th, 2013 at 7:18 pm
@ Jim Loving
His name is Kingsnorth. My impression is that his view is very different to the general view expressed here. He expects life in England in 20 or 30 years time to be very much as it is now.
February 28th, 2013 at 7:23 pm
@ tom f
Those planes will be flying anyway with or without us on them.
Yeah. We’ve had this argument about morals here before. It’s called collaborating with the enemy. Just because those poor wretches are going to be gassed anyway, does that mean it’s okay to help put them onto the trains ?
February 28th, 2013 at 7:24 pm
Climate Change Abolitionists: Who is fighting for a more sustainable world?:
“Well, I can tell you who definitely shouldn’t be considered, under any circumstances:”
“1.)Guy McPherson-This guy isn’t well known outside of the “doomer” circle but lemme tell you, this guy is a real fucking nut”
The author is referring to this article at the Guardian.
February 28th, 2013 at 8:13 pm
Apes in space!
http://vimeo.com/55073825
Yup, save the planet. On the other hand, species come and go
February 28th, 2013 at 8:22 pm
This is the trouble, all those idiots who think that climate and science has to do with popularity or anybody’s opinion about anybody else.
( It’s obvious those people are clueless. Can they even define what they mean by a more sustainable or a less sustainable world ? )
The abolition of slavery concerned ethical arguments and economic arguments.
Climate change is happening now completely regardless of whether we argue about the ethics and economics. What we are going to see is who was the best scientist, that is, who got the science right.
We only get to do this experiment ONCE.
February 28th, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Well, I can tell you who definitely shouldn’t be considered, under any circumstances:
1.)Guy McPherson-This guy isn’t well known outside of the “doomer” circle but lemme tell you, this guy is a real fucking nut; erroneous and extremely holey claims such as his belief that we would see a temperature rise of 16*C by 2100(which is literally impossible, btw), and the claim that the human race would be extinct by 2030, are just a small taste of what to expect.
They first ignore what you advise,
Then they laugh as you warn of demise;
Then the fight will begin,
In the end, you will win,
But by then, of course, everyone dies.
February 28th, 2013 at 8:47 pm
@ B the D
But by then, of course, everyone dies.
Hahaha, so, sort of Pyrrhic Victory, nobody left to applaud…. what an amazing concept !
February 28th, 2013 at 9:07 pm
ulvfugl, actually at first I tried making EXACTLY the point you made just above (at 8:22) but gave up, and I was delighted to find that you covered it ably.
February 28th, 2013 at 9:16 pm
i.e., mixing science with all that other stuff
February 28th, 2013 at 9:17 pm
Here is a song about death that I like, it is dispassionate and neutral – called ‘The Final Taxi’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHBwBfqYhIM
February 28th, 2013 at 9:22 pm
Looking at those names and faces in the Guardian article and thinking about that nonsense at Kos…
This situation is probably the most difficult and complex puzzle that any human mind has ever been faced with. There’s the climatology part, which is amazingly complicated, the earth systems and palaeo-climatology, meteorology, and the oceans and forests, biological aspects, ecology and biomes and soil science, and there’s the socio-political and cultural aspects, and there’s the speed that stuff happens, the overwhelming unremitting flow of information, and an individual human mind has to master all of that and make sense of it and tell others what they believe it all means… and then people want to know, what’s going to be happening in 2022… ??? Are we all going to die ?
Twenty countries are responsible for 90% of emissions. Does it look like they will cut their emissions, does it look like they have any intention of so doing ? Does it look as if it is possible for them to cut their emissions, even if some of the politicians and some of the voters wanted to ?
Bankers, economists, accountants, politicians, people wanting jobs, all want economic growth, which almost always means more destruction of nature, more emissions, more toxins in the environment, more plastic rubbish in the oceans, somehow two additional Chinas-worth of people have to be squeezed into the gaps, and fed and housed, as droughts and floods and famines and lost topsoil reduce the carrying capacity…
A lot of countries are far more concerned with war and political instability and social unrest than they are about climate change, they have never heard of methane let alone know what it is or why it matters, and all the while every corporation has to make a quarterly profit for the shareholders regardless of what environmental havoc that causes.
Hope ?
February 28th, 2013 at 9:28 pm
@ B the D
Yeah. I think whoever has the deepest insight, and expresses it most succinctly deserves an accolade, and you’re the master, but I’d really like some haiku instead of limericks for a change perhaps ?
February 28th, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Sorry, dunno how.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:09 pm
Ah, my friend.
Haiku.
Very cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English
At its most minimal haiku may consist of a single word
e.g. tundra
But I think I prefer the longer examples
e.g.
Little spider,
will you outlive
me?
February 28th, 2013 at 10:11 pm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/28/1190622/-Climate-Change-Abolitionists-Who-is-fighting-for-a-more-sustainable-world
Daily Kos is political bs hack. I quit following them years ago.
They advocate for industrial civilization, pro-growth, breeding, all the usual IC mandates. They just want more equitable distribution of the goodies. What passes for the democratic left in this country makes me want to barf.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Yeah, people generally aren’t moved to action until hope is gone. All the articles on climate change that have a happy ending are a great disservice.
Hope is not a plan, current president’s campaign slogan to the contrary.
February 28th, 2013 at 11:30 pm
ulvfugl
This was probably a typo but, (OzMan added in brackets)…
“…ecology and biomes(s)…”
right on!
February 28th, 2013 at 11:37 pm
Guy
“1.)Guy McPherson – This guy isn’t well known outside of the “doomer” circle but lemme tell you, this guy is a real fucking nut”
Crikey!
Wear it like a medal, and proud.
Can print up a few t-shirts or buttons….?
March 1st, 2013 at 12:11 am
tom f.
Your whole life has been a vacation buddy!
So has mine and many others here.
See Kath C’s link to children coalmining in India….
‘Children Toil in India’s Mines, Despite Legal Ban’
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/world/asia/in-india-missing-school-to-work-in-the-mine.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Many, many in the West use the fine honed skills of the Empire to get over-uber-paid, and some like you seem to want to say…
“There is nothing we can do about it. Those planes will be flying anyway with or without us on them.”
Where does this obfuscation stop?
The petrol was going to go into my car no matter who ownes it, it was going to drive and…
The house I live in was going to have occupants in it anyway…
The resturaunt I went to was going to have custommers anyway..
The Mars Rover was going to Mars anyway…
Now I am sorry that sounds personally derisive, I don’t mean to go for you, just that view.
When did you actually choose to do anything?
Yes, the plane was going anyway. If less and less people travel by plane, they will pull the planes off the tarmac, yes?
It seems simple enough to me.
Maybe you are thinking that the overwhelming trend is for so much consumption of the livig biosphere, that me and my partner choseing not to fly on the plane, will not make any difference – it will not achieve the goal of reducing emissions etc.
See how words just get in the way of thinking.
Make your choice. I suppose you did already, and you are just justifying it here.
O.K. That seems clear.
I don’t advocate feeling guilty in living, just being straight with yourself, and everyone else. We were all born into this ‘system’ of doing things in such and such a way, requiring, or seemingly requiring all this shit. Try just to accept that as something you personally are not responsible for.
But once you do that are you thereafter responsible for using the ways of Empire or refusing the ways of Empire?
Guy eventually came to his choice, but notice he does not do it so ractively as to be a techno-energy-fossil-fuel-luddite. Everyone finds their own level.
I’m only advising to do that and don’t quibble.
In these Anex-1 nations, ‘we’ have a great deal of choice and privelage, and we can choose to get stuck in or pare back on energy and consumption of everything.
Do what you want, just don’t use justifications some 6th graders would try on when they didn’t spend the time to do their homework…
“Let me guess Jeremy, your dog ate your homework…?”
“No. Mr OzMan Sir, I ate it, the dog was going to eat it anyway….”
March 1st, 2013 at 12:31 am
‘Feeding Ourselves on a Warming Planet’
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/feeding-ourselves-on-a-warming-planet/?src=recg
Quotes:
“In fact, we have already entered an era of sharply higher global food prices, with climate change as one of the likely causal factors.
A new paper from researchers associated with Tufts University puts the overall risk in perspective. It is billed as a working paper, meaning it has not gone through formal scientific review, but it strikes me as worth highlighting nevertheless. The findings pretty closely match the conclusions presented in some of my reporting from 2011.
The authors, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, point out that in the 1990s, research suggested that climate change would be fairly benign for agriculture. The first few degrees of warming would help agriculture expand in chilly regions, the thinking went, and the rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would act as plant fertilizer, increasing crop yields. More recent science has cast sharp doubt on some of those conclusions.
Yet the earlier, rosy forecast is still incorporated into a lot of economic models of climate change. As a result, economists sometimes come to the conclusion that relatively modest efforts to tackle climate change are adequate for now.
“Can we muddle along without expensive climate initiatives, and go on living – and eating – as before?” the authors of the new paper ask. “Not for long, according to some of the new research on climate and agriculture.”….
“If warming continues unabated, it will, in a matter of decades, reach levels at which adaptation is no longer possible,” the researchers conclude. “Any long-run solution must involve rapid reduction of emissions, to limit the future extent of climate change.””
Not much new there, excepting the acknowledgement that a whole lot of fudging went on previously to get those IPCC reports and others to conform to the ‘we’ll make it, keep consuming, economic growth is still ok…’ narritive.
March 1st, 2013 at 3:18 am
I can’t see why everyone here is so hopeless. Consider this:
http://www.businessinsider.com/emerging-market-30-trillion-opportunity-for-growth-2013-2
March 1st, 2013 at 3:52 am
Guy, hey I see they have you listed in good company. You should feel honored. The Kos article says “It took Abraham Lincoln and others many years of campaigning to abolish slavery – but who are the contemporary figures fighting to abolish dangerous climate change”
Myth of course Lincoln didn’t care about slavery – from a letter to Horace Greely by Lincoln “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
And yet Modern slavery thriving in the U.S. By Janet Gilmore, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/09/23_16691.shtml
It would appear that people prefer myths than truths and the truth tellers are vilified or worse. Depending on how quickly extinction goes, the truth may never be widely known.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:59 am
Guy: the fact that the science you present speaks for itself, while almost all these other folks put a smiley face on it and use large portions of hopium to make the audience feel better while basically “lying out their asses” distinguishes you from them. Unless someone wants to deny the science, your conclusion is accurate simply because it connects the dots, as it were, to follow the direction our measurements of change are illustrating. It’s DEFINITELY getting worse by the DAY now, but most people ignore the dying trees that Gail points out, the acidifying, polluted and over-fished oceans, the radiation that Kathy C and others have pointed out, the deteriorating human condition (from financial to social) and all the rest that our commenters here point out most every day. We can demolish any of the arguments that these other authors have simply because they refuse to entertain a change in the status quo! They aren’t realistic about humanity’s penchant for self-destruction, psychopathy, greed above all else, and short-term technical patches to every problem without actually addressing the primary cause of it all – overpopulation and environmental degradation. So, whether or not you’re a “nut”, your message is solid and unshakeable as far as i can see – while the continuing evidence backs you up rather than their positions that “it’s all gonna be okay once we . . . .” .(and when, exactly, are “we” going to do this proposed solution?).
March 1st, 2013 at 5:30 am
Charles Eisenstein’s work in “Ascent of Humanity” and “Sacred Economics” have helped me understand why we’re here, at this point in time, under these conditions. He still believes some of us will make it through the bottleneck, but I don’t hold that against him. This is taken from Ascent (but not word for word):
“From the very moment we began to see ourselves as apart from nature, our doom was sealed. Politics, finance, energy, education, health care, and most importantly the ecosystem are headed toward near-certain collapse. During the ten years I’ve spent writing this book, I have become familiar with each of these crises of civilization, enough to get some sense of their enormity and inevitability. I felt the dread of what a collapse might bring, and visited the despair of knowing that our best efforts to avert it are dwarfed by the forces driving us toward catastrophe. One of the main purposes of this book is to speak to that despair. In answer, I offer a plausible and unexpected optimism.
It is not my purpose to persuade you that we indeed face these crises. Others have done so far more compellingly than I could. Nor is it my aim to inspire you with hope that they may be averted. They cannot be, because the things that must happen to avert them will only happen as their consequence.
All present proposals for changing course in time to avert a crash are wildly impractical. My optimism is based on knowing that the definition of “practical” and “possible” will soon change as we collectively hit bottom. When the above-mentioned crises converge, when we experience acutely and undeniably that the situation is out of control, when the failure of the old regime is utterly transparent, then solutions that appear hopelessly radical today will become matters of common sense.”
March 1st, 2013 at 6:10 am
JORMA KAUKONEN – Hesitation Blues
BTW, that’s Jack Casady on the bass guitar.
March 1st, 2013 at 6:34 am
The evidence i alluded to above is shown in this 16 min. video clip of the happenings just since the beginning of the year all over the world and include some of the following categories (that aren’t explored in full) with examples of powerful earthquakes, 4 volcanos erupting at the same time a few hundred miles apart, sinkholes, giant storms and dynamic weather, fish deaths, bizarre occurances (they add some Biblical prophesy, but the events speak for themselves), human death and injury, astronomical events, and flooding (of course there are many more examples of all of these topics they could have added and many they didn’t mention at all like all the formerly rare diseases cropping up all over, for one):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmW3WLfbYNM&feature=player_embedded
March 1st, 2013 at 6:53 am
1.)Guy McPherson-This guy isn’t well known outside of the “doomer” circle but lemme tell you, this guy is a real fucking nut”
I never liked the word doomer but there are no good synonyms. I was thinking about proposing that we (the NBL readers and commenters) try to come up with a better moniker and then an email friend brought up the word azote, which seems perfect:
The etymological root Azote (an obsolete word for nitrogen, the reactive version of which is, as we know, a primary ozone precursor) is the French azote, which derived from Ancient Greek ἀ- (a-, “without”) + ζωή (zōē, “life”). It was originally coined by Antoine Lavoisier, who saw it as “the part of air which cannot sustain life”.
So I wonder how people feel about Azotism: the study of near term extinction (its causes, trajectory, and ways of dealing with the foreknowledge), and Azotist/Azotista – those who study NTE…?
March 1st, 2013 at 6:58 am
Here’s a common sense solution. See, there is hope:
http://news.yahoo.com/nigerias-big-city-razes-homes-poor-left-behind-114736865.html
March 1st, 2013 at 7:15 am
Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” – Beyond Hope, by Derrick Jensen
“In enjoyment, there is the fear of disease; In social position, the fear of falling-off; In wealth, the fear of hostile kings;
In honour, the fear of humiliation;
In power, the fear of foemen;
In beauty, the fear of old age;
In scriptural erudition, the fear of opponents; In virtue, the fear of traducers;
In body, the fear of death.
All the things of this world pertaining to man Are attended with fear; Renunciation alone stands forfearlessness.” -BHARTRIHARI
BG 5.3: One who neither hates nor desires the fruits of his activities is known to be always renounced. Such a person, free from all dualities, easily overcomes material bondage and is completely liberated, O mighty-armed Arjuna.
BG 5.8-9: A person in the divine consciousness, although engaged in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, moving about, sleeping and breathing, always knows within himself that he actually does nothing at all. Because while speaking, evacuating, receiving, or opening or closing his eyes, he always knows that only the material senses are engaged with their objects and that he is aloof from them.
BG 5.13: When the embodied living being controls his nature and mentally renounces all actions, he resides happily in the city of nine gates [the material body], neither working nor causing work to be done.
BG 5.14: The embodied spirit, master of the city of his body, does not create activities, nor does he induce people to act, nor does he create the fruits of action. All this is enacted by the modes of material nature.
The meat robot – the city of nine gates – continues to function normally. The nine gates: four lacrimal puncta, two external nares, the mouth, the anus, and the urogenital aperture.
Hopelessness is the abandoning of expectation while despair is the thwarting of expectation. – As an aside, only these last two paragraphs are “Sez I”.
March 1st, 2013 at 7:31 am
I never liked the word doomer but there are no good synonyms.
It has been pointed out many moons ago on NBL that a doomer is one who dooms, as a murderer murders. A doomsayer does not doom.
March 1st, 2013 at 7:58 am
Guy, I admire your bravery and tenacity. Frankly I am amazed at your ability to persevere against such criticism. Personally, I have always been very sensitive to ridicule – warranted or otherwise. Even though I may press on with a brave face, it can make me wither inside. Oftentimes it was an encouraging word from a friend and/or supporter that helped me keep going. I’m not sure you need it, but just in case, here’s my voice of support for what you do. I feel confident that time will reveal who is the truly “fucking nuts”.
March 1st, 2013 at 8:01 am
For those of you keeping an eye on sinkholes:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/01/florida-man-swallowed-by-sinkhole-under-bedroom-presumed-dead/
The area around Tampa has had a sinkhole problem for at least 20 years. Contrary to the quote in the article that the sinkhole wasn’t manmade, evidence shows that the reason sinkholes are such a problem in that area is due to extreme reductions in groundwater levels. The population in Tampa/St. Pete has grown so much that freshwater is constantly a problem.
March 1st, 2013 at 9:37 am
Re: Inspired Optimism, defined as, where the purpose of each and every one of us is “to create new worlds by challenging established maxims and reaching beyond what seems possible. The belief is that strong convictions, powerful purpose, and bold action give birth to new emergence, overcoming great odds… Combining the opposites of striving and surrender, we arrive at a place that is at once sober, spiritually grounded, positively engaged, ‘unreasonably’ ambitious, and yet realistic and open to whatever may come.”
This is an example of the modern, liberal (in the classic sense) delusion that enlightened individuals can inspire and create structural change in the world. In the last 50 years, or so, philosophers and other critical thinkers have been moving away from an anthropocentric view of historical change towards a post-human, systems view which postulates that we are more like self conscious nodes in vast physical networks which exceed human intentions and motives. I think some of the stuff that Paul C. has been posting here is along these same lines.
Homo sapiens sapiens are only one of about 27 species of primate hominids and the other 26 are no longer with us. I suspect that the others did not vanish because they made bad decisions, it was a matter of an inability to adapt to inhospitable environmental changes. The only difference in our case is that we both created the environmental shift which will now swallow us up and we cannot adapt to the shift (at least not most of us … how big the die-off will be remains to be seen).
The global civilization which we constructed over the last 200 years cannot simply be tweeked in order to accommodate climate change, resource depletion, and so forth. At least 5 billion of us would not be here but for oil and the industrial revolution. Hence, when oil and industry go away a shit load of folks are going to die. And when a lot of folks start dying from starvation and disease, this usually leads to war and other ingrained primate pathologies. The end game is bleak and the best that the human species can “hope” for is that some will survive the catastrophe. It’s not a matter of spreading happy inspiring thoughts in order to bring about happy changes. All the spiritual groundedness and “positive engagement” isn’t going to get around the fact of mass death and suffering! Which is why fundamental, structural change cannot happen because no one can convince 5 billion people to drink poisoned Cool Aid.
March 1st, 2013 at 9:42 am
@KathyC “It would appear that people prefer myths than truths and the truth tellers are vilified or worse.”
I must admit that I chuckle at the continued surprise seemingly expressed by many with regard to how the world actually works. For instance, the lament that TV wasn’t used effectively for educational purposes, but rather, became the commercial monster we know & love.
Ok, so it seems we need a refresher course on “How the world really works 101″. Out of the box, we can quickly summarize how all matter & energy, no matter the form, is utilized by humans, in order of priority:
1. Military – can we ‘win’ with it?
2. Business – can we profit from it?
3. Government – can we tax it?
Let us examine the myth of Lincoln vis-a-vis slavery. Does promoting the lie that Lincoln was an abolitionist serve:
1. The military? Perhaps to the extent that it helps improved morale by serving as an example of American exceptionalism ™.
2. Business: Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner! Never forget that 99.99% of media is a business proposition. Except for personal hobby or activist sites, this includes any movement that reaches the point where someone can actually be ‘hired’. After that, it too becomes a commercial proposition; Kos is way, way beyond that point.
3. Government: Does the myth lend itself to increased gov’t revenues aka taxes? Not sure; probably doesn’t matter since we ID’d the primary driver of the myth in #2.
***
Now, let us apply our thinking caps to the ongoing planning with respect to CC. Who are the players and what are their plans? Only the most foolish would not recognize the military has some very bright people working on this problem.
In fact, I can’t believe Guy wasn’t approached in some fashion. Or, perhaps he was, in that his studies may have been underwritten by a DoD grant. Who knows? Either way, he’s probably considered (a) a loose canon; but (b) someone they would surely love to turn.
March 1st, 2013 at 10:50 am
Speak Softly said, ““Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide—in many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”
The military was quite aware of this statistic as well. Since WW II the military has worked diligently and with great success by getting the 15 to 20% figure to what is now 90% +. As a military veteran I can personally atest to the fact that the WW II number is ancient history.
“He showed little hesitation to use a rifle, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher or whatever other weapon he carried. Marshall himself visited Vietnam to conduct studies similar to those done during World War II and later emulated in Korea. He concluded that much had changed since those earlier conflicts and that it was not unusual for close to 100 percent of American infantrymen to engage the adversary during firefights in Vietnam. It seemed that all was well. Marshall had seemingly found that the Americans’ hesitation to fire was all but gone. – See more at: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm#sthash.0GmY6Aow.dpuf“
March 1st, 2013 at 11:07 am
Guy, In order to post a comment on Daily Kos is a paid membership required? Do you know?
March 1st, 2013 at 11:11 am
Friedrich, I’ve no idea how to post a comment at Daily Kos. Sorry.
March 1st, 2013 at 11:56 am
The ‘hesitation’ problem in U.S. soldiers disappeared when it decided to become an out an out Empire and left the ‘republic’ back in the dust, just like Rome.
Dwight D. Eisenhower signaled the crossing of the American Rubicon into an Imperial entity in his 1960 speech:
“….In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist…”
Too bad everyone waits until they are retired and leaving power to act or to speak the Truth, …….don’t let the door hit you in the ass Dwight.
March 1st, 2013 at 12:08 pm
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/02/28/the-artists-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword-editorial-cartoons/
some good climate-change/civilization cartoons here and in the one below
March 1st, 2013 at 12:08 pm
http://adaptationandclimatechange.wordpress.com/favorite-cartoons/
March 1st, 2013 at 12:48 pm
John I saw that sinkhole story – here is an alternate explanation – the aliens who live under the planet got hungry?
You are right – we humans have changed our environs without any thought as to whether we could adapt to what we have created. Too bad for us.
March 1st, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Tom oh thanks for the cartoons. Wonderful
March 1st, 2013 at 1:41 pm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/28/1190622/-Climate-Change-Abolitionists-Who-is-fighting-for-a-more-sustainable-world
Yay! I made the list too:
5.)Paul Chefurka-This guy’s a little hard to describe….also a doomer, and a really strange fellow, too(as if most doomers weren’t already a little wacky)
I know this gentleman. He’s on my “ignore list” over at DU. I’m glad he considers me strange, and I wouldn’t join a bunch of “hopeless hopefuls” like that if my life depended on it…
I’m working on a thesis for how the Four Laws of Thermodynamics (yes, Virginia there is a 4th LoT) have made the current shape of the world essentially inevitable since oxygen appeared in Earth’s atmosphere. Oh, and why those same laws make it next to impossible to reduce consumption, population, climate change and the corporatization of the world. And why the very popular humanocentric view of the world is a much deeper crock of shit than we can even begin to imagine. And how the LoT make a mockery of the concepts of free will and human agency. So yes, I’ll cop to being strange.
Oh right – we were talking about hope weren’t we? Ummm, I’ll have to get back to you on that…
March 1st, 2013 at 1:48 pm
Don’t tar all of dKos with the same brush. That guy that posted those comments is some newbie from Texas who has posted a total of 4 (count ‘em!) four diaries. Go see his profile. Look at the whole of the post. Note the comments that don’t agree with him. I note a fellow citizen from Canuckistan is also on the list: Paul Chefurka. Almost anyone can start a diary there.
I don’t read dKos at all, but I follow “FishOutOfWater” carefully.
Use your best judgement, as always.
March 1st, 2013 at 1:55 pm
@depressive lucidity
My views are always in flux. I used to hold to the delusion you mention, but now I find myself swinging towards, “We’re even more screwed than I thought we were, but let’s to god stuff anyway – just because we’re human and that’s what aware humans do.”
I no longer hold any hope of changing any structure beyond the one I’m living in.
The coolest thing I’m finding out is that it’s actually possible to live without either hope or despair – and to enjoy doing it.
March 1st, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Sorry, I meant “good” stuff, though maybe “god stuff” works too – so long as the god in question is Shiva…
March 1st, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Hey, Paul, I didn’t see yours when I posted mine! I look forward to reading your theory regarding what my husband calls “Thermo-god-dammics”
March 1st, 2013 at 2:14 pm
So my wife hands me the Inquirer and there on the front page:
Chesco* route for shale gas [*meaning Chester County, PA]
with a map showing that the newer larger pipeline is slated to go through the middle of Downingtown, minutes from my home!
Hey sonny, thought you were gonna fight fracking? We’re shovin’ a big ol’ pipeline right up your back yard!
i’m so pissed i can hardly see straight. Bastards!
March 1st, 2013 at 2:21 pm
@BC Nurse – thanks. You’ll need to be patient, though. It’s a complex topic, so I’ve decided to write a book. I “hope” to be finished before the methane ignites.
March 1st, 2013 at 2:44 pm
In a huge surprise move, it appears that the U.S. State Department is preparing to green-light the Keystone XL pipeline! It is “environmentally sound”. Excellent!
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/01/1661221/state-department-report-keystone-xl-is-environmentally-sound/
“…the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.”
Maybe they can route this one through Tom’s back yard, too!
March 1st, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Tom, its days like you are having that make NTE seem like the best of all possible worlds. Hate it for you.
Down the road about 50 or more acres just got clear cut – looks like hell.
Damn
March 1st, 2013 at 3:04 pm
Paul, do you really think that there are 4 physical laws that have pre-determined “the current shape of the world” such that you can explain geology, biology, culture, psychology, et cetera as just manifestations of those 4 principles at work?
Seriously?
March 1st, 2013 at 3:23 pm
Yes, seriously, I do. In fact, the explanation relies on just one law – the fourth. “Predetermined” in a somewhat broad sense, of course. they don’t predict the existence of Exxon, but they do make it inevitable that nations, hierarchical corporations and especially oil companies and banks, would appear.
I’ll be using a couple of other principles (one from ecology, one from anthropology) to make the idea more easily understandable, but they’re really not necessary from a scientific perspective.
March 1st, 2013 at 3:50 pm
islandraider: Thanks for the laugh! i guess James Hansen is now about as ticked off as i am, since that’s the proverbial “game over” in his opinion. The way i look at it, it just makes NTE closer than that 2037 date. Wait til all that northern/Siberian methane gets displaced into the atmosphere – that can’t be too far off either the way things are melting.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Friedrich Kling Says:
March 1st, 2013 at 10:50 am
Speak Softly said, ““Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide—in many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”
Funny how that is not the way it is portrayed in the WWII movies on television or hollywood. sarc. off) Perhaps the increase by the Vietnam War was in part due to societal programming by watching those movies on the boob tube? Look at society now with the violent computer war games and guys at the joy sticks of drones.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Tom,
Maybe this means that Hansen can join us here at NBL, now. “Game over” would seem like the equivalent of NTE, yes? He can be an unworthy climate change abolitionist and certified fucking nut, like Guy and Paul!
Funny, like Hansen’s “game over”, Joe Romm says in a recent article: “global warming is highly likely to be fatal to a livable climate and modern civilization if left untreated”, which also sounds very much like NTE or at least some kind of Extinction. Yet, he avoids the ‘fucking nut’ moniker and is still a worthy abolitionist!
What is nuts to these people? Following/connecting the scientific dots and speaking/writing/etc. about the logical conclusion of these inquiries? Ignoring science and fracking/pipelining/coal exporting our way to economic growth and extinction?
It can’t keep going. But it will. Until it can’t.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:49 pm
Thanks for the Hat tip on that. Note from the report
From the report:
Based on information and analysis about the North American crude transport infrastructure (particularly the proven ability of rail to transport substantial quantities of crude oil profitably under current market conditions, and to add capacity relatively rapidly) and the global crude oil market, the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area. [...] Spills associated with the proposed Project that enter the environment are expected to be rare and relatively small.
So what they are saying is that rail can handle all the oil anyway so opening the pipeline will not cause more oil to be produced from oil sands. Hmmm if the rail can handle it and add capacity relatively rapidly, why in dogs name do we need the pipeline??? Am I missing something here?????
March 1st, 2013 at 4:59 pm
@ Paul C.
I don’t yet understand what your vision or insight is, but I assume part of it flows from that idea that organisms strive to structure space time ? Is that right ?
So what happens when they are doing this, individually, and/or collectively ? I mean, this could be tested on computer with an algorithm perhaps ? What do all living things produce as a result of their joint efforts to organise space time ?
If I remember, early on in the last thread, prior to your eureka moment, you said something about us having no idea what’s really going on. Afaik, apart from the very crude simplistic reductionist mechanistic thinking that most scientists have re ‘the world’, there are only two models, Lovelock’s and Ward’s. Does your new idea produce a third ?
I just came across this rather delightful and amazing quotation from Kepler, ‘The Earth as Animal’. 400 years ago might seem a long or a short time, depending upon your perspective.
“If anyone who has climbed the peaks of the highest mountains, throw a stone down their very deep clefts, a sound is heard from them or if he throw it into one of the mountain lakes, which beyond doubt are bottomless, a storm will immediately arise, just as when you thrust a straw into the ear or nose of a ticklish animal, it shakes its head, or runs shudderingly away. What so like breathing, especially of those fish who draw water into their mouths and spout it out again through their gills, as that wonderful tide! For although it is so regulated according to the course of the moon, that, in the preface to my Commentaries on Mars,’ I have mentioned it as probable that the waters are attracted by the moon, as iron by lodestone, yet if anyone uphold that the earth regulates its breathing according to the motion of the sun and moon, as animals have daily and nightly alternations of sleep and waking, I shall not think his philosophy unworthy of being listened to; especially if any flexible parts should be discovered in the depths of the earth, to supply the functions of lungs or gills.”
http://fadesingh.tumblr.com/post/44285751458/keplers-gaia-the-earth-as-animal
March 1st, 2013 at 5:16 pm
NASA discovers a third radiation belt:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/28feb_thirdbelt/
March 1st, 2013 at 5:28 pm
You know the Shift is nearing when the Owners give the thumbs up to ‘end-o-the-world’ Memes that are not tradition ‘scare’em’ disaster movies, but romantic comedies: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Hey, it’ll be fun!!! The goal of all MSM memes is conditioning the Sheeple People to Accept their fate, apparently with a smile on their faces.
This movie’s premise is that an asteroid 70 miles wide named ‘Matilda’(waltzing? haha) is on a collision course with Earth in three week’s and nothing can be done about. One of the primary comic devices of the movie is watching the many people who still want to just continue their daily routine and going to work as usual, but that becomes increasingly dysfunctional and absurd. Like the restaurant that’s still open and serving food but the whole staff decided to drop some Ecstasy, it just seemed appropriate, like ‘casual Friday’ at the office, to makes things running smoother ;>)
It occurred to me watching it that this is actually what it might look like. The coming financial implosion simultaneously occurring with a political and supply chain collapse as a stand in for the Asteroid. If will all just pretend it’s normal, maybe it will be syndrome. Jiminy Cricket on Vitamin X. The American Dream writ large to the very End.
Like George Carlin said, “That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
March 1st, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Speak softly, I just added that to my netflix queue – one viewer said this of it
I was hoping this would be a comedy, but it is appropriately categorized as a drama. Accept it for being that, and you’ll probably be much happier with it. I’m sure viewers will be split on whether Carell’s character ends up making the right choice, but I was fairly satisfied. What’s “right” when the world is ending, anyway?
Good question, perhaps the only question – what is right when the world is ending.
‘
A recent book on the same subject is “The Last Policeman” and another is “Everything Matters” – maybe they are preparing us…..
March 1st, 2013 at 6:16 pm
I feel confident that time will reveal who is the truly “fucking nuts”.
Great truths are first seen as great heresies, yes?
Ignorance by consensus rules until Physics, Chemistry and Biology tap them on the shoulder. . . aka “Nature Bats Last”.
March 1st, 2013 at 6:18 pm
. . .perhaps a better phrasing would be “. . . until Physics, Chemistry and Biology hit them upside the head with a baseball bat. . .”
March 1st, 2013 at 6:32 pm
depressive lucidity Says:
March 1st, 2013 at 9:37 am
“no one can convince 5 billion people to drink poisoned Cool Aid.”
AFAIK what occurs through propoganda is that the elite end up poisoning the peoples minds such that they beg for the cool aid. Society begs for jobs, growth, Arctic drilling, pipelines, debt slavery, wars, gun control, erosion of the Constitution, etc. . . .
The best form of coercion is to have people ask for or even demand it from their leaders.
Take the so-called Reverend Jesse Jackson. he is pro gun control in a big way. Can you imagine telling his black constituency they should not be allowed to arm themselves? This after slavery, KKK, Jim Crow laws, the rapes, beatings, murders. The current level of incarceration of young black males? Can you imagine?
Can you imagine telling Native Americans they do not have the right to arm themselves? Can you?
March 1st, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Hi Anthony,
You are correct that TV played a role in the desensitization process. Additionally, at least during my military service term, the military did not hesitate to wash out recruits who failed to show necessary traits.
I also note a difference in the proclivity to fire on enemy between Europe and Asia. It’s far more difficult to fire on people who are just like yourself (German) than the Japs, Gooks, or Chinks.
March 1st, 2013 at 7:05 pm
H iAnthony,
I am with you on the gun issue. I can’t imagine a US where the only people with guns are the crooks and cops (i.e. one in the same often).
March 1st, 2013 at 7:16 pm
@ Anthony
The best form of coercion is to have people ask for or even demand it from their leaders.
This was from December-ish, supposedly from a DHS source, spilling their secret agenda. How reliable it is, is questionable, of course.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/52005
But yes, standard strategy, deliberately create intolerable turmoil and chaos so that the people are begging for intervention. The first corporation, the East India Company did it in India, sending spies into areas they wanted to take over, to identify rival groups, then followed by provocateurs, who would cause outrages ( murders, massacres ) which each side would blame on the other, so that there would soon be riots and conflict. Then EIC could send in its ‘peace keepers’ to restore order, and they’d be gratefully received. And once established, they’d stay, welcome or not.
It’s very easy if there are Sunni and Shia, or Catholic and Protestant, or blacks and whites. If there isn’t a suitable division, it’s not hard to create one. Fear and violence lead to hatred and paranoia, scapegoats. Divide and rule.
British Gvt wanted to retain Northern ireland as part of UK. Best way was to keep troops there, which needed a conflict. Turned out that MOST of the top IRA leaders were working for the British. So most of that fucking bloodshed, bombings, murder and mayhem, can be blamed on fucking MI5 and the fucking British Government.
It’s the Gladio strategy that the CIA used in Europe, ( and all around the world ) and US Gvt use against its own people. Just like the Austrians were so grateful to be annexed by Hitler because their own country was in such distress, they thought things would improve. Of course, they got a very unpleasant surprise.
March 1st, 2013 at 7:22 pm
Almost sounds like JR himself may be coming around to being classified as a “fucking nut” himself, but then a brush with cancer tends to concentrate the mind:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/01/1644511/for-climate-hawks-the-five-stages-of-grief-are-reversed/
March 1st, 2013 at 7:24 pm
I was thinking about signs and signals all around us of impending doom in modern culture. The d-KOS dude seems to have missed most of them, even if they had Dope Slapped him up the side of his head. Is that what the ‘d’ in dKOS is for?
In Poker there is always the ‘Tell’. It can be almost anything under the Sun.
I recall reading a guy who was very very good at poker, about to go into a national poker contest, and having his brother, who had played with him for years, give him the ‘gift’ of exposing a ‘Tell” in his game that he himself had never been aware of, as a birthday gift. His brother had used this ‘Tell’ against him for decades and could still beat him more often than not because of it.
Turns out that when ever his brother had a good poker hand he would use a slightly larger denomination of chip. A poorer hand, a smaller denomination chip.
No one can have total objectivity on their own “Tells’, and neither do large social organizations. They have “Tells” signals, of intention that transcend conscious planning and thought that an aware, engaged populous should be on the lookout for.
To a willfully ignorant, sleep walking, over medicated ‘citizenry’(cough), the DHS ordering 450 million rounds of hollow point ammo and ‘no hesitation targets’ should be a “Tell”, but to the Well Washed Masses of the western ‘democracy, not so much I guess, the Sheeple appear to be Thick As A Brick.
“Really don’t mind if you sit this one out…
My words but a whisper….your deafness a shout…”
March 1st, 2013 at 8:03 pm
@ Speak Softly
Who was it who said something like ‘If you’re in a pro poker game and after ten minutes you don’t know who the sucker is, then it’s you’.
Yes, i used to think, once, that melting of the Arctic icecap would be the Tell that would wake everybody up. Sigh. How naive I was.
@ Gail
I find that Joe Romm page and comments so sad and so funny, slowly, slowly, they catch up, slowly, slowly, the true horror sinks in… what if it really IS too late ? That’s going to keep happening to more and more people… Of course, they only think of themselves, not about the species already going and gone…
March 1st, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Background on Gladio
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_Gladio
March 1st, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Gail Says: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/01/1644511/for-climate-hawks-the-five-stages-of-grief-are-reversed/
“For Climate Hawks, The Five Stages Of Grief Are Reversed”
Last line of article:
“It is impossible to believe. I myself can’t believe it.”
Kubler-Ross deals with doom’s curse
By grieving before things get worse;
If your goal is denial,
Delay for awhile
By doing the steps in reverse.
March 1st, 2013 at 9:44 pm
I have to admit, being 57 years of age and hearing of multitudes of imminent economic, environmental, and other apocalyptic scenarios since the 80s’, I am a bit skeptical concerning timing of NTE. The earth is remarkable and we don’t know what various corrective mechanisms are currently taking place related to our blunders. For example, recent reports show that increased volcanic SO2 from recent volcanic activity is the primary reason the earth hasn’t warmed more (and warming can volcanic activity via plate tectonics).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130301123048.htm
However, regardless of arguments of science reports yada yada, common sense tells me that the industrial way of life, and continual overpopulation are not something the earth can ultimately deal with in a ‘business as usual’ approach. So, there ‘may’ be some valid points concerning the critique of timing with us doomers, but where I do fit with the doomers is that the fossil fuel industrial lifestyle and our population will result in our eventual extinction (something that the status quo science and current government institutions do not get).
March 1st, 2013 at 9:54 pm
@uvlfugl
The vision is still too new to be able to explain easily. Is it a “third model”? I’ll let others decide. The thumbnail sketch looks something like this:
The 4th Law of Thermodynamics (aka LMEP) ensures that as energy flows into an open system from its environment, order arises spontaneously in the system. This order is the mirror of the disorder (entropy) created in the environment that the energy flowed out of, as required by the balance equations of the Second Law. The key is that even in the open system there has to be at least one energy gradient. I intuit from the nature of the LMEP (though I don’t know for sure yet) that the “clumpier” the energy is, the more order arises. Since this is a fundamental law of the universe, it works at all scales, in what is essentially a fractal process. The same tendency is of course a feature of all ordered systems that arise as a consequence: thermodynamic energy flows created a fractal set of spontaneously ordered systems and subsystems. Like superstrings, galactic clusters, galaxies, stars, planets etc.
The next step is the arising of primitive life, as living forms are more effective energy-absorbers/entropy-creators than simple matter. From there begins a process of extensive amplification, as the living forms become more complex (i.e. they become more efficient entropy engines). On our planet around that point they created an oxygen atmosphere that made yet more energy available through oxidation.
Multi-cellular life arises in response to the self-organizing aspect of the order-creation process. Speciation begins, in the search of ever more order. Then small critters, which lead to bigger, more complex critters. Around this time creatures begin to reproduce sexually, which kicks off the whole Darwinian manifestation of the process (which isn’t essential, but is useful).
Life forms start to cluster together in groups because it’s more efficient. The beginnings of “social” organization appears. Specialized energy-seeking aspects of structure appear, like motility and eyes, that make it easier to see and move towards distant energy. And brains begin to develop. It’s easy to see that for a creature with eyes and motility, a brain is a marvelous entropy engine, because it allows much more complex energy-seeking behavior over greater distances.
In response to brain development, social organization becomes ever more complex, leading to mutual aid in energy-seeking activities (pack hunting, keeping watch for the herd as it’s grazing, etc.) Then the cortex of the brain develops, and keeps the process accelerating.
As the brain becomes more complex and capable of abstract thought, it begins to tell itself stories about why it’s seeking more and more energy – stories like, “I want my children to have a better life than I did.” Language develops in order to increase the level of organization through abstract communication. Hierarchy arises spontaneously because it’s more ordered than a uniform herd of creatures, and as a result it creates systems that are more effective at gathering energy. Social structure starts evolving towards the form we know today.
The more energy the species finds and uses, the more structured it becomes – hierarchies become more pronounced and universal, and larger groups like countries begin to appear. And all the time the amount and types of energy the species is able to find and use is increasing. At the same time the brain is telling the organisms stories about why it’s doing all this: to survive, to “get ahead”, to leave a legacy, to create beauty (aka order) in the world, to defend its right to grow and find more energy so it can survive and get ahead, etc.
Built into our very matter, down far below our genetics, the social structures that have arisen from the ordering process and the stories we tell ourselves about it all, buried so deep within us that it’s an unquestioned part of our being, is the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, telling us to look for energy. We are now living with the consequences. But even when they become painfully evident, that Law keeps us moving up the energy gradients of the world, and telling ourselves stories about why it’s essential that we do so.
Can we break its grip? I don’t know, but logic and experience both tell me that even if it’s possible it’s going to be a Herculean task, accomplished in the face of ferocious opposition. After all, to stop searching for energy feels like suicide to the organism, and the way reality is constructed from the very bottom on up, suicide is an extremely unattractive option. So we keep moving, keep building, keep burning.
We truly are Burning Man.
So if the Fourth Law does turn out to be irresistible, and we are destined to burn out, what do we do when we comprehend the true state of affairs?
As best as I can tell, we try to keep living despite it all – doing good things, adding joy to the world, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Taking pleasure and love where it is – right here, right now. Regaining our equanimity any way we can, and recognizing that in the end all we can do is live. Trying to develop:
“The courage to change the things I can,
The serenity to accept those things I cannot change,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
I think that’s what the vision looks like.
Bodhi Paul Chefurka
March 2nd, 2013 at 1:14 am
According to author and Harvard University instructor David Ropeik, social pessimism can become a dangerous positive feedback loop. Ropeik charts the rise and fall of hope and fear registered in a survey over the last eleven years – revealing Americans’ increasing pessimism that the future is more threatening than promising. “That is really scary,” he says, “because the way the human animal responds to such a general sense of being threatened, is to grow even more tribal and divided, more closed minded and unable to cooperate, more and more locked into an ultimately destructive combat that is more about fighting for our own individual tribe than for solutions to the huge overarching problems we all face in a society that, like it or not, we share.”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201301/be-worried-so-many-us-are-more-worried
March 2nd, 2013 at 2:26 am
Paul C.; Is this any help?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/10/free-energy-and-the-meaning-of-life/
March 2nd, 2013 at 2:29 am
Since 2001, the top five oil companies in the United States have recorded profits of $464 billion through the first quarter of 2007:
ExxonMobil: $158.5 billion
Shell: $108.5 billion
BP: $89.2 billion
ChevronTexaco: $60.9 billion
ConocoPhillips: $46.9 billion
In 2012 Big Oil earned well over $100 billion in profits, while the companies benefit from continued taxpayer subsidies. Average gas prices also hit a record high last year, showing how a drilling boom may help oil companies’ profit margins, but not consumers’ wallets.
ExxonMobil — now the most valuable company in the world, passing Apple — earned $45 billion profit in 2012, a 9 percent jump over 2011. Meanwhile, Chevron earned $26.2 billion for the year.
—————————
I think I found out why there’s been no progress on climate change over the previous decades, and why nothing will be done in the coming decades…and why we’re heading for 1350 ppm CO2, not 350. With this kind of money to fund armies of lobbyists to promote their agenda in all the world’s power centers, these trends won’t be coming to a sudden halt, nor will the industrial economy collapse, not as long as profits are this good. Honestly, can anyone envision the convincing argument that gets these people to walk away from this kind of money?
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:07 am
Uncle Noam Chomsky – Forum on Capitalism, Future of Capitalism, sponsored by Northeastern University Economics Dept. – 2013-02-25
Speech Capitalism vs. Reality:
http://www.radio4all.net/files/chuck@wmbr.org/727-1-Noam_full_speechw.intro.mp3
Q&A:
http://www.radio4all.net/files/chuck@wmbr.org/727-2-Noam_Q_and_A.mp3
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:54 am
Bluebird, psychologists spend their time thinking about states of mind, not the state of the world. So the author worries about how pessimism might have a feedback loop, but never tries to find out why people are more pessimistic these days.
In Nazi Germany there were Jews that were optimistic that Hitler wouldn’t kill them all, and Jews that were pessimistic about Hitler’s plans, and Jews that were realistic and immigrated. Realism can look like pessimism, but it is based on facts not fears.
I agree that people who sense things are not right are becoming pessimistic and fearful and that it can make them act in negative ways.
OTOH many who have been following Peak Oil and Climate Change have been realistic about the future and making plans. Now realism calls us to see that Climate Change has progressed faster than even the most pessimistic thought. It has forced a new realism on us, one that gives us precious few options as to how the face the future. My sense is that most who have been being realistic are not shattered by this, do not become tribal, divided, unable to cooperate. What I sense coming from the realists here is that most are preparing to meet their inevitable end with their values and human compassion intact.
I vote for realism, wherever it takes you. If you are realistic you know you will die eventually and Near Term Extinction just means that you might die sooner than you thought (for us older folks not that much sooner) and that extinction will happen sooner than expected (all species go extinct and the sun won’t last in its current state forever). Realism allows you to make good use of what time you have.
I realize that realism and pessimism can look similar, but the first is an assessment of what is and the second is a state of mind about what may be real or may not. And the cheerful optimist, if they have no grounding in reality is no help at all – sometimes worse than no help.
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:00 am
Joe Romm getting it
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/01/1644511/for-climate-hawks-the-five-stages-of-grief-are-reversed/
Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will …The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:
It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
It is impossible to believe. I myself can’t believe it.
He can’t believe it but I think he finally knows it. Maybe now he will let Guy post a comment on his blog????
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:03 am
@dairymandave
That looks like it might be on point. I’ll read it when I wake up a bit more. Thanks!
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:43 am
@ Paul C.
Thanks very much.
Energy flows into an open system and order arises spontaneously, form appears.
http://youtu.be/05Io6lop3mk
So once the ‘form’ has a place to do it, Earth, and an energy source, Sun, it stabilises, and seeks to maximise its ‘orderliness’ of space time by maximising its intake of energy… ?
Don’t know how well I’m understanding this, if at all ?
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:55 am
One more thought on the resilience of the earth: the earth may adjust to various changes but extinction is also one of those adjustments. This won’t be the first time, and maybe not the last. Next time the little green people will get wiped out!
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:05 am
Wow – great stuff people!
So if we go back to the parable about the tree of knowledge and why a human should avoid it – is it that this result comes to pass? Or would the result happen anyway due to the trajectory of all things from dissolute to composition and back?
u: those were some great links – i had never heard of gladio and must have been asleep during chem when your last link was going on. Amazing!
This is new stuff to me too and it’s gonna take a while to absorb. Just fascinating!
dmd: thanks for the background link to the topic Paul brought up.
Paul: this is awesome stuff, thanks for introducing it!
Bluebird, Kathy, others:
On our human reactions to our predicament – pessimism seems to be a failure to come to grips with unforeseen (sp?) change, and the “5 steps” seem to be our road to adaptation of that which we didn’t see coming (probably because most of us are so short-sighted, unconscious or unaware of the consequences of our actions). And to tie this to Ripley’s comments (re profit/greed underlying the resistance to meaningful change) and Anthony’s agenda, it would seem that the “smartest people in the room” (the big industrialists, capitalists, bankers/Wall Street military industrial gang) aren’t very intelligent at all – since they are in effect forcing us into an early extinction scenario that may possibly have been avoided if we had begun transition out of fossil fuels back in the 1960′s or so.
The problem, of course, comes with the attendant overpopulation that occurs (whether by Paul’s gradient or our “biological wiring”) leading to the same result eventually. In other words, it looks as if, no matter what course we as humans took to get here – we would have eventually “hit the wall” in any case, but in some of the simpler models (ie. less population for longer periods of time) we may not have killed off all life as it’s apparent we’re currently doing.
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:11 am
the earth may be resilient in short time spans but sun and earth end
The Death of the Sun
All things must end. That’s true for us, that’s true for the Earth, and that’s true for the Sun. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but one day in the far future, the Sun will run out of fuel and end its life as a main sequence star and die.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/18847/life-of-the-sun/#ixzz2MO4vy780
The question of resilience it seems should never be if, but how long
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:12 am
Yep, that’s the core of it. It’s not quite “intake” of energy, but close. It maximizes its transformation of energy. The transformation (breaking down the potential energy gradient) is what both allows it to do work for its own benefit (increasing its own order) while at the same time creating entropy for the universe.
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:27 am
@Tom
I think our biological wiring is just the way self-ordering complexity has chosen to express itself in us. It’s the way we developed to fulfill our part in the program. So there really is no difference between the wiring and the underlying energy gradient idea. Think of thermodynamics as the paint, and our human psycho-physical-cultural nature as the “Mona Lisa” or “Starry Night”.
The CEOs and other “power people” you mention are neither smart nor stupid, and in a strange sense they’re not even greedy. They’re simply natural occurrences born out of the self-organizing ordering process of human culture. Hierarchies emerge because they are more ordered than a uniform group of peer nodes in the network, and can transform more energy. And the more energy gets fed into the system, the more pronounced the ordering becomes, and the steeper the hierarchies have to become in response. Their intellectual and emotional response to the situation, what we see as greed, is simply their brains’ way of explaining to themselves why it’s good for them to fulfill this role. We think of it as greed, because that’s how our brains justify to us the feelings of lack that come from not being near the source of maximum energy transformation.
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:34 am
@ Tom
…must have been asleep during chem when your last link was going on.
I was never taught that by physics, chem or biol teachers, I don’t think they were aware of such knowledge. One of the great weaknessnes of specialisation and reductionist thinking. There’s more amazing videos of that stuff. What’s most astonishing is that some of the forms that appear are identical to cross sections of plant stems, etc, and very close to other biological morphological structures.
As I understand it, the way form arises on some of those vibrating plates is roughly similar to how forms arose in the Universe, from fluctuations and variations on the Cosmic Background Radiation from the Big Bang, everything that exists here has been bathed in that since Sun and Earth first appeared…. I’ve even read the suggestion we may be able to hear it, perceive it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/sights/cosmic_microwave_background_radiation/
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:39 am
End of the world by Rev. Billy
http://youtu.be/Om2Ij4us10Q
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:42 am
And Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm: Rev. McKibben’s Fire & Brimstone
http://youtu.be/_LRdghs8LAc
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:46 am
u: thanks – i’ll check it out.
Kathy: that guy is such a clown, but at least he’s passionate about the direction we’re heading.
Here’s a little look at our water problem (esp. in the big cities)
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/03/01/up-shit-creek-in-water-wars-sinkholes-and-more-agw-feedback-loops/
Up Shit Creek in Water Wars, Sinkholes, and more AGW Feedback Loops
enjoy
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:00 am
@ Paul
Yes. But…
http://youtu.be/vYsMAREROGQ?t=5m58s
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:24 am
@Paul, dairymandave,
Interesting stuff! I have long posited that neg-entropic processes as life, crystal formation etc. are the result of fractal energy gradients (bridges of free energy towards entropy). The seeming defiance of such neg-entropic phenomenon (in light of thermodynamic law) is balanced by a corresponding increase of entropy elsewhere (and hence the bridge of free energy ‘bottlenecks’ via such processes toward entropy).
Backing off from the canvas a bit, though I wonder if there are any teleological implications; Current theory is that very shortly after the big bang, a remarkably small window occurred by which the lighter elements formed (nucleosynthesis) and the universe did not immediately go towards stable iron. Of course, it is these lighter elements of H and He by which energy results via the path towards heavier elements (in the stellar processes).
It the universe had within minutes of the big bang, gone directly to iron, time itself would not have existed, since time is the derivative of entropy (time itself being a metric of ‘movement’). Life would have never existed without the flow of energy gradients resulting from nuclear elemental transformation.
That being said, the ultimate expansion of the universe and eventual heat death, are not a slam dunk..
Expanding Universe Violates Conservation Laws
http://www.charpan.com/expanding-universe-violates-conservation-laws
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:36 am
Tom, Rev. Billy is no more a clown than the preachers he mimics. He started with the Church of Stop Shopping and has moved on to the whole ecology/climate change stuff. I find him a hoot, my husband can’t stand him
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:37 am
@ Paul.
Correction. My ‘Yes. But…’ should have been a ‘Yes. And…’
@ Bailey
But that’s where the quantum stuff comes in ! Infinite number of multiverses, somewhere there’s one which is just a massive lump of solid iron… and there’s an infinity of yous, of Baileys, somewhere, in one of them, identical in every other respect to this one, there you sit, except that you decided not to make that comment after all…
Actually i don’t believe that crap, but some deeply serious physicists do, or so i am lead to believe…
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:55 am
@ulvfugl
Yeah, I personally suspect that the ‘contrivations’ of mathematics by which much of string theory, M-branes, and multiverses arises, is…1) to try and resolve the difficulties between quantum gravity and general relativity and..2) To get around possible conclusions based on a universe which goes back to a point where ‘something came from nothing’, where all physical laws break down, and scientific reductionism is no longer possible.
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:08 am
@ Bailey
Yes, indeed, and at that point our opinions conveniently converge
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:17 am
Jennifer Francis video, lecture on Feb. 26 – Weird Weather and Disappearing Arctic Sea ice – are they connected? Start at 4 minutes in – the intro is poor quality and unnecessary.
http://www.uvic.ca/video/player/videoplayer.php?width=640&height=360&file=PICS/JenniferFrancis26Feb2013.m4v&firstImg=http://web.uvic.ca/~webcast/graphicn.jpg&start=0&icons=true&repeat=list&rtmpdvr=false&encryption=off©right=on&sourcetype=vod&streamer=rtmp://vod.uvic.ca/vod/
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:20 am
That’s true ulv. However, all of this ontological musing aside, it does beg the basic question of ‘what are we to do’ given the current reality that we are ‘entropy engines’ which by a resulting exigency are destined toward maximal energy utilization (releasing free energy from CO2 into entropic heat). Though paradoxically, we are creating more CO2 in the process!
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:16 am
@ u (may I call you u?)
Yes, cellular automata seem to hold fascinating clues to the way reality works. I don’t now if they can be said to model it, I’m not enough of a math-head to penetrate that deeply. I tried to read Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” back in 2003, and at the time I thought he’d gone clinically insane. I still have that enormous brick of a book, and I should probably dig it out and reread it in light of what I’ve learned in the last two or three years. Thanks for the reminder about Conway and the whole field.
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:22 am
@ Bailey
Well, I don’t share the doubts you expressed earlier in the thread.
I’m thinking that the examples of taoist hermits and Bishnoi and the Kogi and some others, who don’t maximise their energy through put might be relevant… not sure of that, I’ll wait until I understand Paul’s thesis better
I wonder what you think of P. Kingsnorth’s And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277#sthash.f16Zdisd.dpuf
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:35 am
@ Paul
Yes, you can call me ‘u’ with the implication that we are speaking informally, so I may be tempted to lapse into my usual vernacular ad hominem vulgarity
Thing is, the entropy and thermodynamics, from my angle, is essentially, physics, so I wonder how we get from there to biological life, as it originated…. which isn’t so hard to imagine, if vibration, energy, sound, standing waves, automatically create structure.
Then the structures become stable. That would be something like crystals, nearly viruses… water droplets surrounded by an oily film of molecules, a skin, bacteria, then they need to able to replicate, as per Conway’s rules, and then to be able to seek out energy…
Once all that’s taken care of, the rest is straightforward Darwinian evolution, and we end up with, as you say, the board of directors of Exxon sitting around their table maximising profits….
Done
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:58 am
@ u
Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s the way it works. The cymatics videos are fascinating from this perspective. My partner has long been convinced that symatics says something profound about the way the world works, and i finally understand what she means. Swenson say repeatedly that the universe is in the order-production business, and that organization appears with a probability of 1, Boltzmann be damned.
@ Bailey
The article about conservation laws takes place well above my pay grade, though it reminded me of two things. One is sitting in my bedroom at the age of 13 calculating the Lorentz-FitzGerald equations for fun (it’s a wonder that I turned out normal
) The second is that if we run into a situation where the universe violates its own laws, it’s quite unlikely that it’s the universe that has made the error…
March 2nd, 2013 at 11:40 am
@ Paul
Much easier if Boltzmann was wrong, and Swenson feels right to me, for sure.
Have you searched for any criticisms of his work ? I might later on if I have time.
Very short TED talk on cymatics
http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/EvanGrant_2009G_480.mp4
March 2nd, 2013 at 12:09 pm
@u
I have found no substantive criticisms of Swenson’s work so far. The closest was a paper on “Thermoeconomics” in which the author dismisses all the entropy theorists from Schrödinger and Georgescu-Roegen to Prigogine and Swenson – largely (as far as I can tell) on the basis of “I don’t believe it.”
http://www.complexsystems.org/publications/pdf/thermoecon.pdf
March 2nd, 2013 at 1:19 pm
@ Paul
“I don’t believe it.” Hahahaha
Yes, I’ve read Georgescu-Roegen and Prigogine a long time ago, I seem to recall Prigogine had something like 90 university degrees… great to listen to
http://youtu.be/2NCdpMlYJxQ
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:28 pm
I just read P. Kingsnorth’s article in Orion magazine. I was touched, and I was astonished by the wisdom of such a young person. I think I understand the scythe thing, but only because my husband bought a scythe from these folks:
http://scytheworks.ca/
and went to Victoria and did a workshop, and bought another scythe, and two more blades, and then he stripped a maple branch and made another snath, and spends hours swinging this thing in the grass. There are other things I wish he would be doing, but when he comes back up to the house, the look on his face is such that I don’t say anything. He keeps a copper dipping thing-y on his belt with a homemade sharpener in it. We have some blue stone around here that he makes honing stones with, then keeps one in water in the copper thing. He stops scything every 15 minutes and swipes the stone along the blade, puts the stone back into the water and keeps going. At the end of the week, he’ll sit in the sun by the tool shed and peen the blade for an hour before putting it away.
Most of our neighbours say he’s crazy, but in the next breath they’ll say something like, “My grandfather used to have one of those. As a kid I saw him swing it. He told me he could do an acre a day. I wonder where his scythe went… Maybe it’s in my garage somewhere.”
Go to the Scytheworks website above and click on the picture of the barefoot girl in a skirt. You’ll see a video in which she brings down the grass around a tractor. This video always makes me cry, and I don’t know why.
There are problems with scythes, of course. Steel, for one. But are we inevitably on Paul Chefurka’s path? Paul, does this process ever go backwards? I guess I mean: are there places where it can go backwards?
So, are we going to talk about Ted K. again? Or Ivan Illich? The way Kingsnorth read these works is the way I read them. I clicked on the link because I wanted to know what he thought were things that were worth his time, now, at the end of this world. What I found was something that clicked inside my head. Withdrawal:
“If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction.”
This is what I’ve been struggling with. My inclination is withdrawal and paying attention. But my lifelong indoctrination has been to do stuff, teach stuff, etc. I’m tired of feeling that obligation thing. I’m beginning to think this is wrong. Wrong for me, at least. Not because it is in some way “moral” as he says in the quote above, because morality is simply a human concept that we invented to put pressure on others to make them behave. I just recoil at the notion that I have to beat people over the head with the insights that I’ve spent decades learning. They’ll just have to do the work themselves. If they want to learn to scythe, fine. My husband can show them. If they want to make a rhubarb pie, fine. I’ll show them.
There are only five weeks left in this, my final semester. Yes, there are two students out of 45 that “get it”. I can see it in their faces. I hear it in their words. They ask me about the books I suggest in class and I give them my copy. I gave away my copy of “Deer Hunting With Jesus” this week. Is it worth the abject misery of being crushed in the university system to see those two faces? No. They’d get it no matter what I do. I’d probably have statistically higher rates of having people “get it” by handing out books on a street corner.
This morning I dug up half of one of the gardens. I was completely surprised by the fact that the soil did not freeze this winter. Here. In Canada. The soil did not freeze. At all. I dug through the last patches of slush and flipped over black dirt and worms. I think I’ll plant some peas tomorrow.
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:38 pm
BCNP: i get it (as an adjunct, read “slave”) loud and clear. i too have withdrawn to the point that i don’t even want to work any more at a job for money, but would rather spend the time contemplating while working around my home and gardens. My wife wants me to attempt to get a full-time job with bennies (at 63 i ask who is going to hire me, but i’ll try, to keep her happy).
Here’s a quick pre-look at the two year anniversary of Fukushima:
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/03/02/japanese-bloggers-troubling-insight-into-the-psyche-of-post-disaster-fukushima-residents/
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:48 pm
Oh my what a great post BC Nurse. I have seen the girl scything around the tractor – it is absolutely beautiful. I thought to get a scythe early in my peak oil days, but never did and now my body can’t do anything more than 15 mins at a stretch. Funny for someone who does a continual mulch garden, but I love to dig. Ah well the worms like it better if I don’t dig much and my knees certainly appreciate me not digging much. Worms. Slush. Are you sure you are still in Canada???
This winter has seemed cooler than last, but we really haven’t had any super cold days. Not once this year has the soil gone crunchy from frost or have I had to switch to my heavier gloves and jacket. So I think it is just that there have been more cool days but no really cold days. High today 44, high in a week is supposed to be 74.
I am all with you on the obligation to do something. It seems that it is in fact the obligation to do something to make life better that has gotten us into this mess and we cannot fix it by doing something more.
March 2nd, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Tom: An adjunct – you poor thing! I’m so sorry to hear this. Slave, indeed. Can’t you earn more, in food instead of money, by staying home and gardening and raising animals? That’s what I tell my husband, anyway. As a full professor, they pay me a lot. But then more than half of it is taken away because this is Canada. I don’t begrudge that because we get good things in return, but I actually believe I’d be better off if I just produced the food myself instead of working for money to buy the food. Besides, the food you can buy is toxic.
My husband is on the tenure-promotion-treadmill, teaching journalism. He likes it, so far, and he’s good at it. He will burn out, of course, but he’s a lot younger than me, so it will take some time. So he can earn the bux to pay the property taxes and I’ll move dirt and compost from one pile to another. Wax on, wax off.
The Tao of Winter in Canada: Chop water, carry wood.
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Does anyone have the link to NTE (Near Term Extinction). It was mentioned in an earlier post and of course I cannot find it. Thanks everyone!
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Thanks, Kathy C.
Oh, yeah, this thread is supposed to be about hope.
I gave it up and I’m much better for it.
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:05 pm
BC Nurse, you might like the video “Obey” (which is up on my blog – trying to avoid 2 link moderation, so click on my name if you want to see it). It’s a little bizarre (music and effects – for me, maybe, cause I’m older) but is full of wisdom, like this:
“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
- Pindar
and
“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
- Augustine
Personally, I prefer this to “acceptance” which is being widely preached.
Also, there are some other fascinating words from Orwell and Camus, and these stirring words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spnHJMBOhlA
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Thanks, Gail, I’ll go look at them when I go to my office on Monday. I can’t watch videos on a dial-up connection out here in the boonies.
March 2nd, 2013 at 4:53 pm
@BCNP
The process can go backwards locally. While the averaged global movement is always forward (at least for as long as possible) the whole process is very clumpy. I think it has to be to work the way it does. so that means that there will be hyper-urban clumps and bits of bucolic backwater. The danger to the parts that are moving backwards is that they may be absorbed by the more active parts of the system, may become “involuntary resource donors” or may be at risk from “well-mixed” global threats. Those are risks, not certainties, though. Within those constraints it should be possible to find or create situations that aren’t about Maximum Power.
Speaking of winter (and I love your Tao line) I’m in Ottawa and it’s been a real bear of a winter. The polar jet stream has apparently been dipping way south right over us, and at the moment we have 8-foot snowbanks, and more snow than I’ve seen in 15 years. OTOH three weeks ago it was +10C. Welcome to the Brave New World.
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Gail, excellent posts on your blog Wit’s End, both the current one and the previous one. You have put a lot of work into documenting what is going on with the trees. Down here, out in the country where the pollution is not quite so bad, they make sure none die from ozone by cutting them down in their prime and hauling them out. A near neighbor just had about 50 acres of mixed hardwood and pine clear cut. Not sure if he will leave it fields or put in planted pine for them to cut down in 20 years – but it is a scar on the land and words cannot describe how awful it looks. It almost feels like a personal violation to see it.
For anyone who hasn’t yet figured out that names showing up in blue can be clicked on to take you to the posters blog, Wit’s end is at http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/ which I can post without violating the 2 link moderation rule
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Paul: Yes, I’ve heard about the terrible winter you folks have had in the east. It’s because of this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/16/1179397/-Sudden-Stratospheric-Warming-Split-the-Polar-Vortex-in-Two
We’ve had a warm winter. It has stayed right around freezing all winter, with lots of snow. The avalanche danger in the Rockies right now is classed as “extreme”. Ten or more people die in avalanches in this province every year. There is so much snow in the watershed now that if we get a fast melt there will be flooding for sure.
But the biggest danger for us will be a hot summer. What Australia is having now will be what we get this summer, I’m afraid. Last summer we didn’t see the sun for months because we got the smoke from Colorado AND from Siberia. When fire sweeps this part of the world, it scours everything off the land, as it has for millions of years. Until people stopped it from happening. Now it will come back, with a vengeance. Like the hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria, they want their world back.
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:08 pm
Ripley
Do you have links for those figures you posted on the big profits of Oil companies?
Also your concluding paragraph:
“I think I found out why there’s been no progress on climate change over the previous decades, and why nothing will be done in the coming decades…and why we’re heading for 1350 ppm CO2, not 350. With this kind of money to fund armies of lobbyists to promote their agenda in all the world’s power centers, these trends won’t be coming to a sudden halt, nor will the industrial economy collapse, not as long as profits are this good. Honestly, can anyone envision the convincing argument that gets these people to walk away from this kind of money?”
The $24 000 question…you said it.
What more penetrating insight is going to flush out the underlying reasons for widespread climate change denial, political obfuscation, and inaction dynamics, (an oxymoron of my own), of most public institutions in Anex-1 countries ?
I have no reasonable answer to your question, and am greatful for such a clear potent analysis in so little words.
Cheers
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Paul: It can go backward locally? Can “local” be a whole planet?
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Addendum.
I don’t even think the realization that their children will die would do it, bt that’s just speculating on my part… otherwise they would have done it by now…No?
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:18 pm
Pilot 17
NTE isn’t a blog, or a website, or any famous theory. It’s just the end of life on this planet. We know that earth was formed about 4 billion years ago. Complex life on the planet is having its day in the sun, so to speak, right now, and in another 4 billion years, the sun will die. So we know that in the long term, all life is extinct. NTE says that extinction is coming much sooner than that because of what human beings have done with fossil fuels. Soon. Like in 30 years. Read some earlier posts of Guy’s and you’ll get the idea. Maybe this one:
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/
And then come back and tell us what you think.
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:21 pm
Hope
The future is going to be hot,
And even though we can’t do squat,
Something internal
Makes hope spring eternal,
Whether it’s welcome or not.
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:33 pm
http://neartermextinction.ning.com/
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:02 pm
Oh Right. On ning. I forgot.
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:03 pm
BC Nurse Prof,
Near Term Extinction is a blog (and has a website). I see that Guy posted the link two “blogs” after yours. I thank you for the link to Guy’s earlier blog on “Climate Change Summary and Update.” I have already faithfully read it as I have been a loyal NBL follower for some time. I don’t post often, but I do appreciate the help from all of you. I hope you don’t have a “firestorm summer” in BC like they did in Tasmania/Australia. I have a cabin in NW Montana and even the Northern Rockies Ecosystem is visibly different than when I was a kid (40 years ago). I fear we are doing such irreparable damage to our planet. I don’t even recognize the Rockies as I remember then. Thanks to you and Guy! Keep up the dialogue and incoming Climate updates!
Pilot
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:13 pm
@BCNP
Although looking at the world through “entropy glasses” can help make some things clearer, it doesn’t give us any new options. Anyone who has taken the warnings seriously for the last decade or four has sussed out the available options already.
No it can’t go backwards globally. It can’t even really go backwards locally. Entropy is God’s own one-way function. It can look like it’s gong backwards locally for a while, but even then, in the end it has to turn around.
The best thing to do, from a thermodynamic perspective, is to get into an “insulated” place – a place that works something like like a thermos bottle, with enough barriers to slow the flow in or out as much as possible, both metaphorically and physically. A place that lives on sunlight flows or the equivalent, and doesn’t grow in terms of activity or human numbers.
As Guy has found, there aren’t many places like that left, and they’re hard to live in, especially for us civilized types.
March 2nd, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Please everyone don’t forget, when the grids of the world go down from solar flares or EMP or more likely from the effects of Peak Oil (lack of fuel and lack of infrastructure maintenance) there are 439 nuclear plants in the world that will go Chernobyl/Fukushima but worse. They used 500,000 sacrificial lambs otherwise known as humans to get Chernobyl somewhat contained. Who knows how many in Fukushima. Try please to imagine all those plants melting down, all their fuel pools burning up with NO way to control, contain, slow them at all. That is our future. We can argue about anything we want, but those plants are going to blow no matter what. There IS NO HOPE. Only hope that we can live each day in harmony as best we can with nature and other humans.
Unless that is someone thinks they can get the world to decommission all those nuclear plants before the grids go. In that case we await the methane time bomb to do us in. https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/21-3
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Jeeez, I’ve missed a lot in my life, didn’t realise that Rod Swenson is a kinda complex, erm, multi-dimensional, character…. Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater ? Um… well, this is the more ( or less ? depends on your perspective and tastes, I suppose ) interesting aspect of the work, at least as it connects to what Paul has been saying here, and what I was thinking, re Lovelock and Ward’s models of the Earth as a system..
Evolution “on” Earth needed revising to evolution “of” Earth now. But such an evolutionary unit does not fit within the terms or observables of Darwinian theory. According to Darwinian theory the Earth cannot evolve because evolution, as that which follows from natural selection, is defined as the consequence of a competing population of reproducing or replicating entities, or a population of many while the Earth system is a population of one. This “problem of the population of one”, the inescapability of which is confirmed with every breath each of us takes, is found not only at the planetary level, but in from the origin of life (which arose as a population of one) to the rise of civilizations, and more generally in ecosystem succession at every level.
All these systems are flow structures that pull resources into themselves in their own self-production through the coordinated motion of their components with a set of empirically traceable circular relations. They are all self-organizing or ACK systems. The circularly causal relations that constitutes them exist through the dissipation of environmental potentials (or energy gradients) where output feeds back on input to amplify growth from the initial instabilities where they originate. The macrostructure (what we call the “thing”) at one level is constituted by the flux of the lower level components. Dust devils, and tornadoes are non-living examples which make this easy to visualize where can see literally as they come into being that the origin, evolution (or development) of ACK systems, the transformation of some previously less ordered or incoherent set of components into a dynamically ordered or coherent set is inherently a process of selection. As the system appears, emerges, develops and grows (or evolves) we see some number of smaller microstates or degrees of freedom selected from a larger initial set.
More here :
http://www.vice.com/read/revolution-evolution-and-rock-n-roll-an-exclusive-interview-with-plasmatics-founder-rod-swenson
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:03 pm
I haven’t had time in RL to closely study Paul C.’s line of thinking, but I do remember an email exchange I had with someone years ago.
They thought, conventionally, as I had done, that humans worked *against* entropy to create order, but something dawned on me leading me to point out that this order is frequently only in the human mind. The more humans exert civilizing and organizing efforts, the more banana molecules move from Costa Rica to New York, the more petroleum molecules move from Saudia Arabia to China, the more gold molecules move from Africa to Zurich, onto gold-leafed paintings, into our dental work, even into our fancy liquors and then the sewage system!
Just imagine where every scrap of the stuff in your local landfill came from, and the enormous propensity and capacity that humans have developed to disperse energy and materials will become more clear.
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:08 pm
American Bumblebee Disappears in Midwest
http://www.vnews.com/search/4774985-95/bumblebee-bees-american-wild
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Some background info re Swenson
…what he saw as the discrepancies between biology and physics particularly as relating to evolutionary and culture theory and became focused on spontaneous order production or self-organization. By 1988 he had “proposed and elaborated the law of maximum entropy production as the missing piece of the physical or universal law that would account for the ubiquitous and opportunistic transformation from disordered, or less ordered, to more highly ordered states,” [8] and in 1991 he and Michael Turvey explicitly connected this thermodynamic account to J. J. Gibson’s law-based account of information to build on Swenson’s view of evolution as an epistemic process and argue that the evolution of cognition, intelligence, and knowing follow directly and opportunistically from universal or physical law [9]. From that time until the present Swenson’s work has continued in the elaboration of these principles addressing more specifically the issues of human ecology, the emergence of meaning, and intentionality.
http://www.eoht.info/page/Rod+Swenson
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:40 pm
The Law of Maximum Entropy Production is a part of Non-equilibrium thermodynamics, also known as NET
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:42 pm
A book on Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, substantial sections of which can be read online, is
Into the Cool
March 2nd, 2013 at 9:06 pm
An MIT site Exploring Emergence
March 2nd, 2013 at 9:12 pm
A discussion on Self-organization
March 2nd, 2013 at 9:19 pm
If I’m understanding this correctly, Swenson’s contribution, ( if it is right, that’s an important proviso ) is indeed as revolutionary and mind-blowing as Paul C. indicated in the previous thread.
What he appears to be saying, removes evolution and the origin of life from the hands of the biologists. So Darwin and Dawkins et al, fade into the background somewhat. That’s kinda radical !
The key insight and logic he offers is this quote :
…according to neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, evolution is taken to be the result of natural selection acting on populations of replicating or reproducing entities showing random variation and competing for fixed resources … But this assumes replicative order or ‘the struggle for life’ to begin with.
Evolution did not come into the world with life; life was the product of it. In addition, it is now well-recognised that the Earth system at its highest level has evolved, functions, and is evolving, as a single global entity, but because there is no competing population of Earth systems on which natural selection can act, that is, because the global Earth system is a population of one, neo-Darwinism cannot address this global evolution and in fact denies it.
Since natural selection cannot thus account for the spontaneous and active production of replicative order out of a ‘dead’, purposeless, or aimless world of physics which it requires first to act, and since it cannot explain global evolution itself, it is clear that evolution is not reducible to natural selection.
In fact Darwinian evolution or natural selection can only be a process internal to a more general evolutionary process which is the product of a more fundamental principle of selection which must reside in physical law ( since if principle of selection does not involve competing replicating or reproducing entities it cannot be biological ).
Selection in this case, and thus competition ( without implying end-in-mind ), must be between macro or ordered and micro or disordered modes. But given Boltzmann’s claim that according to the second law of thermodynamics ordered states are ‘infinitely improbable’ , how can this possibly be ?
He then goes on to develop his argument.
I can see a number of points where his line of thought could be attacked, particularly re Earth as a single evolving entity. I believe it is, but plenty of reductionist scientists don’t accept that, e.g. all the critics of Lovelock’s Daisy World, including Peter Ward.
http://www.sonoran-institute-for-epistemic-studies.org/
March 2nd, 2013 at 9:54 pm
@uvlfugl
You saw it! That’s it. By solving the “problem of one” with the order-creating properties of the LMEP, Swenson has also casually solved the issue of Cartesian dualism and swept Darwin off the table. I’m just getting into the Gibson connection with ecological psychology now.
It’s a bit of a mind-fuck, isn’t it?
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:08 pm
@ Paul
I think Darwinian evolution still holds up ok, but it becomes secondary, a subset…
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:09 pm
I think part of the issue the Swensonites face is a semantic battle over the meaning of the word ‘evolution”. It’s been so thoroughly co-opted by the geneticists that the evolution of single systems can’t even be called evolution, although any common-sense view tells us that it is just that. Add in the issue of end-directed change (“Oooohh, teleology! Burn the witch!”) and the embedded enculturation of 50,000 years of humanocentric perception, it’s going to be an uphill fight. but I’m convinced of its core truth, and that makes the game worth the candle.
You used the right word – radical. This is a radical idea in the true sense of the word that Guy used some time ago, of “going to the root”. In fact it fits all six definitions of the word:
1. of or going to the root or origin; fundamental.
2. thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms.
3. favoring drastic political, economic, or social reforms.
4. forming a basis or foundation.
5. existing inherently in a thing or person.
6. (slang) excellent or cool.
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:51 pm
Greedy Lying Bastards Unravels Koch and Exxon Hidden Climate Agenda
It’s got almost 7,000 Facebook likes already, it has hundreds of followers on Twitter, virtually every newspaper, political blog and news outlet is talking about it and it’s not even due to be released until March 8, 2013 – It’s safe to say that Greedy Lying Bastards is causing a tad of a storm.
And so it should. Unequivocally titled to convey its message, this American documentary film focuses on what its director argues is the “climate change denial campaign.”
Produced and directed by filmmaker, writer and political activist Craig Rosebraugh, Dirty Lying Bastards investigates the reasons why, despite there being scientific consensus that climate change is placing the planet on the brink of disaster, efforts to tackle the impending catastrophe were deliberately stalled.
(The above link includes an interview with the film’s director. See the trailer at greedylyingbastardsdotcom.)
March 2nd, 2013 at 10:52 pm
Link for above post:
http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2013/02/greedy-lying-bastards-koch-exxon-climate/
March 2nd, 2013 at 11:24 pm
Personally, I prefer this to “acceptance” which is being widely preached.
Acceptance in lieu of action is cowardice. Rejection in the face of contrary reality is folly. Both are from attachment: the former to an aversion to risks, the latter to an attraction to an alternate preference.
Without expectations, there is no acceptance or non-acceptance: only < thusness, the recognition that in the grand system of things, everything is just perfectly normal.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on:
nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it
BC Nurse Prof: The Tao of Winter in Canada – that was a good one!
March 3rd, 2013 at 12:18 am
@u
Darwinian evolution is a subset. Exactly so.
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:28 am
Life. Our efforts to eliminate it appear to be futile. If only we could keep the stars from exploding. And carbon has a lot to answer for, it’s always up to no good. We are 2% different from chimps, if we had evolved to 4% different, we would seem like chimps to that creature.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDRXn96HrtY
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:30 am
@ Paul
Darwinian evolution is a subset. Exactly so.
Not completely clear about the relationship though…
Is it similar to how we THINK we are following our own rational behaviour, when in fact, closer scientific examination revealed that we are following ancient biological imperatives.
And now we discover that what we THOUGHT were ancient biological imperatives turn out to be following even deeper imperatives, i.e. the energy gradients of physics ?
Yes, re previous comment, so much is about the language and how it is used and defined. Perhaps just have to coin new terminology rather than fight over the old.
The biologists will be very unhappy about having their turf rolled up and taken away, and heck, most physics departments wouldn’t even know what to do with it and will say hey, that’s not our turf, we don’t want it, we don’t understand that stuff !
What I seem to have got from this, so far, that I didn’t have before – don’t know why I didn’t have it before, and if someone else DID have it before ? – it’s kind of seamless, all the way from the Big Bang to the Exxon board room, it just sort of rolls out, like a carpet, inevitably, which is not at all how I want it to be, it appalls me… so I hope I’ve got that wrong…
One thing that falls out of that, we are relieved of moral culpability, perhaps, because any blame rests with the creator, Creator, of the rules in the first instance…
But another puzzle… where exactly ARE these rules ? I mean, starts with Big Bang, cosmos expands, lumpiness means galaxies, and stars and the periodic table and planets and sound vibration can create form which is as close to dammit as the beginnings of life… all following ‘rules’… but they are invisible ? How can that be ? How do these rules just appear out of nothing from nowhere ?
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:47 am
I thought this was a good video to watch before watching Guy’s “Two sides of the fossil fuel coin”. Notice that the first comment refers to Guy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlgSZnHn9DQ
The ending is interesting…when questioned.
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:55 am
“I believe in evading and disintermediating the state,” he said. “It seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. This means you can make something that is contentious and politically important—not just a multicolored cookie cutter—but something important. It’s more about disintermediating some of these control schemes entirely and there’s increasingly little that you can do about it. That’s no longer a valid answer.”
He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/download-this-gun-3d-printed-semi-automatic-fires-over-600-rounds/
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:20 am
Pessimists live longer and healthier lives
http://in.news.yahoo.com/pessimists-live-longer-healthier-lives-055247966.html
Huh, based on this most of us here are on track to survive extinction. . . .no mean feat that.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:37 am
– it’s kind of seamless, all the way from the Big Bang to the Exxon board room
Good one, u. One of those don’t know whether to laugh or cry lines.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:44 am
@ Paul
Darwinian evolution is a subset. Exactly so.
What Swenson says :
(1) Self-organization or spontaneous ordering is a process of selection; (2) this selection process is governed by a “physical selection principle”; (3) this principle is the law of maximum entropy production; and (4) natural selection is a special case where the components are replicating.
So, yes, we appear to have understood him, thus far. His new ideas are 1,2,3, and then we get to Darwinian evolution at 4.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:51 am
@ Ripley
Yes. Kinda makes me feel ill. But then, if we’re smart enough to understand this stuff, how come we’re not smart enough to find sensible ways forward ? Rage Against The Entropy or Rage Against The Laws Of Thermodynamics grrrrr
2% different from chimps ? Look what that did !
http://youtu.be/EF1V8HFfpTE
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:52 am
LOL, I read that about pessimists living longer. I am so many standard deviations from the norm, I don’t think I fit on the scale though.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:59 am
Re, Pessimism, try this one,
- We are nothing but heat engines so that universe can find a faster path towards its heat death,
- We are a prototype of parasite and virus which cannot be surpassed.
- There is no God, meaning, or purpose to life.
- We are destroying every other species and only have a matter of decades (at the most) before most of the planet is extinct.
- We have damaged the ‘hardware’ of the planet which resulted from its very formation, such that highly evolved life is likely to never return.
- 99.999% of humans are so deep in cognitive dissonance they can never realize the above if there was not another species left, and they blood was boiling from the heat – they would still be digging for more oil.
Okay, now I am so full of bliss and excitement, I could shoot myself
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:06 am
dmd: i watched that presentation you linked to and he too doesn’t want to tell the kids that “we’re basically toast” in their lifetime by pulling back at the end. Some of the students in the audience started to connect the dots when the moderator cut off questioning. Hmmmm.
Also, have you seen this?:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/latest/16283446/mysterious-light-blamed-for-circle-of-fire/
u, Paul, Ripley, others: principle 3 has me a little confused. Why should it be maximum entropy production when everything else in life procedes along a gentle curve responding to conditions – like fire. Fire goes exponential when there are entire forests to burn and tons of oxygen, but smolders and may even go out in an enclosed room with ample fuel but not enough oxygen. Why do scientists say it’s maximum when it clearly depends on conditions? Is it that i’m misinterpreting and that what they’re saying is actually what i just wrote, but they assume that it’s conditional (and i just didn’t get the memo)? Sorry to slow down the discussion.
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:15 am
Obviously hesitated when ordered to stamp on a kitten
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/chief-staff-out-dhs_704981.html#
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:23 am
I don’t understand this very well, Tom, but in so far as I can grasp it, self-organising forms, kinda ‘want’ maximum entropy, so, for example, these cell-like structures appear most strongly when the heat throughput is maximised… is that right ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh–Bénard_convection
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:34 am
Kathy: looks like the nuclear radiation threat is quietly proceding
http://enenews.com/67-suspected-leakers-nuclear-site-stuff-inside-melts-instruments-eats-rubber-plastic-video
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:49 am
dmd:
here’s one on German tv
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/02/ufo-travels-through-tunnel-in-germany-26022013-live-cam-2578890.html
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:58 am
music ( and paranoia )
http://youtu.be/4Gc6_ZcXZa4
March 3rd, 2013 at 7:26 am
My two cents, re: hope/hopium. BCNP, I hear you regarding withdrawal versus engagement, but perhaps we need to define engagement a bit differently.
http://www.igotsomethin.wordpress.com/sociuspaethocene
March 3rd, 2013 at 7:58 am
BC Nurse Prof,
I can relate to the “withdrawal” thing. I go back and forth with that myself. Unfortunately, for me I am limited to how far I can withdraw because I’m a debt slave. I’m working to correct that, but obviously, that’s not easy and takes time. Of course, we probably don’t have a lot of time.
My dream situation would be for me to garden and care for my animals while taking care of the occasional patient who shows up at my house, letting them barter with me for care. That’s not possible in today’s world because of State requirements for medical licensure. For instance, just having an active medical license costs a minimum of $7,500 a year – whether you actually use it or not. Oddly enough, the State medical board and malpractice insurance companies won’t barter for chickens.
As to using a scythe, I bought one a couple of years ago. We used it a few months and didn’t feel like we mastered that skill very well at all. Since then we bought some goats. That seems to have eliminated our need for a scythe pretty well.
Last year we didn’t have a winter. This year we had a somewhat normal winter but now it’s hanging on. The last three days we’ve had snow flurries. We can expect more variation as the mechanisms controlling our weather begin to unravel and rework themselves.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:04 am
u: oh, ok – so “conditions permitting” entities seek maximum entropy.
So what about homeostasis then? Or cooperation? i’ll have to read more about this.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:44 am
@Tom, u, Ripley, et al -
It’s not so much “maximum entropy production” in any discontinuous sense, but the the fact that if the universe has several thermodynamic pathways toward equilibrium that it always moves toward equilibrium along the set that gets it there the fastest, and that always includes the pathway that allows the maximum rate of equalization.
A necessarily incorrect but illustrative human analogy might be a person who is presented with several offers of employment. All else being equal, they will always choose the one with the highest pay.
I’ve been thinking more about this last night and this morning, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the order-producing aspect of the LMEP isn’t really a law a thermodynamics. It appears to be a core cosmological principle.
That’s why it has such a feeling of sweep, scope and scale. It applies “From the Big Bang to the Boardroom” (sounds like a good book title…)
To uvlfugl’s question about “Where’d it come from?” – that’s the $infinite question, isn’t it?. The rules probably come from the same place as gravity and all this energy came from in the first place. At some point ya gotta just have faith
Yes, this means there is precious little room/need for morality, save as a purely human invention that governs appearances. The idea that humans are morally responsible for the appearance of large corporations or the authoritarian nation-state dissolves in the face of this understanding.
If Darwinian evolution is a special case (as it seems to be), then so are the two other empirical “principles” I’ve been working with, that led me to this point: HT Odum’s ecologically-based “Maximum Power Principle” and Marvin Harris’ anthropological principle of “Infrastructural Determinism” from his framework called Cultural Materialism. Both are revealed to be subsets, or maybe more precisely, “domain-specific expressions” of the LMEP.
On a more personal note to uvlfugl, I’m hugely relieved to watch you grasp the principle and its implications in exactly the same way I did. One doesn’t normally sit in one’s living room one weekend and discover a new cosmological principle that turns the world completely on its head. I was worried that I might be pulling a John Nash. Thanks for relieving me of that particular concern. If we’re nuts, at least this isn’t the evidence that will put us away.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:46 am
@ Tom
I was thinking about the physics part, when self-organising structure or form arises.
It is ( almost ) magical, miraculous. I mean, the emergence from nowhere, or nowhere visible, of patterns that have symmetry or dynamic rhythmic oscillating shapes that closely resemble living organisms. Perhaps Paul can give you better answers. I could give you answers from traditional biology, but this theoretical stuff from physics broadens the scope and is new to me.
http://youtu.be/9R4Bkwh9h9c
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:57 am
@ Paul
Well, my dear partner in insanity, we crossposted… please don’t be re-assured because I’m following you down this dark alley, it may be that we are both as daft as each other, it would not be the first time I’ve stumbled into a big black hole on a dark night along with good company
I’d like to have been there
But hey, we owe this to Swenson, who was at that CBGBs club or whatever with the Ramones et al, so it’s GOT to be pretty weird and worth investigating
http://youtu.be/wxHaRU77zo8
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:32 am
@ Paul
At some point ya gotta just have faith
Heck. No. It’s a powerful question. Same place as gravity ??
Look, when the guy rubs the steel plate with the violin bow, a pattern emerges, at a particular frequency. Fine. Physics describes that. Tells us the thickness of the plate, the size of the sand particles, the frequency of the sound, the room temperature, every damn thing, so we can repeat it exactly, and write down the rule.
But where IS the rule ? Why is it THAT pattern and not another ?
Physicists just shrug, and say ‘Well, them’s your laws of physics, came with the Big Bang, they’re hiding in the stuff, we’re the guys who find them for you and tell you what they are’.
Not really good enough, is it ? I think they’re shirking their responsibility… I want some answers !
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:34 am
Lidia your link on bumblebees requires a login, but here is another story on the issue
http://www.weather.com/news/science/nature/bumblebees-disappearing-midwest-20130301
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:40 am
Someone on my facebook posted that in Italy they have uncovered a deadly gene in Monsanto’s genetically modified corn. I bet we do not hear about it in our US news. It’s on an app called UBAlert. Anyone heard more details?
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:41 am
Bailey, once we realize there is no MEANING, we are free to make meaning wherever we want. Once we realize there is no PURPOSE, we are free to follow whatever purpose we decide on. Once we realize that Near Term Extinction is poised over all living creatures, we are free to enjoy each moment for all that moment holds.
It has always been the case that life on earth would end when the sun dies. It has always been the case that life on earth could end with any stray asteroid of sufficient size. It has always been the case that each living individual would die, that species would go extinct.
So we have a tentative date. Nothing new. Transform pessimism into optimism about what you can do with the time left.
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:06 am
Thanks Kathy and I get your drift. But still, you have to admit that there does seem to be a huge wind of futility stirring about (so far as our goals any longer having any significance even short term).
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:19 am
It’s becoming clear what the goal is of Paul and U: figure out the big question before time runs out. Where’d it all come from.
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:37 am
I think Guy’s presentations tend to go over the heads of the average “man on the street”. I think the average person knows so little science that they can’t get what he is talking about. Only 1 in 100 would be able to get any of it since, as was pointed out, warming involves so many subjects integrated into an overview of how life on earth works.
So I put together a few videos that I think help teach some of the basics. I am recommending these to one of my employees if, in fact, he even wants to know what’s going on. Most people don’t.
I know, most of us here in the choir already know this stuff, but we all know folks who don’t. I know a lot of folks who would never get this stuff. Some of them work here on our farm!
Short Course in Global Warming
Global warming basics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlgSZnHn9DQ
We have a problem:
http://www.apollo-gaia.org/PlanetEarth/index.htm
20-30 feedbacks, how IPCC works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg
Guy McPherson: The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ina16XSJQvM
When we know we have lost the plot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3sgwZXRvxc
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:39 am
Bailey I googled “deadly gene in Monsanto corn” and found multiple stories – thanks for the hat tip – just more reasons to fear gmo’s
BTW summer before last when it was so wet some farmers were saying that monsanto corn was more vulnerable to the mold plaguing the crops. Monsanto of course asserted that their corn was less vulnerable.
snippet In the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report, which can be read online, you can find (within the scientific wording) that researchers discovered a previously unknown viral gene that is known as ‘Gene VI’. What’s concerning is that not only is the rogue gene found in the most prominent GMO crops and about 63% of GMO traits approved for use (54 out of 86 to be precise), but it can actually disrupt the very biological functions within living organisms.
more at the link.
http://www.occupy.com/article/revealed-deadly-rogue-gene-discovered-monsantos-gmo-crops
Pretty much anytime you hear such a rumor you can find something about it by a quick google search.
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:54 am
@ dmd
That’s not my goal at all. I think it is totally futile to try and understand what happened before the Big Bang whatever. There’s a handful of astrophysicists who know enough to make a strong theoretical case, and they each have their own strongly held opinion and disagree with all the others. I don’t think it can ever be settled in the foreseeable future, and even if the picture is enlarged it makes no difference to our fate here.
So far as I know, there’s only two models of what the Earth ‘is’, Lovelock’s and Ward’s. Swenson’s ideas may permit a third, and it’s a stimulating intellectual challenge. Seems to me that knowing what the Earth ‘is’ is important, because it can tell us what the constraints, the boundaries, are. It might tell us what ‘it’ wants to do, as opposed to what we want to do. So that is more interesting and relevant, to my mind.
Unfortunately, from what i’ve gathered so far, the conclusions from Swenson are not really what I’d like to hear. But there we are, that’s science, I suppose. Maybe he’s mistaken, maybe I’ve misunderstood. I think the view that physics is fundamental to evolution is highly significant, and stays with me.
@ Paul
Re pulling a John Nash, it’s always hard to tell, because when one ventures beyond the boundaries there’s no established landmarks or reference points, and everybody else gets left behind, I’m familiar with that unmarked territory, I actually LIKE it, it’s where shamanic skills are tested and challenged. All normal folk run away when they hear gunfire, but the best troops, the ones the generals really like and want, are the crazy ones who run towards the gunfire, because they are mad for the action…
It’s like that for shamans and the like, as you doubtless know. Normal people don’t like to be hungry or to go without sleep. Shamans fast and deprive themselves of sleep, because they want the strange mind-expanding results, they want to see what happens when the hallucinations and visions kick in, and what happens after that and after that…
So I’ve done all that stuff, over and over. I find weird challenges interesting, stimulating, enriching. Did you ever read about the Air Loom and the life of James Tilly Matthews ? That guy went through some freaky stuff. Kiteing, Thought-Making, Lobster Cracking ?
http://www.theairloom.org/text.html#
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:58 am
…two centuries later, the Air Loom has become something that neither of its authors could have guessed at: not the solipsistic ravings of a forgotten lunatic, but the first appearance of a myth of the modern age. The machine that controls the mind has emerged from its obscure corner of psychiatry to mesmerise the broader culture, its image now endlessly amplified and recycled through the mass media and the Hollywood dream machine. The Air Loom is a creature of the imagination that has become ever more recognisable as telephone, television and computer have colonised the texture of our reality, creating a world where rays, ethers, beams and particles assail us constantly, powering inscrutable machines that project shadow worlds into our minds from unseen basements and cellars, stimulating our senses and manipulating our thoughts.
In 1810, the Air Loom was real – but only to James Tilly Matthews. Now, perhaps, it is beginning to come into focus for the rest of us.
http://mikejay.net/articles/james-tilly-matthews-and-the-air-loom/
March 3rd, 2013 at 12:57 pm
U; Heck, I’m disappointed. I thought the pressure would give you the necessary mind-expanding kick to get the job done.
March 3rd, 2013 at 1:05 pm
@ulv
I think it is totally futile to try and understand what happened before the Big Bang whatever.
And not only that, there was no ‘before’ the big bang, because time could not have existed (as I pointed out previously). Makes the head hurt!
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:05 pm
@ dmd
What would be the point ? Even if I came up with the correct answer, nobody would believe it. There’s already loads of people on the internet claiming to have disproved Einstein or the Big Bang or whatever, and new theories in science journals are two a penny these days.
@ Bailey
Yes. No time. No space. Doesn’t make any sense. Stuff gets sucked into big Black Holes never to be seen again.
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:20 pm
There is something big going on here. Can we say that?
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:24 pm
@u
No, I hadn’t ever heard of Matthews. I suspect that’s because those guys from CSIS in the house just down the street have blocked that thought from my mind by sending their Cosmic Code through the internet cable into my wireless router, from whence it .. wait, what?
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:49 pm
@Paul
Yeah, they have a complete simulation of you and your house, exact in every detail, and the replica thinks the same thoughts you do, all in real time
Naaah, forget it, this Swenson stuff is more interesting. And weirder, too
Maybe it’s not so dismal. What I get, we wreck the planet’s ecology, but then, because of this inevitable inherent principle, so long as there is energy, it cannot help but begin re-ordering itself…
Thinking about e.g. the prairie grasslands that are the most stable because they contain the most number of species per square foot, isn’t that because they are maximising the entropy production ? Is that right ?
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:53 pm
@ dmd
There is something big going on here.Can we say that?
We can’t even say where ‘here’ is.
March 3rd, 2013 at 4:00 pm
We… who is we?
March 3rd, 2013 at 4:23 pm
@ Brad
I suspect dmd was using it in the Pluralis Majestatis sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
March 3rd, 2013 at 4:45 pm
@u Re: prairie grasslands, I think that’s true – they’re maximizing entropy, within the incoming solar energy budget. I think that’s probably true of any climax ecosystem.
@Tom – I think cooperation is essential to any entropy-maximizing community. It seems to me that cooperation and competition both have to exist in order to make the whole endeavour really hum. Cooperation makes any individual system operate at peak effectiveness, while competition ensures that the most productive systems prevail.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:04 pm
@ Paul
Aha. Well, that’s really rather amazing. Thanks.
So now do we have a sort of purpose ? Can that be right ? The Amazon rain forest is as it is because it maximises entropy ?
There’s various ways I’ve read, schemata, trying to help the reader understand this entropy thing, which have not helped me much.
I’m visualising it as water running down hill. It takes the easiest path. So, then, maximum entropy, is like a deep channel, or a waterfall perhaps.
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Awakened people across the world have come to the realization that our culture, politics and economics are controlled by a corrupt, dangerous and false monetary system which is entirely in the hands of bankers and supported by their partners in the corporate media.
History has demonstrated beyond doubt that governments are not only subservient to the bankers, but are their willing accomplices.
http://www.marchmanifesto.com/
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:15 pm
According to the transcript of the secretly recorded tape, Charles Koch was chuckling like a six-year old. Koch was having a hell of a laugh over pilfering a few hundred dollars’ worth of oil from a couple of dirt-poor Indians on the Osage Reservation.
Why did Koch, worth about $3 billion at the time (now $20 billion) need to boost a few bucks from some Indian in a trailer home? Koch answered:
“I want my fair share – and that’s all of it.”
http://www.gregpalast.com/i-want-my-fair-share-and-thats-all-of-it-the-kochs-the-xl-pipeline/
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:24 pm
An orbiting mind control laser caused Paul Chefurka to say what?
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Traveling Wilburys – End Of The Line
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:49 pm
So perhaps, what seems to have gone ‘wrong’ – although that’s not the suitable word, because it implies a moral judgement – here, looking at evolution and ecology from this new angle, we humans found the oil and used it much too fast.
Other species found energy sources, maximised the entropy, handed on the by products to other species further along the line which utilised and recycled everything, slowly building and integrating systems… but we did it so rapidly, we’ve just poisoned ourselves and everything all around, with no time for evolution to take care of the byproducts.
What’s so dismal about this though, is that it’s even more bleak than social Darwinism, it seems to me.
When the vultures on the African plain descend on a carcase, they are following this rule.
I read a story, of a ship in an Australian port during a gold rush, and the captain ordered the officers to shoot any crew who attempted to leave for the gold fields. But the officers left too. Seems to me, it’s all the same thing, whether it’s the hunger for meat, or the lure of gold, or fucking Koch and his oil. Maximising entropy.
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Great plan! Let’s do it again in the next incarnation – see if we can beat the time to destroy the whole planet, woo-hoo!
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Gulf Stream Diversion: “Gulf Stream diverged well to the north of its normal path beginning in late October 2011, causing the warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures along the New England continental shelf.”
Mysterious Rise in Ocean Salinity: “These changes in salinity are accelerating the water cycle. As global temperatures get warmer, evaporation increases, altering the frequency, strength and distribution of rainfall around the planet.”
Ocean Acidification Occurring at Unprecedented Rates: “Although similarities exist, no past event can serve as a model for future projections due to the unprecedented releases of anthropogenic CO2.”
March 3rd, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Couple of videos on emergence…
http://youtu.be/gdQgoNitl1g
http://youtu.be/S5NRNG1r_jI
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:05 pm
@ Tom
Yes, it is rather depressing.
But, as paul seems to have perceived, this may well be a fundamental universal principle.
In which case, like it or not, we’re stuck with it. I don’t like it.
But you see, it’s not the first time we’ve encountered that sort of thing. We’ve already got gravity, temperature, all the physical stuff, and human nature, that we have to contend with. We’ve often discovered elegant benign solutions.
http://youtu.be/8M81_FRbTLc
I was thinking that, if maximising entropy can be envisaged as water flowing downhill, and this maximising entropy is really the deep hidden driving imperative underlying all human desire and endeavour, perhaps if we can understand that, we can do something about it. Theoretically, at least, that might be possible, in principle. I don’t know. I’m out of ideas at the moment.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:05 pm
@Kathy C
“Bailey, once we realize there is no MEANING, we are free to make meaning wherever we want. Once we realize there is no PURPOSE, we are free to follow whatever purpose we decide on. Once we realize that Near Term Extinction is poised over all living creatures, we are free to enjoy each moment for all that moment holds.”
perfect.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:20 pm
‘So yes, I’ll cop to being strange’ not just strange, paul. surreally strange! let’s not drop descriptive adjectives! smile
‘now I find myself swinging towards, “We’re even more screwed than I thought we were, but let’s to god stuff anyway – just because we’re human and that’s what aware humans do.”’ -paul again. paul, gods don’t have to be concerned with petty matters like nature and natural limits. in this respect our species collectively are acting like gods. wannabe ignorant artificial gods without godly powers, unless one considers destruction godly.
‘Sorry, I meant “good” stuff, though maybe “god stuff” works too’ -paul tvt- i don’t know if i agree that ‘aware’ humans necessarily are do gooders. i’m not big on ‘morality’. it’s tied to free will, which i think u yourself are skeptical of. seems to me that ‘morality’ as a concept tends to dogmas, closely related to ‘sin’, used to shame and manipulate.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:51 pm
Red Eft
You quoted:
“Bailey, once we realize there is no MEANING, we are free to make meaning wherever we want. Once we realize there is no PURPOSE, we are free to follow whatever purpose we decide on. Once we realize that Near Term Extinction is poised over all living creatures, we are free to enjoy each moment for all that moment holds”
How about just realising you are free.
Then it follows that we are free….No?
NTE just happens to be a cypher to wake us up to ‘now’, and that is not the ordinary ‘now’…It is tha big …. ‘NOW”!
Woopee!
It reminds me of …..the cleche closing dramatic scenes of ‘Indianna Jones and The Last Crusade’, where Indie is reaching for the Holy Grail but will lose his life. His dad uses his real name, and that wakes Indie up to the illusion of the Grail, as prized object …… but in reverse.
Once we really get NTE, we also have to get our own death somewhere in the mix, and when we do, it is all about NOW.
What codes, what ethics what awareness what human qualities come to the foreground when we really accept death is 100% happening to us?
I believe it is the best qualities in humanity that shine, and outshine all the petty egocentrism of convoluted game-life, evident in urber-neo-empire-games-living.
Guy’s term, often missed in the focus on temperature, oxygen, food, and water, is ‘decent human community’. If we are always seeking the Holy Grail of Empire – which is to be free of any obligation to anyone, law or state, then we will never see the need for a ‘decent human community’.
We could do with some of that right now, regardless of NTE, but if the awareness of NTE is what it takes to generate some, then better that than not, sans the destruction of the living planet, of course.
Just sayin.
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:25 pm
Here is the actual current report on Monsant(no) I was referring to.
http://www.ubalert.com/bwwb?open_ctab=1
Deadly Viral Gene Discovered in Commercial GMO Crops, Study Finds
Italy Severe // Poisoning
An Italian study found that Monsanto’s NK603 genetically-modified (GM) corn causes serious organ damage and tumors in mammals. This reports issued by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has discovered that most GMOs in commercial use today contain a hidden viral gene that appears to be unsafe for human consumption. The study was entitled Possible consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in plant transformation vectors used and the viral gene VI in transgenic plants. The report highlights that fact that 54 of the 86 GMO traits currently approved for use, or roughly 63 percent, contain a strange viral gene known as “Gene VI” that researchers have found alters the normal function of crops. This alteration is present in most of the widely-grown GMOs in commercial use today, including both NK603 and MON810 corn, as well as Roundup-Ready soybeans, all of which are produced by Monsanto. The gene can induce unintended phenotypic changes, which can involve serious physical and biochemical mutations, in organisms. Based on earlier research involving the link between viral genes and plant and human health, the new discovery raises serious concerns about the safety of many GMOs in commercial production today.
20 hours ago
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:55 pm
@u
I keep wondering why I find this so much of a relief. Partly it seems to be related to being able finally to let go of blame. Here’s the story of my journey so far.
I started off as the son of enlightened parents who are committed to social justice. I learned that CEOs, politicians and bankers are evil people, out to commit immoral acts solely to enrich themselves and make the little people (us) suffer. But the more CEOs, politicians and bankers I met, the more I realized they were pretty ordinary people, with the same kinds of dreams as any of us, just with a different set of skills and connections. So I’ve been fairly sure for a while now that they aren’t intrinsically evil people – at least not any more evil that the rest of us.
Then I tried on the “broken species” theory so beloved by Jay Hansen et al. But I soon asked myself whether it was reasonable to believe that an entire species that had been living on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, and making a general success of it, could be fundamentally broken. It did’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that our entire species suffers from a general moral failure, a genetic breakdown, or any other fundamental brokenness that makes us Bad People.
The Paul Kingsnorths and Daniel Quinns of the world think we’re telling ourselves bad stories. I adopted this view for a while, until I realized it just begs the question. If it’s true, why are so many good people telling themselves bad stories?
So we aren’t evil, we aren’t broken, and it’s not that bad stories that are corrupting our nature. But still, despite our growing awareness in the 50 years since that “Silent Spring”, we persist in operating in ways that we know intellectually are going to damage us – severely. We can’t seem to stop driving towards the cliff. It’s almost like some other force has its foot on the accelerator – almost as though our species has been possessed.
Since I don’t believe in possession by evil spirits, I wanted to find out why we can’t stop behaving like this. If there is some other force mediating our behavior, what is it and where is it coming from? I started hunting for natural forces outside of “human nature”.
The first satisfying candidate I found was Marvin Harris’s principle of “Infrastructural Determinism”. It accurately represented the human situation as I understand it. It is based deductions from observations of patterns of general cultural behavior, patterns that could be the result of impersonal forces at work. So I followed that lead.
But there is no suitable scientific theory underpinning Harris’s work, and the trail went cold. then recently I read about H.T. Odum’s Maximum Power Principle. That turned out to be closer to being an explanation, in that it addressed both living and non-living systems in a uniform way, and produced the kinds of effects I see in the non-living, living non-human and the human world. It seemed to represent a natural principle, but it was still just an observation, not a theory. The science of “why” was still missing.
And along came Dr. Swenson’s LMEP. Eureka. We are not evil, we’re not broken, we’re not stupid, or telling ourselves broken stories, or possessed. In fact there is an unseen foot on the accelerator. but it’s not living, and it’s not God – not even his Shadow side. It’s a natural principle that shapes the cosmos itself, driving it towards thermal equilibrium by the fastest route possible – which just happens to run through our living room. We have been molded in its image – but on a planet with lots and lots of stored carbon, and with enormous problem-solving brains. The outcome is a foregone conclusion.
So there is, in the end, no blame or failure attached to any of the active players in this unfolding Greek tragedy. It is what it is. We are what we are. We may not like (we may even hate) the realization that we are not in control, but that too simply is what it is.
Working in our favour, we have consciousness, intelligence, imagination and compassion and courage. Some of us even develop wisdom. We can, if we so choose, treat the whole human Odyssey as our species’ Hero’s Journey.
Using that metaphor, for those of us who have arrived here, on Guy’s blog at the beginning of 2013, this time represents our greatest trial. It is our Dark Night of the Soul. How will we rise to the demand it is making of us – the demand for surrender, to let go of blame, shame, anger, despair and all desire for attachment and control? If we can look it in the eye and not defend ourselves against the fear, what reward might be on the other side? We can only imagine.
Yet even that question needs to be abandoned now. Our task, our test, may be simply to live with the knowledge we now have, without letting go of our humanity.
Is this hope? That’s for each of us to decide.
March 3rd, 2013 at 9:58 pm
And how do I edit a posted comment on this dain-bramaged software?
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:09 pm
OzMan,
Hello! I did not think Kathy C’s comment to Bailey indicated that the freedom to define meaning and purpose excluded “decent human community” or suggests no obligation to our fellow man. Quite the contrary in my experience the acceptance of a coming environmental holocaust has softened my interactions with others. Little things like being polite and patient. Not having to be right or agreed with, to be quiet instead. But I am still working out how to exist in this knowledge in a way that both contributes positively and also allows for me to cherish the fragile beauties critical to MY now. As far as truly internalizing my death and freedom I’m not there. I flip out if I’m in a confined space with someone who has a cold, so clearly I have not conquered fear and therefore, cannot be free- or at least in the way I think you are saying.
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:28 pm
@paul chefurka
Your conclusion sounds correct. Thank you for sharing your path of inquiry. Letting go of assigning blame is critical. I have said here before that i arrived at “everyone’s to blame; no ones to blame” Now that I stopped burning like a sun of rage there is time and the proper attitude to get on with being in love with the living world. Tiny victories are good enough.
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:32 pm
“And how do I edit a posted comment on this dain-bramaged software?”
Finally, understanding that we are but robots, in the service of entropy, we have surmounted the pinnacle height of wisdom, yet, this damnable html, it’s a vexing curse, & we’re unlikely to ever ascertain it’s mysteries!
March 3rd, 2013 at 10:42 pm
Guy, is the same as the Gulf Stream current shooting up the Fram Straight, or a phenomena that is occurring as an addition to it?
====
Guy McPherson Says:
March 3rd, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Gulf Stream Diversion: “Gulf Stream diverged well to the north of its normal path beginning in late October 2011, causing the warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures along the New England continental shelf.”
March 4th, 2013 at 2:31 am
The increased salinity of the oceans doesn’t make sense. All the melting ice adds fresh water to the oceans which would lower the salinity. A thought I had is the fresh ice water is cold and heavy and thus flows to the deepest areas far out to sea, not mixing well with the warmer salt water even though the salt also makes water heavier. More time is needed to get the mixing done and melting is happening too fast for mixing to keep up. Thus the warm, more shallow waters close to land evaporate more to the air leaving a greater salt content in those waters, not the entire ocean.
Or maybe it’s all that salt they put on the roads that washes to sea. Probably this doesn’t affect the oceans but it sure sells new cars. Is that a positive feedback?
March 4th, 2013 at 3:44 am
More details:
http://www.awi.de/en/research/research_divisions/geosciences/marine_geology_and_paleontology/research_themes/bathymetry_and_geodesy/bathymetric_chart_of_the_fram_strait_bcfs/regional_setting_and_relevance/
March 4th, 2013 at 3:45 am
Oz man “How about just realising you are free.”
Overcoming fear of death is a great freedom. I have no fear of being dead.
Unfortunately there are many routes to death and most not pleasant. I have not overcome the fear of how I might die or how I might be forced to live until I die (think FEMA camps – you have something like that in Australia?) Being Free in a FEMA camp will take a strong mind and great courage.
As always by death I mean that event
when rigor mortis sets in, followed by other things you can read about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver
March 4th, 2013 at 4:09 am
BTW a very interesting read is Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Book description at Amazon “”One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year….Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.”—Entertainment Weekly
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.
In this fascinating, ennobling account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries—from the anatomy labs and human-sourced pharmacies of medieval and nineteenth-century Europe to a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab, to a Scandinavian funeral directors’ conference on human composting. In her droll, inimitable voice, Roach tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.”
March 4th, 2013 at 4:26 am
@ Paul C.
There’s a lot to respond to there, I have a lot to say…
May I suggest we move the conversation to the slightly less brain damaged software at the ning forum and start a thread there ?
Bit like moving from this table to another table where we can fit more chairs ?
March 4th, 2013 at 4:28 am
Paul: i think the theory has merit, but what about all the “other” choices people make. If it isn’t “immoral,” ie. not favorable behavior, why aren’t more people killing each other for any reason whatsoever, or sexual deviancy like rape, or greed-mongering like the Kochs, or polluting the environment like Massey Energy – if there isn’t any meaning, purpose, morality or control, why aren’t we all just destroying ourselves and the planet faster? What’s the hold-up?
(ala OzMan, faux presidential radio announcement in the near future:)
Come on people – you can do better than this – go out and kill somebody, trash your environment and get your entire community to jump off the Verranzano-Narrows Bridge! Let’s go! Look at some of the other countries – rioting, raping children, burning the rainforest – use your imagination and let’s get to it! Gotta keep that entropy law happy! Bankers – help yourself to people’s savings; “law enforcement” (tee-hee) shoot to kill, even on speeding tickets! Airline mechanics – don’t put all the parts back, let ‘em crash! i’m okaying the XL pipeline to help out, while Monsanto is doing its best to poison everyone, so please, do your part and help entropy destroy everything!
i wonder what exciting whimsical principles other universes are “built” on? It can’t be to stay in an ideal state for as long as possible – no, that wouldn’t be any fun – how about some wanton destruction, death, pestilence, rot, pollution and perversion to add some spice to life?! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
i always thought we were little bits of the consciousness (awareness) of the universe in our individual location, but now it looks like that’s just an illusion and that our “real” identity is about something else entirely, whether we “become” murderers or pedophile priests or gardeners or teachers or Hitler or Mother Theresa. Oh, that’s so much better (. . . okay, snark off now)
March 4th, 2013 at 5:44 am
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/2-day-notice-earth-gets-another-close-graze-by-newly-discovered-asteroid-on-march-4/
March 4, 2013 – SPACE – A newly found asteroid will pass just inside the orbit of the Moon, with its closest approach on March 4, 2013 at 07:35 UTC. Named 2013 EC, the asteroid is about the size of the space rock that exploded over Russia two and a half weeks ago, somewhere between 10-17 meters wide (the Russian meteorite is estimated to be about 15 meters wide when it entered Earth’s atmosphere). 2014 EC was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona on March 2. There is no chance this asteroid will hit Earth. 2013 EC will come within 396,000 kilometers from Earth, (246,000 miles, or around 1.0 lunar distance, 0.0026 AU. The Moon’s distance from the Earth varies between 363,104 km (225,622 miles) at perigee (closest) and 406,696 km (252,088 miles) at apogee (most distant point). Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project had a live view of the asteroid when it was about twice the distance of the Moon, and a replay of that webcast is available below. “That we are finding all these asteroids recently does not mean that we are being visited by more asteroids,” Masi said during the webcast, “just that our ability to detect them has gotten so much better. Our technology has improved a lot over the past decades.” –Universe Today
March 4th, 2013 at 6:00 am
With all the austerity coming downt he pike now, here’s a “solution” (ala soylent green):
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/03/02/eat-the-rich
March 4th, 2013 at 6:02 am
Tom morals are not from outside, they are part of our genetic makeup. We are social critters so we have programs that make the social world (tribe) work as that benefits our genes. We no longer live in the world in which those programs were evolved, so they get messed up. People like to laud mothers for being these wonderful self sacrificing critters (which most aren’t) when in fact they are just following the programs for kin selection. That is why in hunter-gatherer tribes great care can be taken for children, but in times of hardship an infant may be killed.
When the environment changes, what is a beneficial trait may become no longer beneficial, as the dinosaurs found out. We had a sweet tooth that worked well when sweets were scarce but desirable for their quick energy. Now they are no longer scarce and the program becomes counter productive. I believe our moral programs are still working, people still want the world and humanity to survive, its just that some of our programs that worked in scarcity are out of whack in this temporary abundance our technology has created. Further our morals are programs that were designed to work in tribes, not in a global community So like the dinosaurs….
Craig Dilworth discusses morals in Too Smart for our Own Good – a tedious but worthwhile read.
short version at http://candobetter.net/node/2755
snippet
In most cases these three types of instinct work in concert. But in certain situations there can arise a ‘conflict of interest’ among them. In such a case the more-basic instincts have a tendency to override the less-basic (e.g. hunger takes precedence over the sexual drive), a phenomenon which, if it persists too far, can lead to disequilibrium and the demise of the species. In this re-gard, the social instincts differ from the survival and sexual instincts in that they may support the species’ existence at the expense of particular individuals’ gene lines, at least in the short term. Thus there can arise situations in which an individual’s supporting its own genetic fitness (sexual instincts) can reduce the fitness of the species – such as when a pair rears more than a replace-ment number of offspring in an overpopulated group. Infanticide, for example, is the result of the operation of a social instinct that helps maintain the health of the group. It is here, in the context of the manifestation of social instincts, that altruism and morals come into existence.
March 4th, 2013 at 6:08 am
Red Eft
I didn’t mean to imply you were missing some of those things, you probably caught me out winging about the relative lack of the ‘decent human community’, and I should have slipped it onto another comment.
Sorry for that imlication when it was not intended.
Re the death aclimatisation thing, I get that it is not so simple as thinking it is easy. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to be dead, but it will happen, some day some way, so no use pretending.
Each day, each person is a gift.
Just sayin…
March 4th, 2013 at 6:11 am
Paul, I’m not sure why there has to be any “why” other than a human desire for an explanation for something that just IS (which would be our intrinsic nature to use everything up).
I can’t follow all your energy entropy theories however, if they rest on our use of fossil fuels, I don’t think it’s valid. Our species was fantatically adept and pushing species to extinction and destroying entire ecosystems without using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels just sped things up quite a bit.
It seems to me the outcome was a foregone conclusion from the moment we learnt to use fire and were able to shed the constraints imposed on us by Nature (colonizing really cold places, for example).
Blame? I blame Prometheus.
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-blame-prometheus.html
March 4th, 2013 at 6:20 am
@Tom
Paul: i think the theory has merit, but what about all the “other” choices people make. If it isn’t “immoral,” ie. not favorable behavior, why aren’t more people killing each other for any reason whatsoever..
In light of the theory concerning removing the speed bumps (energy traps) towards free energy to useless energy (increase of entropy), the things you have mentioned above would disrupt society and therefore, slow down its consumption of energy.
It makes sense that life is only carbon based (so far as we can determine). Why? because carbon is a potential free energy speed bump. CO2 (Being potential free energy) is also a speed bump, and being the early atmosphere was full of it, that is another theory as to why life developed; As the earth cooled, a process needed to exist that liberated this potential free energy. That process was life.
March 4th, 2013 at 6:27 am
..BUT, we have the problem that humans are now creating more CO2 so things would seem a little more complicated; The earth will cool again and something else will need to liberated stored energy in CO2 via conversion to other hydrocarbons.
I am still not convinced there is not teleology involved, and that the speed bumps are not epi-phenomenal towards life (albeit temporal).
March 4th, 2013 at 7:53 am
@ Paul, others
This discussion re Swenson and entropy, etc, has already spread across two of Guy’s posts, may well extend much further, so I took the liberty of posting my reply on NTE.
Also there’s time to edit and other advantages.
http://neartermextinction.ning.com/forum/topics/paul-chefurka-s-thoughts-re-rod-swenson-s-ideas-concerning
March 4th, 2013 at 8:03 am
Hamlet Jones, in response to your question, “YES.” The reported phenomenon is part of the larger phenomenon, i.e., a bit more evidence in line with an altered Thermohaline Conveyor Belt (aka Gulf Stream).
March 4th, 2013 at 8:31 am
I will say one more thing about entropy and then ‘try’ to shut up. Perhaps Paul can comment, as I don’t think he is on the forum site? It’s a tangent to all discussions, but has been bugging me.
Anyhow, having a degree in engineering and minor in physics, I am fascinated by entropy, thermodynamics etc. One thing which is counter intuitive to me concerns the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy (Shannon’s etc). It takes more information to describe a random, disordered system (high entropy), than a highly ordered one. But then, this seems to imply that the complexity (highly ordered, low entropy) of the human brain would be described with less information. What a paradox!
March 4th, 2013 at 8:34 am
Kathy C and others
Some ways to go:
Heart attack, anaphylactic shock from bee sting in back of throat, blunt force trauma to head in accidental car crash, bus collision, special ops hit( er.. erasure.?), knife attack by student, waterboarded once too many, necrotic spider bite, polar bear attach, viral pandemic, hypothermia exposure to cold in woods, ruptured appendix, laceration to jugular in barfight, misallocation of medicine in hospital for minor operation, electrocution by toaster in bath (Groundhog Day again and again), slip in shower, break and enter homocide, accidental poisoning by mushrooms, use of recreational drugs badly measured, dissentry in non Anex-1 country hospital, crane collapsing on head, lightening strike, throw self on hand granade to save fellow soldiers, (it did happen), train derailment, volcanic eruption, grandstand collapse, drowning in pool after slipping while drunk alone at night, gang related shooting, stroke, caught in rip at unfamiliar beach, mine collapse, smoke inhalation in house fire while sleeping, crushed by buliding in earthquake, hiking and walk off cliff in fog, skiing and oops….over the edge, parrachute failure, tribal war raid gone bad, cop tasers you too many times, cooped up in FEMA camp with coughing/sweating/itchy eyes friendlies, radiation poisoning, drinking contaminated water for the thousandth time and system too weak to cope, heat exhaustion, asthma attack, sinkhole collapse of home while inside, fall dowm manhole in street(cover missing), run through plate glass window cut artery, hanged by rope by mob rivals (suicide note left on bed but something just not right to investigating cop), alcahol poisoning after loss of sweetheart and drinking binge(suicide…?), swept away in flood, boyhood prank with hammer to head from slightly older brother(three stooges slapstick), accidental firarm discharging while cleaning same, exposure to Chromium as child from local chemical plant, industrial accident at nuclear plant, midair plane collission, accumulation of toxins in food lead to ovarian cancer diagnosed too late, attacked by giant chicken, salmonilla poisoning, abseiling accident, bashing by mother in rage over husbands adultery (small child), asbestos lung cancer, political assassination in open car in Dallas – Texas, gunshot in shower recess through door by boyfriend(double leg amputee), powdermonkey accident, cyanide capsule (cold war…?), emphetamine lab explosion, oil rig explosion, bermuda triangle disappearence(iffy… but still dead), death in custody, drowned at sea, caught in mudslide, fall into continuous concrete pour pylon for bridge (nobody saw), decapitation from rope snap at ferry wharf, mountaineering exposure, helicopter accident, metal guillotine workshop accident, cotton mill mouth cancer, mercury poisoning accumulation toxicity, bull terrier attack to toddler, bashed to death by pimp, smallpox infection, gassed in flat while sleeping by rival crack gang member, casualty of war, fall from tree, hit by train, crushed by fall between moored river boat and peir, acute meningitis, sleepwalked onto interstate highway, papercut to finger leads to heart failure 3 days later (cause of death heart failure…but no known cause), ran out fire escape during fire in appartment building and fire escap emissing, test polot accident, horse riding throw helmet comes off head trauma, asphixiated by atomised flour in silly game in bakery, shot in crossfire in warzone acting as journalist (turning camera on self as dies), suffocated in large fish storage vat on factory fishing vessil at sea (only half body ever recovered during processing), garrotted by motorboat run over while backstroking at beach, human trial of drug has complications, bled to death in alley in metropolitan area while raped and stasbbed over 40 minute ordeal while hundreds in surrounding tennements heard screams for help but no one came or called cops, crushed as steel gurders collapse from faulty welds on roof supports above, caught in bushfire, 2 lateral brain tumours caused by mobile phone use inopperable (Alan Bond’s lawyer), punched in head by drunk thug at night while walking to train alone, AIDS contracted from dirty needle shared at party for graduation, crushed while caught in moving ship entering water on slipway from drydock (as champaign bottle is smashed on prow of ship), slipped on glacier into crevass, killed by aunt as act of infantacide in moutainous region of Japan as winter approaches in 16th Century, disposable lighter explosion to face massive infection to brain 3 days later, walking away unhurt from motorbike crash only to be hit by truck (truck driver nodded off), falling fromroof while tiling and harness not attached(it was too restrictive), gas explosion at factory, rockfall to head when hiking, fireman caught in burning building collapse, brain tumour from benzine exposure at gas station for 20 years, mauled by wild pig, seeing your tribe massacred decapitated by mounted soldier as you try to resist (young boy not yet warrior), bridge collapse over river, flash flood while sleeping in tent, working too close to transformer at electrical substation and …zap, stomped by elephant, caught in storm water drain during swift downpour, locked in bank vault(had fun while air lasted pretending to be wealthy banker – but was wealthy banker), high speed racing car crash (replayed many times on camera),kicked in head by mule, diving into shallow pool, falling into ocean while whaling, hit by truck from behind while cycling (with helmet on), tree branch falls on family in tent at nigh in campground(kills mother and only child, husband physically umhurtnight), gunshot wounds during raid in Abatabhad, gas chamber, tortured by CIA, shark attack, crucifixion, kayaking accident, multiple organ cancers after wartime cleanup duty at nuclear test site in central Australian desert, fancy light sabre move cuts self in half (watched in amazement as did it to self….just kidding), prop malfunction on stage (real knife..), bleed to death from stabbing after rape in park in South African city, mine detonation in farmland, gangreen from leg amputation in warzone trench, sniper fire while saving Private Ryan, bystander being cleaned up by professional hitman, drowning by allegator attack, swallow marble in windpipe, snow cave collapse, wolf attack, measles, crushed by stage collapse at rock concert (not AC/DC, but would be the best option if had a choice)exhaustion from continuous computer gamingsomewhere in Korea, speargun accident, locked in older fridge, stingray barb to chest, unrecognisable child remains from cluster bomb in field mistaken for aid drop package, starvation, falcon drops large nut on bushwalker’s head, wake up in coffin (already had funeral service), truck broken down on train track, impaled on fence after bicycle chase from cops, trampled by soccer crowd in stadium riot, ultralight plane accident, fall from sttel gurder on construction of skyscraper, bomb idsposal gone bad, bashing in outback strret by local cops (got away with it), exhaustion from endless hiccups, poisoned by otherwise loving mother(Munchhousen Syndrome), killed by son on narrow road somwhere on outskirts of Thebes in ancient Greece, testing experimental rocket car machine collision with desert messa circa 20 meters above raod level, (heavy airplane solid fuel booster strapped to ute), shot on the job as security guard for armoured van, trapise accident, accidental suffocation by parent in bed (infant), stonefish barb attack, drunken asleep on major raod runover, saving the life of another….or my all time favourite…..
Loss of will to live…..
In any case, whichever circumstance begins the process of dying, it soon gets to the same place of receeding perception from the bodymind, and then the adventure really gets individual, unique, and everyone is equally equipped to journey henceforth, no matter what circumstance they enjoyed,or endured in thier lifetime, however long or short it was.
The Illustrated Man …..
‘They are Skin Illustrations’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7hgaOTyPw
Do you really want to look…?
March 4th, 2013 at 8:44 am
@KathyC “Once we realize there is no MEANING, we are free to make meaning wherever we want. Once we realize there is no PURPOSE, we are free to follow whatever purpose we decide on.
@Bailey “Thanks Kathy and I get your drift. But still, you have to admit that there does seem to be a huge wind of futility stirring about (so far as our goals any longer having any significance even short term).”
Kathy, bravo – well stated. Now, since you definitely “get it”, why are you depressed? Same to Bailey – why the sense of futility?
I must be a strange bird, because I had this shit figured out before I was 20. Maybe it was my dad, the agency guy, who clued me into how things really operated.
From the very start, I never “believed” any self-serving propaganda about the system, but understood the way to maximize whatever it was that I wanted to do, which was the real key to the issue, was to completely blend in and act like I was a willing, happy cog in the machine.
That meant the best suits, the best shoes, a good haircut, and no weird complaining or alternative behavior. Just as important was never going into debt, to be happy living an ascetic lifestyle, other than springing for ‘costumes’ that would keep others who I needed to make comfortable paying me $ from asking too many questions.
The net net is a head full of hair, none of it grey, a healthy body that can out-compete 99% of those years younger, and a ‘who gives a shit’ attitude whenever I see evidence of complaining, bitching & moaning.
It is what it is – it’s a real testament to hubris, to ego, to think for even one moment that you were anything than a biological heat sink that was going to make a difference.
Today is another wonderful sunny day in La La Land; what will I do today? Anyone can live this lifestyle – you just have to understand what it takes. And what it takes is what Guy did – just walk away. Walk away from expectations, from obligations, from trying to explain or justify yourself. Just walk away.
March 4th, 2013 at 8:53 am
Oz yes I agree those are all ways of dying. I do not agree that there is any journey at all after the moment of death. Near death experiences can be replicated with various drugs. They can also be false memories produced by suggestion. I can’t say there is nothing after death, but I fervently hope there isn’t. I suspect that most people who think there is something after death do so because they fervently hope there is. BTW Raymond Moody who documented NDE’s found them all lovely at first, but then later found ones that were more like descent into hell. He also wrote a book on Elvis sightings, wishing he would be one of the lucky ones to see Elvis’s ghost.
I’m with Epicurus on this one
Faith in immortality was born of the greed of unsatisfied people who make unwise use of the time that nature has allotted us. But the wise man finds his life span sufficient to complete the full circle of attainable pleasures, and when the time of death comes, he will leave the table, satisfied, freeing a place for other guests. For the wise man one human life is sufficient, and a stupid man will not know what to do with eternity. Epicurus
Again for those who want to see the rates of death from various reason
http://www.fabulant.com/downloadcenter/deathcounter/deathcounter.html
March 4th, 2013 at 8:57 am
@ B9K9
Don’t think I’d enjoy time in your company.
It is what it is – it’s a real testament to hubris, to ego, to think for even one moment that you were anything than a biological heat sink that was going to make a difference.
The problem is people who think like you do. I changed the world. The course of events. The world is different because of ME. Because of some actions that I took. If I had not existed, if I had not done what I did, the world would not be quite the same. What I did made it better, against all the odds. That could only have happened because there were many other people also pushing in that direction, although I never knew or met them, and they never knew or met me.
Best suits ? Best shoes ? Good haircut ? Fuck that. What a load of crap.
March 4th, 2013 at 8:59 am
Wiki has a list of unusual deaths – fascinating reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths
Here are a few
1387: Charles II of Navarre, after having been wrapped in bandages soaked in brandy in an attempt to cure an illness, was burned alive when a servant accidentally set the bandages on fire.[27]
1687: Jean-Baptiste Lully, the French composer, died of a gangrenous abscess after piercing his foot with a staff while he was vigorously conducting a Te Deum. It was customary at that time to conduct by banging a staff on the floor.[39]
1755: Henry Hall died from injuries he sustained after molten lead fell into his throat while he was looking up at a burning lighthouse.
1871: Clement Vallandigham, a lawyer and Ohio politician, was demonstrating how a victim may possibly have shot himself while drawing a weapon from a kneeling position when he shot himself in the process. Though the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was ultimately cleared, Vallandigham died from his wound.[56]
1919: In the Boston Molasses Disaster, 21 people were killed and 150 were injured when a tank containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal (8,700,000 L) of molasses exploded, sending a wave travelling at approximately 35 mph (56 km/h) through part of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.[62][63]
1930: William Kogut, an inmate on death row at San Quentin, committed suicide with a pipe bomb created from several packs of playing cards and the hollow leg from his cot. At the time, the red ink in playing cards contained flammable nitrocellulose, which when wet can create an explosive mixture. Kogut used the heater in his cell to activate the bomb.[78][79]
March 4th, 2013 at 9:02 am
Some barely live before they die – like the du babies in Afganistan, and Iraq
http://prisonerofjoy.blogspot.ca/2008_11_01_archive.html
do these babies get a special journey when they die to make up for the horror of their birth?
March 4th, 2013 at 9:12 am
B9K9 Kathy, bravo – well stated. Now, since you definitely “get it”, why are you depressed? Same to Bailey – why the sense of futility?
I was depressed when I thought there had to be meaning – I am not depressed now. When I gave up God I thought I would have a big hole in my life – turned out I was wrong, I was much happier. Now knowing it is over and means nothing I feel a weight lifted.
The biggest depression of my life came from spending time in Haiti trying to help save babies. When I realized that saving babies saved them to a life of poverty and added to the overwhelming overpopulation and attendant environmental structure I was very depressed. How could good not be good? How could good also be evil…. Well there is no ultimate good or evil. The good feelings I had caring for babies and the good they felt being cared for was enough good regardless of how it all plays out.
My life now is simple and good.
March 4th, 2013 at 9:15 am
@B9K9
Your sentiments make me think you might be Mr. Lebowski (The Dude abides). Great movie by the way..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCgeaNfcw-w
March 4th, 2013 at 9:20 am
@ Kathy C.
Tom morals are not from outside, they are part of our genetic makeup. We are social critters so we have programs that make the social world (tribe) work as that benefits our genes…. etc
I think that this genetic determinism and the whole darwinist understanding which everyone, including me, has had, has just been overthrown in the last two or three days, on this blog. Readers may not have noticed the revolution.
It no longer makes sense to say that we are, as it were, ‘victims’ of out genetic make up.
The biological model that everyone has been following ( everyone, that is, who accepts evolution ) tries to explain our behaviour by deriving principles from the animal kingdom.
However, it would now appear, following what Paul Chefurka found in Rod Swenson’s work, that these apparent principles of the animal kingdom are not what they seem. They are actually following deeper principles, based in physics.
What this means is that the whole picture must be revised.
March 4th, 2013 at 9:34 am
After sitting around for two hours, the whole jury pool for the week got dismissed without even making it “upstairs” to where the courts actually meet. That’s kind of a let down, but at least I’m free.
Pardon me for not giving a shit about whatever principles of the animal kingdom just got overturned here in front of our eyes! Let’s tear down the dominant culture next, and then we might have accomplished something.
Right now, today, the dominant culture is busily killing the earth. That is the only goddamn thing we should care about, if we care about life.
The rest is just mental masturbation. Feels great. Leaves a mess.
March 4th, 2013 at 10:00 am
@Bailey
Swenson mentions Shannon and information entropy briefly in the paper that originally upset my applecart (http://rodswenson.com/humaneco.pdf):
“Since its coinage by Clausius to refer to the dissipated potential in a system the word “entropy” has taken on numerous, and non-physical, as well as subjective, or observer-dependent quantities (e.g., Shannon’s information “entropy”) where the “entropy” of a system depends on what an individual knows about it. The reader should be aware that some authors illegitimately conflate these meanings. In the present paper, to be clear, the word entropy is used in its physical thermodynamic sense as defined.
I don’t know exactly what he means by this, but I’m going to investigate.
@u
I’ll be over to ning later on. Yes, it is truly revolutionary. I wonder how hard it’s going to be to get the point across to those who are heavily invested in an emotional, human-centric (or self-centric) perspective. And whether it would make any difference at all to anything if they did “get it”. Still chewing…
March 4th, 2013 at 10:02 am
@ wildwoman
Understanding the nature of nature, and tearing down the dominant culture are not mutually exclusive objectives.
March 4th, 2013 at 10:17 am
@ Paul
Yes. Oh, maybe it’s not about getting the point across to those who are heavily invested, etc, because the whole of the human race are heavily invested, but this is a weapon which cleaves all previous justifications and excuses for lack of action, I think, perhaps we start with the intelligentsia, chop their heads off, and then work down through the ranks, so to speak
Yes, look forward to continuing on ning…
March 4th, 2013 at 10:19 am
@wildwoman
I understand where you’re coming from. But what if a deeper understanding of What’s Really Going On results in strong evidence that the dominant culture cannot dismantle itself (with the implication that “we” are in no way outside it)? Shouldn’t that prompt us to go back and reassess what we’re trying to do?
You’re welcome to continue disregarding this line of thought – it’s a bit old thermodynamic universe with room enough for all of us. Most people in the dominant culture do disregard this line of thought, after all.
March 4th, 2013 at 10:57 am
.
Unwell
Future’s gone; found a new place to dwell:
The Grand Doomer Collapse Hotel,
Where, here in my cell,
I watch the shit jell,
Feeling weakened, stressed out, and unwell.
March 4th, 2013 at 11:53 am
.
Humanity’s old, you can tell:
Every day something new goes to hell;
It’s not yet the knell,
But a sense you can’t quell
Has you feeling vaguely unwell.
March 4th, 2013 at 11:55 am
Name calling; Guy isn’t the only one. Kunstler got nailed and so did Chomsky:
http://www.dcdave.com/article5/121108.htm
March 4th, 2013 at 1:34 pm
The Grand Doomer Collapse Hotel? Benjamin is that where the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is?
March 4th, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Whoa. So much happened when I was offline for all of a Sunday, out digging in my not-frozen garden.
This revolutionary thinking is incredibly interesting to me. I still have questions, Paul, so don’t go away.
1. As a theory, can you think of a way to disconfirm it?
2. As a theory, do you have hypotheses that can be tested?
I still think withdrawal is my path, but if I had given up computers last Friday I wouldn’t have been given this wonderful gift of a way to think about life, the universe, and everything.
It will take me a while to work out all the ramifications of what this means to what I do, how I perceive things, how I relate to others, etc.
Wolfbird, you’ve put words to this that make a lot of sense to me. I’ll have to read them over about a zillion times before it sinks in, but this is about as mind-blowing as an experience I had at age 14.
At the time, I was trying to impress an “older man” (about age 20) who was majoring in physics. So I kept asking him questions about what he was studying. This always impresses men. So he told me about general relativity, special relativity, quantum theory, etc. and I kept asking him more and more questions. He was very good at explaining things and I suddenly began to actually understand him. My natural curiosity began to take over and I forgot about him as a member of the opposite sex and instead wanted to know as much as he could tell me.
I’ve never forgotten the feeling of being changed very deeply by someone’s words about the big picture. I mean the biggest picture, the biggest picture there is.
This is another of those times.
I think I get this, and I think it’s going to mean a different internal life for me.
Today I got a call from a dear friend. He said he has been given six months to live. I told him he was lucky. He said he knew that. I told him that he could now say to people, “I know what I’m going to die of, and you-oo don’t! Neener Neener Neener!” He laughed.
March 4th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Kathy C
“do these babies get a special journey when they die to make up for the horror of their birth?”
I don’t recall having an easy birth either.
Yes I forgot to mention DU babies lasting 20 mins in Iraqi hospital wards, but I actually refrained from putting too many ‘baby’ death scenarios in the listso not as to upset you too much. But actually baby deaths would have to be statistically pretty high on the list if it was percentage ranked since humans were, well, humans, I’m guessing.
I reckon that original wize woman who began the cult of using figurines like Venus of Woolendorf and other Neolithic figures has a lot to answer for if one tries to find a reason for our overpopulation.
IMO this wize woman figures out that mothers to be who were fat had higher birth weight babies, who by and large had higher chance of survival…No?
This has always been the implication of the cult of fat lady figures like Venus of Wolendorf.
See the great and often hillarious film based on a lot of contemporary anthropology:
‘Quest for fire’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSWjkYAjAzA
There are hunter worrior skinny females and rather portly fat females awaiting impregnation in this film, which makes for an interesting look on early human role asssignation.
The film follows a small group of neandertals looking to regain fire from a distant location, when they encounter a group of differently able homonitds…us.
It is on my top 10 list . Has Ron Pearlman as lead Neandertal.. Great casting IMO.
March 4th, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Kathy C., wonderful post re realism, pessimism and optimism.
BC Nurse Prof:
“They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction.”
This has been my approach for many years, pretty much based on religious models of monasteries. I can’t help it; I’m not a scientist, I am a philosopher and I have always been attracted to Buddhism in particular, and the very simple and humble life that is part of many religious traditions. Another reason I have been attracted to these frequently taboo belief systems is that they seem to recognize that human beings are capable of creating problems they cannot solve, which is a problem itself, and that problem might, in fact, be *the* problem.
I do not think such a perspective is so very far from conclusions drawn here.
It is difficult to simplify one’s life, but it is possible. Yes, do step back from the fray. Sit, and sit some more. Let some peace be. Turn it all off. Take naps. Do good along your path. Everything will still be there when or if you decide to join up with wave again, or it may come by and sweep you up, in which case you’ll be glad you took some time.
March 4th, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Good advice, Ess. Thanks, I intend to do just that. I’ve always told people that I live my life the same way I cook: either on “high” or “off”. Simmer for an HOUR? Are you crazy? Why can’t I just boil it for 15 minutes, fercrissakes?
My husband told someone once that he watches me go 90 miles an hour, hit a brick wall, and then collapse. He told them that he just tries to guess which way I’ll fall, so he can be there to catch me. So far, he’s been there every time.
March 4th, 2013 at 4:42 pm
Guy, did you send me an email today? Gmail says the one I received may not be from you, and at the same time, I received an odd thing about my profile at NTE.
Thanks,
judy
March 4th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
OK, so what is it exactly that negates Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky” ?
March 4th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Saving babies in Haiti, or Cambodia, etc requires overthrow of the dominant paradigm in the USA. Nothing more and nothing less.
March 4th, 2013 at 6:12 pm
@ BC Nurse Prof
Thanks for kind remarks, and remark to your dying friend made me laugh too …
Don’t know if anything negates Ward’s model. He dismisses Lovelock’s model. Afaik, those are the only models we have, other than the much more common very childish simplistic mechanistic reductionistic thinking of most people, most scientists, who only see a collection of pieces. Kind of like seeing a stripped down motor car, laid out on the lawn. They each recognise the bit they’ve been taught about, have no idea what the other bits are supposed to do, and no idea how the whole thing is supposed to fit together.
Lovelock says it fits together in one way, kinda takes care of itself, Ward says it fits together in a different way, always on the brink of falling to pieces. There’s also Lynn Margulis take, which I suppose is almost the same as Lovelock.
Ernst Mayr, who was probably the most distinguished authority ( ? ) is on record as saying there is no incompatibility between Lovelock and Darwin,but most neo-Darwinists don’t like Lovelock’s idea…
But anyway, on with the revolution, because I think a lot of that is now obsolete !
People used to say, what is life ? what’s the difference between animate and inanimate stuff ? And they wanted to know what caused stuff to organise itself into living forms, and along came Crick and Watson, and said its the DNA, and along came Dawkins and Ventner and sold us all a bunch of crap trying to explain every single damn thing as being determined by genes and became rich and famous for doing so…
Okay. So WHAT IS IT THAT ORGANISES THE DNA ?
And, when I get my answer to that question, I want my answer to What is it that organises THAT ? Right back to the beginning…
No handwaving, no bullshit. Where are ‘the rules’ ? Where are they hiding ?
How come stuff can organise itself into highly complex, indeed very beautiful and sophisticated patterns, nobody can explain this ? Nobody knows why ? Nobody in science even ASKS this ? They all so busy getting qualified and making careers and doing commercial research…
What Paul found, in Rod Swenson’s paper, gives us a whole new revelation. When energy flows, it wants to balance itself out. It can’t help it. Just a basic force. You’ve got a nice warm room. You open the door. The heat rushes out, the cold rushes in, until the temperature is balanced.
When this balancing happens, it seeks the quickest, fastest, easiest, route. Sure, there’s lots of little cracks in the floor and around the windows, it can seep through, but if the door is open, that’s the way it’s going to go.
So, that’s the idiots guide, for idiots like me, to understanding this fundamental cosmic principle re entropy. Energy wants to flow and balance out to zero.
And all of life on Earth can be viewed from this perspective. Energy, coming from the Sun, flowing through the system, towards a balance.
Once this idea clicks, just about everything that we’ve previously thought… well, it’s the paradigm shift thing. They hurt….
http://neartermextinction.ning.com/forum/topics/paul-chefurka-s-thoughts-re-rod-swenson-s-ideas-concerning
March 4th, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Kathy, that was a temporary accident; I was trying to write the second verse but Elvis reappeared.
March 4th, 2013 at 7:08 pm
@ BC Nurse Prof
1. As a theory, can you think of a way to disconfirm it?
2. As a theory, do you have hypotheses that can be tested?
I think it’s probably possible, if someone was smart enough.
I’m not able to do it, but I think someone calculated that only ten percent of the Sun’s energy that reaches Earth, actually runs through the living organisms. The rest eventually goes off again into Space. So I think it’s probably that ten percent that would be involved in the entropy and evolution part of the picture. So it might be possible to model that on computer, and see what happens.
According to Swenson : The world is in the order production business, including the business of producing living things and their perception and action capacities, because order produces entropy faster than disorder.
So maybe a computer model could test that as a hypothesis ? Perhaps it’s been done ?
http://www.ecologicalpsychology.com/SwenTurv.pdf
March 4th, 2013 at 8:17 pm
@ BC Nurse Prof
I’m an advocate for withdrawal as well, if that’s how one feels drawn. In fact, one of my mottos is “Don’t just do something! Sit there! I’ll trade you for the Tao of Winter in Canada
In general, though, I think that people should do whatever they feel called to d. Of course, since that’s what they’ll do anyway, it’s an easy call. It helps if one does it mindfully and free of guilt and blame. It won’t help the global situation, of course, but it feels much better to do whatever we do from a position of awareness and freedom.
About testing Swenson’s theory – he says it’s falsifiable in the Popperian sense, but all I’ve seen so far are confirmatory experiments like the Benard cells. I don’t have any hypotheses, since I’m satisfied with LMEP’s intuitive explanatory power as is. It has framed everything I’ve thrown at it so far exactly as it would if it were “true”, and that’s enough for me. I’m not that much of a formalist though, and if ideas are a little loose around the edges I’m OK with that. I don’t think this is the case with LMEP, but I don’t have the math/physics chops to say for sure.
March 4th, 2013 at 8:22 pm
To ulvfugl:
Yes. When looked at through the lens of cause and effect – which cannot be denied – every question ultimately leads back to the big bang.
Somehow it has always fallen flat for me, just like old, warm Pepsi or beer, as the whole enchilada. I can’t help it. I cannot consign everything to the “meaningless” and “random accident” bins. I can’t even consign it all to the “it’s whatever you make of it” variation of “meaningless.”
How can this extraordinary beauty that we see, the variety and range of life, the intelligence, humor mean nothing? Why does it harm us so much more if someone we love is violated terribly and murdered than it does if they die peacefully of old age, if nothing means anything other than what we choose? We’d all choose to never suffer, if we could choose, I would think.
March 4th, 2013 at 9:00 pm
Hi Ess,
Not even sure about the Cause and Effect thing. Have you read David Hume’s thoughts on that ? Bloody philosophers.
Anyway, yes. The pace of discovery during my lifetime has been extraordinary, but we’re overloaded with information, every day there’s press releases, somebody has found that there is no Dark Matter after all, or found the Dark Matter that everybody has been searching for… whatever…
I’m asking some very simple basic questions. Paul ( and Rod Swenson ) turned me on to a whole new way of seeing this world and the Universe.
If we start with the Big Bang, ( whatever it was and wherever it came from and why and what it means and all the mystery surrounding that, which remains unanswerable ) it was a huge release of energy, which has been spreading out ever since, and what seems to happen, is that energy, somehow, wants to organise itself, to find order, as in the Benard Cells Paul just mentioned, and all sorts of other forms, from galaxies in many forms, all the way to what we find here on Earth.
The physicists insist its all just random stuff doing its thing, without any purpose or meaning. And then the biologists come along, and say, ‘Well, life begins here, and has nothing to do with the physics, but it evolves, again with no purpose or meaning’.
I’m saying this is wrong. I’m not invoking God, or anything like that. No need to. What Swenson is saying is that, according to his understanding of thermodynamics, order is produced naturally and inevitably. So that’s why we see these emergent forms and patterns. All the way from galaxies to tornados to tortoises and to ourselves.
The bit that is hard to take, is that also means that what we humans are doing also follows this rule. Consuming the oil and the forests as fast as possible is as ‘natural’ as a flood of water flowing downhill by the quickest possible route.
This realisation fills me with horror and dismay.
The corollary is, that nobody can blame what is happening on our genetic heritage, or culture, or capitalism, or religion, or moral weakness, or anything else like that.
We’re evolved to follow a principle that’s simply built into the Universe, like gravity, or fire.
Which means, to my mind, that we are forced to re-appraise our situation.
March 4th, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Wealth in America
http://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
March 4th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
ulvfugl, you wrote, “And, when I get my answer to that question, I want my answer to What is it that organises THAT ? Right back to the beginning…”
It is a series of questions of, ‘what causes that?’
That’s what I meant. Ask enough questions, from any point, and you wind up back at the big bang. We might as well begin to answer all questions with “the big bang.”
Why do we have storms, Dad?
The big bang, son?
Why do we like girls/boys, Dad/Mom?
The big bang, dear.
There. We’ve just simplified it all.
March 4th, 2013 at 10:08 pm
I wish this program had an edit function.
March 4th, 2013 at 10:46 pm
@ Ess
Yes, I see what you mean, but that wasn’t quite what was in my mind, i should have expressed it better.
What I meant, if energy is put into a system, pattern or form arises spontaneously.
So what are ‘the rules’ ? Where were they, before the energy made them visible ?
Here’s an example. The energy is vibration, sound waves.
http://youtu.be/UU7iuJ98fRQ
The way I’m seeing this, in principle, this is no different to the Sun and the Earth. The Sun sends heat energy onto the planet, and patterns and forms arise spontaneously.
That would have been inevitable, before what we call life appeared. The only difference between forms like those in the corn starch and what we call biological life, is the ability to reproduce or replicate.
What seems to happen, is that a form manages to grab and store some of the energy. that’s the first step.
( If you want the edit function you have to join the NTE forum )
March 5th, 2013 at 12:36 am
@ ulvfugl and @ Paul:
Maybe you’d be interested in the work of Robert Pope, artist and philosopher and founder of the Science/Art Research Centre in Australia. Pope is seeking to avert the self-destruction of humankind. Forty-five of his articles are accessible via the blog page on the centre’s web site, http://www.science-art.com.au/.
“If consciousness, as growing scientific evidence suggests, is indeed an evolutionary part of infinite fractal logic, then the present fixed worldview is based upon false physics assumptions. However, the proposal that consciousness is part of the workings of an infinite universe is consistent within the holographic principle universal reality proposed by Einstein’s close colleague, David Bohm.”
March 5th, 2013 at 1:55 am
U wrote:
“Okay. So WHAT IS IT THAT ORGANISES THE DNA ?”
Yeah, like why does a liver cell do what liver cells do while a cardiac muscle cell does what it does. . . while having the same genetic material in the nucleus and mitochondria?
Reading Lynn Margulis opened me to that idea that cells having consciousness was a possible answer. I’m going with that.
Consciousness has always been. Maybe even before the big bang. Eastern science has something going on with that I think.
March 5th, 2013 at 2:44 am
Do you suppose that Consciousness surpasses all understanding?
Or only Western Cultural/Scientific understanding?
As I recall many Peoples understood that both the animate and inanimate had spirits (aka consciousness?)
March 5th, 2013 at 3:21 am
Everything we can do with computers is done with ones and zeros, digits, combinations of dots, yes or no, do or don’t do based on “ifs”. It’s all in the way they are arranged; programing. DNA is just a lot of programing, a very lot. Take all the DNA out of one cell, expand it to the size of these letters on this page, string it together and it will reach from NY to California. There are trillions of cells in our body. It’s a long program that tells the cell what to do based on “ifs”. It evolved by variation and selection, starting with an amino acid, a few elements stuck together in a certain way by chance.
In my mind, it comes down to the elements. They fit together in certain ways like Lego blocks. We can’t eat Na or Cl but we need to eat table salt. We must breath O2 and drink H2O. Frost grows on a window without vibration. It’s due to the shape of the ice crystals and the way they fit together. Matter matters. Why does it do what it does; it’s all made from the same stuff like computer digits. Is this stuff the Eternal? That still is no answer.
I’m going now to put more wood into the wood stove and then milk the cows. I understand that well enough to do it. All this gives me a headache. Even NTE is easy to understand.
March 5th, 2013 at 3:56 am
OZman – talking about babies and the horrors so many of them face once born does not upset me. It is refusing to see the horrors that upsets me. People say new life is sooooo goooood – when they have never held a child with skin so thin it looks like parchment, the bones visibile as outlined by that skin. I can do that. I can take care of children one day, knowing that when I come back the next one or two will be gone. What makes me mad and upset is when the suffering of the poor is not part of the discussion of whether life is good or not. How can we say that for people whose shoes, sandals, bare feet we have never walked in.
Wester said we need to overthrow the dominant paradigm in the USA to save babies. No we need to overthrow civilization so that we stop having too many babies. I read a study of the !kung that said they prohibit sex for 1 year after birth of a baby and by then the child is nursing heavily and does so for 3 more years which inhibits reproduction. So they space their children at a rate that allows the mother to not have to carry 2 children on their treks. Now that they got touched by civilization they have available food that young children can eat so the kids don’t nurse as heavily and the spacing is messed up. We don’t need to save babies, we need to have far less babies.
Ah well academic now as are all the discussions here. When 439 nuclear power plants go Chernobyl and the methane time bomb goes off its all over for the arguing ape.
March 5th, 2013 at 3:59 am
Aha ! Someone has got there before me
The science of cymatics, the study of visible sound, is beginning to yield clues to one of the most challenging questions in science: what triggered the creation of life on earth?
http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/biology.html
March 5th, 2013 at 4:04 am
@ Bluebird
Thanks for the link ! Yes, I’m familiar with Bohm’s ideas.
March 5th, 2013 at 4:10 am
@ Anthony
Those are very hard questions. I’ve tried to find answers. I can’t supply any satisfactory answers, as of this morning.
L-Field is very interesting. You’d think there’s be money and enthusiasm to research that, but doesn’t appear to be so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Field
March 5th, 2013 at 4:26 am
Well, I learned something this morning already, I already knew that the wave form on an oscilloscope, the Sine wave thingee, was a 2 dimensional slice, like a slice taken through the ripples of the ocean, and that the waves actually extend away from me and towards me, so to speak.
But this guy explains that the sound is actually a sphere… which is sort of amazing… so all these sounds and noises we hear, are really more like bubbles… And does that go for the whole electro-magnetic spectrum ? I think it does… hahahaha, so, if we could only see it, the whole fucking Universe is just a massive bubble bath ? Oh dear… something for the Goddess to splassh around in…
http://youtu.be/GlkIxpuF43o
March 5th, 2013 at 4:42 am
Free Electricity !
http://youtu.be/-ahWs9YTJkc
March 5th, 2013 at 4:50 am
Thermodynamics 410 – Final Exam – March 2013
1. “LMEP resolves Fermi’s Paradox.”
Explain.
Give one example.
March 5th, 2013 at 6:51 am
Interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson
C: If we assume that’s true, do you think religion is then useful as a vehicle, not to just jump back into it, but use as a vehicle for calming the mind and perhaps as essential to healthy living as nutrition?
N: Well, that’s been demonstrated to be true. That’s not a mystery that people take comfort in religion, that’s been so since the beginning. The real question is, if you remove that comfort, is there some other comfort you can offer in its place, and a big part of the more vocal atheist is to try to convince religious people that you can lead a happy, productive, fulfilling life in the absence of reference to deity, and that’s a big part of that effort. I can say, coming at it as a scientist, that if you want to feel the majesty of the Universe, you can do it – that’s something else that can help without reference to God. There’s a lot of beautiful things in the Universe that transcend our experience here on Earth that can take you to new places emotionally, physically, philosophically. That’s what the original Cosmos series did with Carl Sagan, it offered the Universe. It was not an anti-religion track, it offered the Universe as something for the taking that would inspire you to think more about our place in the cosmos.
C: Out of curiosity, what’s one of the more awe-inspiring pieces of knowledge that you hold onto for those reasons?
N: That we’re part of, the elements that comprise life on Earth and our bodies are traceable to stars that have exploded five billion years ago and scattered their rich contents around the galaxy, which then coalesced to form the Sun, the planets, Earth, and ultimately life. I think that’s profound because it reveals a connectivity between us and the rest of the Universe that – one can even call that a spiritual thought, spiritual in the very broad use of the word, not in the literal reference to spirits floating around, but – I’m using the word spiritual in the sense that it can bring a spiritual feeling upon you, just reflecting upon that fact, when you look up at a darkened night sky.
“I’m using the word spiritual in the sense that it can bring a spiritual feeling upon you”
http://vimeo.com/38101676
March 5th, 2013 at 7:20 am
@ Gail
…one can even call that a spiritual thought, spiritual in the very broad use of the word, not in the literal reference to spirits floating around..
Why the restriction ? Why not enjoy both, when both are freely available ?
http://www.snu.org.uk/newsevents/infocus/scienceday.html
March 5th, 2013 at 7:28 am
Tracing out your link from snu
The Spiritualists’ National Union – just another religion.
They say so themselves
The company aims to promote the religion and philosophy of Spiritualism as based on the Seven Principles:-
1. The Fatherhood of God.
2. The Brotherhood of Man.
3. The Communion of Spirits and the Ministry of Angels.
4. The Continuous Existence of the Human Soul.
5. Personal Responsibility.
6. Compensation and Retribution Hereafter for all the Good & Evil Deeds done on Earth.
7. Eternal Progress Open to every Human Soul.
I prefer this
God’s God – DarkMatter2525
http://youtu.be/ODetOE6cbbc
March 5th, 2013 at 7:45 am
Hey Benjamin, it looks like it worked. I inserted a false memory of seeing Elvis into your brain
But seriously, it appears that false memories are not that hard to create
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/dec/04/science.research1
More recently, she (Elizabeth Loftus) has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people’s suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.
“We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience,” says Loftus. “And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories – we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big.”
I suspect that in fact our brain is quite adept at creating the false memories we wish to have, including Elvis sightings, premonitions (created after the fact) visions etc etc
March 5th, 2013 at 8:11 am
Thanks for that video, KathyC!
U – Because, the collective grasping for some other, higher, external consciousness enables paralysis when enormous and drastic sacrifices need to be made. It underlies the conviction that humans cannot destroy our own species and that if we drive others to extinction, it’s okay – because we are the crown of creation, we’re special, we alone have consciousness so we are separate from nature, like gods or that we alone are made in god’s image. It’s based on a false faith that is ultimately toxic…and besides, its stupid (as KathyC’s video revealed so amusingly). There’s absolutely no reason to postulate anything spiritual other than it “brings a spiritual feeling” – which happens to be a belief system that serves the elites well, an aspect also noted in the cartoon.
When humans die off, what will happen to the “consciousness” that we invented? It will go away with us, because it doesn’t exist outside our minds.
Frankly I don’t understand how anyone who genuinely accepts NTE can simultaneously postulate any sort of independent spirituality – it looks more to me like that “bargaining” stage at work than a sincere exploration of NTE, and how to accept it as humans who can perceive it looming in the future – and maybe put it off a bit. All we have remaining is time, and we are squandering what little is left.
March 5th, 2013 at 8:33 am
@ Gail
I don’t ‘believe in’ belief systems.
All we have remaining is time, and we are squandering what little is left.
What do you think ‘we’ – whoever ‘we’ are ? – can do with the time ?
I’m just nattering away for something to do. There is no action that i can take that is going to have any effect upon the decisions of the British Gvt, or the American Gvt, or the Russian Gvt, or the Chinese Gvt, or any other Gvt, or any of the banks or any of the corporations or the masses of the public in their cars and rushing through the streets and airports and watching their tvs….
Wildwoman was muttering about tearing down the dominant culture, but afaik, nobody has any realistic idea or plan as to how that can be done.
March 5th, 2013 at 8:36 am
@Gail
When humans die off, what will happen to the “consciousness” that we invented? It will go away with us, because it doesn’t exist outside our minds.
You realize that’s a faith-based statement, right? That it is unfalsifiable? Why denigrate others who see reality differently? They have just as much right to participate in (or precipitate) the inevitable heat-death of civilization as you, after all.
For example, I’ll put my doomer credentials up alongside anyone’s – Guy’s, Jay Hanson’s, Dmitri Orlov’s, Matt Savinar’s, or you. The reason I can look it in the eye and not run around with my hair on fire is that I have experienced the non-existence of my Self. I’m as spiritual as you can get without any god except my own consciousness. I’m a bit of a panentheist – my consciousness both contains the universe and operates within it. What will happen to it when the body dies? There are no clues here, but I see no advantage to believing that it will evaporate, over believing that it will persist. I’m a Pyrrhonian skeptic – I aspire to believe nothing, and to let experience guide me. Does this get in the way of preparing for NTE? On the contrary, I think it makes me more capable. I’m certainly more able to make calm rational preparations than I was a decade ago, when my senses were filled with the sight, smell, sound, taste and feeling of doom.
We each get to decide what works for ourselves. If something works for you, that’s excellent. But that doesn’t make it a universal truth. The feeling that it “should” be universal is largely projection. I’ve been there. But I left.
March 5th, 2013 at 8:41 am
I wonder how hard it’s going to be to get the point across to those who are heavily invested in an emotional, human-centric (or self-centric) perspective.
The First Feature of Existence: “All composite things are transient”. This implies change which implies energy flows, which implies non-equilibrium, which implies flow that decreases the potential of the overall system: increases entropy.
Every”thing” is subject to it. Including meat robots.
what is life ? what’s the difference between animate and inanimate stuff ?
“Animate” stuff has is inanimate stuff with sufficient complexity that the illumination by the ambient consciousness produces an illusion of awareness. Awareness is always of an object. Consciousness is devoid of characteristics and content, the Sunyata, the Ein Sof, the Void.
Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There: A Mindfulness Retreat with Sylvia Boorstein (Paperback) by Sylvia Boorstein
Loaned the book to a practicing Buddhist (an AfroAmreican female doctor) before I had read it. She liked it so much, she kept it.
Yeah, like why does a liver cell do what liver cells do while a cardiac muscle cell does what it does.
Biochemistry Revealed podcast: The Histone Code:
“Have you ever wondered how your skin cells and neuronal cells could have the same DNA in them, yet look and behave so differently? Have you ever imagined how nearly 6 feet of DNA could be neatly crammed into each cell nucleus better than clowns in a clown-car? Have you ever pondered why cheesecake is so delicious? We can answer (some) of those questions by understanding histones, important proteins that serve as a scaffold for DNA.”
For those not inclined to listen to the podcast, histones are bobbins made of protein, a length of DNA is wrapped around one bobbin, a section is left unwrapped, the next section is wrapped around another bobbin and so on. Each chromosome is a single chain of DNA wrapped around multiple bobbins. The bobbins prevent the expression of the genes encoded in the lengths of DNA wrapped around them. The bobbins can have one or more methyl groups and/or acetyl groups and/or other groups attached or detached from them, which controls the expression of the exposed DNA in various ways. The bobbins can also be moved around on the DNA chain – short or long distances.
There is another layer of control: RNA is made on the DNA template, and proteins are made from RNA. However RNA also functions in many ways as proteins do, folding into many shapes, by themselves or in association with proteins, and managing chemical reactions by themselves or in association with proteins. All of this is relatively new stuff: a few decades old. It’s a jungle in there. But like the jungle outside, both are extremely finely tuned, even though their complexities surpass our comprehension. Nevertheless, it is robots all the way, up to, including, and beyond – meat robots.
The Double life of RNA:
hyper text transfer protocol colon slash slash dubya dubya dubya dot hhmi dot org/biointeractive/rna/lectures.html
Do you suppose that Consciousness surpasses all understanding?
Understanding is necessarily of an object which include concepts. Consciousness is not an object: one of the standard Sanskrit chants includes a line “Beyond Concepts”. But it is the basis of awareness, and even when devoid of content, is Self-Aware. Since an “I” is required for understanding (as in “I understand”) It cannot be understood. Only when all baggage including the “I” is dropped is it manifest. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”.
Consciousness has always been. Maybe even before the big bang.
It is not included nor excluded by time, space and causation. Incidentally in our universe only one dimension of time can be perceived, defined by the inexorable flow from potential to entropy.
When there is sufficient energy potential (non-equilibrium) those configurations in the randomness of matter that best promote the flow of energy towards entropy are recruited by the energy flows and become magnified/intensified. All the way to the boardroom.
sound is actually a sphere
But of course. It propagates in the three dimensions of space.
And does that go for the whole electro-magnetic spectrum ?
Again, of course. It exists and propagates in the three dimensions of space that are apparent in our universe.
March 5th, 2013 at 8:45 am
I’ve posted anew. It’s here.
March 5th, 2013 at 9:28 am
we alone have consciousness
Au contraire, no one “has” consciousness.
There’s absolutely no reason to postulate anything spiritual other than it “brings a spiritual feeling”
And it comes in a bottle.
postulate any sort of independent spirituality
There is no independent spirituality: it has to be distilled and bottled.
1. “LMEP resolves Fermi’s Paradox.”
Explain.
Give one example.
0. The quantity gets evenly distributed.
1. The quantity remains the same.
2. It all turns into trash.
3. You can’t clean it up.
4. Fancier ways make trash faster.
This universe.
March 5th, 2013 at 9:30 am
@Robin
A+
March 5th, 2013 at 9:44 am
@Ess,
“How can this extraordinary beauty that we see, the variety and range of life, the intelligence, humor mean nothing? Why does it harm us so much more if someone we love is violated terribly and murdered than it does if they die peacefully of old age, if nothing means anything other than what we choose? We’d all choose to never suffer, if we could choose, I would think.”
And not only that, but by what strange law of physics alone are we able to reflect, ponder, yea..and even resent the fact that all we are is heat engines speeding along the death of the universe? Consciousness itself seeing itself in the mirror perhaps?
March 5th, 2013 at 11:18 am
Gail Frankly I don’t understand how anyone who genuinely accepts NTE can simultaneously postulate any sort of independent spirituality – it looks more to me like that “bargaining” stage at work than a sincere exploration of NTE, and how to accept it as humans who can perceive it looming in the future – and maybe put it off a bit. All we have remaining is time, and we are squandering what little is left.
Yes exactly. Glad you liked the vid. DarkMatter has done some rather good vids on the whole issue of God and death.
March 5th, 2013 at 11:25 am
Paul What will happen to it when the body dies? There are no clues here, but I see no advantage to believing that it will evaporate, over believing that it will persist
While Occam’s Razor is but a principle, IMHO in this instance it is an excellent principle. No clues about what happens after death most likely mean that NOTHING happens after death other than that the body which housed the brain which housed the “you” disintegrates and the “you” that was there is gone. It is not uncommon for someone to say of a loved family member when they have alzhimers that “they are not there anymore”. But usually they lose their identity bit by bit – when those parts of your self awareness are gone, do they sit out in the ether somewhere waiting for the rest of you brain to be gone so all of what is you can get together again?
March 5th, 2013 at 11:35 am
I think that which we call ‘self’ does not continue anymore than the wave continues after it has crashed on the shore. However, what of the ocean? For me, ‘spirituality’ does not imply a dualistic notion of body-spirit, but simply that we have NO CLUE as to what ‘we’ really are. Even time itself appears to be a biological construct – dependent of relatistic frames of reference. How can something cease which never ‘really’ was? The rose which blooms once blooms forever.
March 5th, 2013 at 11:35 am
Kathy, in the absence of evidence, I remain free to make choices that enhance my life in some way. I don’t see any way that the concept of dissolution enhances my life
Any time I think my beliefs are getting in the way of my functioning, I discard them. Those that are functionally advantageous get to stay. My previous belief in disintegration and evaporation was one of the former. My current concept is one of the latter.
March 5th, 2013 at 11:42 am
..The mathematical center of a greatly wheel does not truly move.
March 5th, 2013 at 11:43 am
Arghh, I hate that I cannot edit my stupid typos (so easily done on a mobile).
March 5th, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Bailey,
Yeah. Well, I won’t share what I think because it’s too out there for this forum. Y’all would find my perspective worthy of contempt, the way some people do NTE beliefs.
For some reason I keep thinking of Woodstock lately. All the time. I looked for a DVD of the documentary at Blockbuster’s yesterday, and they didn’t have it, so I looked on the internet at info about the festival and a copy of the documentary.
I lift a little of the text on hope. I find it heartbreaking.
“‘After the concert, Max Yasgur, who owned the site of the event, saw it as a victory of peace and love. He spoke of how nearly half a million people filled with possibilities of disaster, riot, looting, and catastrophe spent the three days with music and peace on their minds. He states that “if we join them, we can turn those adversities that are the problems of America today into a hope for a brighter and more peaceful future…’[4]”
I wasn’t at Woodstock. I was only 16 then. But I grew up in California and I remember those days very, very well. Things were so different, and the music tells me that much, for sure.
Another one that is wonderful:
“‘We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn … there were a half million people asleep. These people were out. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud.’
—John Fogerty recalling Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 12:30 am start time at Woodstock[5]“
March 5th, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Dang not having that edit function – I have to get it.
Here is the second part of Fogerty’s comment:
“And this is the moment I will never forget as long as I live: a quarter mile away in the darkness, on the other edge of this bowl, there was some guy flicking his Bic, and in the night I hear, ‘Don’t worry about it John. We’re with you.’ I played the rest of the show for that guy.”
March 5th, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Dang, dang. Where do I sign up.
Those came from Wikpedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock
March 5th, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Paul I don’t see any way that the concept of dissolution enhances my life
The concept of dissolution I find quite comforting. Positing an unknown continuance without any information about it seems frightening. What if continuance is streets of gold, harps and halos – Mark Twain found that quite appalling. Me too. What if continuance is judgment and punishment. We all stand guilty of something. What if continuance is our brain waves captured by aliens for some devious purpose which has their benefit and not ours in mind. Since you are positing it without information about it, have you ever considered that continuance might be an eternity of boredom? Could be anything.
Haven’t you ever wondered if this continuance might be bad rather than good. Or that all good might get to be a huge bore.
I hope for sweet nothing when this old body wears out.
March 5th, 2013 at 2:41 pm
I wrote:
When humans die off, what will happen to the “consciousness” that we invented? It will go away with us, because it doesn’t exist outside our minds.
And Paul asked:
You realize that’s a faith-based statement, right?
No, I don’t see that as a faith-based statement. It’s a simple observation. Was there consciousness BEFORE humans evolved?
Of course people are free to believe anything they wish. U. asked me why I object, and I answered. Beliefs in immortality, spirituality or whatever you want to label it result in two outcomes – control of the masses by people clever enough to dupe them into thinking they are the spokesperson for the divine…and excuses for people to avoid the fact that we are engineering our own destruction as fast as we can.
March 5th, 2013 at 3:29 pm
@Kathy
That’s why our inner lives are different, and our values and responses are different. I grew up with the concept of dissolution, as the son of the strongest atheists you’ve ever met. I held that view myself until I was about 57 – “spirituality” was my synonym for “weak-minded, ignorant wishful thinking”. In the end that belief did not serve me well, so I changed.
@Gail
Was there consciousness BEFORE humans evolved? Any answer to that question except for, “We have no way of knowing,” is faith-based. There is simply no way to know whether consciousness is connected to the body/brain or not. the best we can say is “Right now there seems to be some awareness that appears to be co-located with my physical entity.” Beyond that all is faith and supposition – the dissolutionist and continuationist positions are both faith.
The classic illustration of this is a television set. When you turn it off or it breaks, the program stops playing, the picture disappears. Is the program an emergent property of the TV? Unless one understands about the electromagnetic transmission of TV signals, how can one tell?
March 5th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
Paul, I’m glad that after years of atheism you have found meaning through some other venue than the simple existence of Nature. For me that’s sufficient, and I really can’t be persuaded by any sort of comparison of the human brain to a television set. The AI guys got pretty discouraged. Interesting discussion here:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/mar/05/big-data-revolution/
March 5th, 2013 at 4:23 pm
@ Gail
U. asked me why I object, and I answered. Beliefs in immortality, spirituality or whatever you want to label it result in two outcomes – control of the masses by people clever enough to dupe them into thinking they are the spokesperson for the divine…and excuses for people to avoid the fact that we are engineering our own destruction as fast as we can.
That may be what YOU believe, but it is most definitely not true in UK, where the people who are engineering the destruction believe as you do, ( and Kathy C. ), that is, they are predominately secular materialists, and capitalists, not religious or spiritual in any sense.
Although the State and the Queen and the Prime Minister regularly mention God, and the Anglican Church has some official authority, this is ceremonial, a sort of social thing.
Quite a lot of people go to church on Sunday for the same reason, to see and be seen, to structure their week, to show their status, catch up with the gossip, see their friends, and the church attends to weddings, christenings, and funerals.
Other than that, actual ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ hardly comes into it at all. Many of the clergy don’t believe in God at all, in any of the simplistic traditional terms, they just try to perform a role that the people ask of them.
The general population is post-religious, has an immense range and mix of beliefs, hard to find anyone in UK anywhere near the extreme fundamentalist literalist interpretations of so-called Christianity in the USA.
March 5th, 2013 at 4:34 pm
@ Gail
Was there consciousness BEFORE humans evolved?
I’m shocked that anyone can ask that question.
Have you not had any experience with creatures that evolved before humans ?
Isn’t it blindingly obvious that they are conscious ?
How could any human who is not unconscious, not notice that ?
March 5th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
@ Ess
Where do I sign up?
http://neartermextinction.ning.com/
March 5th, 2013 at 5:52 pm
The concern with personal immortality or “salvation” seems to be a red herring. So also is the idea of dissolution of the self. It is a very anthropocentric and even narcissistic concern. If you have a dualistic perspective and look at the material universe as an inferior transitory reality to escape from; or have a materialist reductionist view of the universe as essentially dead matter, governed by the immutable laws of physics, you are left with this false dichotomy of disembodied existence vs nonexistence at the moment of death.
The discussion between Paul and ulvfugl regarding the 4th Law of Thermodynamics is particularly interesting because it looks at this from the widest possible perspective–the whole universe and all of space-time.
If the laws of physics are really immutable, as scientific materialism asserts, then the exorable laws of thermodynamics will eventually result in the heat death of the universe once universal thermal equilibrium is reached. There will be no more time, no more life and essentially a changeless, eventless eternity of nothingness.
There is another possibility other than a supernatural escape from the physical universe or the ultimate extinguishing of a mechanistic universe by the laws of thermodynamics.
If the universe is seen as essentially alive rather than mostly dead matter and the laws of nature are not ironclad, immutable laws, but are as Rupert Sheldrake suggests, “habits” that form over the course of the cosmos’ evolution. Then the inexorable laws of thermodynamics will not necessarily lead to cosmic extinction but instead the latent potential for life in the cosmos will be revealed and fully expressed in the most all-inclusive and expansive sense.
It will not be a matter of just a few “saved” or total dissolution of all things; rather nothing is lost, all things in the universe are healed, transformed and set free from the tyranny of the laws of physics and biology. It is the coming of a truly free, anarchic cosmos bound together by mutual empathy between all things. This is not supernatural; rather it emerges from the foundational depths of physical reality at the quantum level and perhaps deeper than that—-an unlimited reservoir of creative, life giving energy that freely flows into the universe to overcome the threatening heat death with all bountiful life. And yes this would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, but life is no respecter of laws when they become death dealing rather than life enhancing.
The abyss of thermal equilibrium will be filled to overflowing with creative life energy where life is not the exception in the midst of the default death state of the present universe, rather it becomes the default state of the universe—a truly living universe.
March 5th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
@DaveF
Wow. What a beautiful, elegant, eloquent vision! It is just the sort of “third way” perspective we need to keep ourselves from falling into the holes that litter the road. Thank you for bringing it to the table.
March 5th, 2013 at 6:34 pm
@ DaveF
The discussion between Paul and ulvfugl regarding the 4th Law of Thermodynamics is particularly interesting because it looks at this from the widest possible perspective–the whole universe and all of space-time.
Nice of you to say that. I think a lot is left out. Entangled photons on opposite sides of the Universe in instant communication ? But if I mention quantum stuff and consciousness here, I’ll get into trouble
Yes, it’s not conclusively established that the Universe is a closed system that will end in heat death. It’s not conclusively established wtf the Universe is. The understanding of the Universe has changed constantly through my lifetime, changes faster now than ever, and…. well, who knows ?
Don’t really want to speak for Sheldrake, anyone who is interested can listen to his talks or read his books.
Video here, What Banged ?
http://www.edge.org/video/what-banged
March 5th, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Here’s another theory.
The key difference between this picture and the consensus picture comes down to the nature of time. The standard model, or consensus model, assumes that time has a beginning that we normally refer to as the Big Bang. According to this model, for reasons we don’t quite understand, the universe sprang from nothingness into somethingness, full of matter and energy, and has been expanding and cooling for the past 15 billion years. In the alternative model the universe is endless. Time is endless in the sense that it goes on forever in the past and forever in the future, and, in some sense, space is endless. Indeed, our three spatial dimensions remain infinite throughout the evolution of the universe.
http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-cyclic-universe-paul-steinhardt
March 5th, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Thanks DaveF, I really enjoyed that post!
Ulv, I have seen that presentation by Steinhardt before, and thanks for reposting it. This is what I meant when I said there were other options!
March 5th, 2013 at 9:15 pm
@ Bailey
Yes, but re Swenson, etc., all the thermodynamics stuff still applies to us, on Earth, I think.
March 5th, 2013 at 9:45 pm
@ulv
Yes, but re Swenson, etc., all the thermodynamics stuff still applies to us, on Earth, I think.
Well, there is another possible side to that and as alluded to by DaveF and regarding Sheldrake. There is the issue with the non immutability of physical law in the face of conscious creatures (aspects of psi enter in here, but I will save that for the forum).
March 6th, 2013 at 5:20 am
Thank you, ulvfugl.
On another forum that I participate in someone posted a link to one of Guy’s recent talks. I thought it was so interesting, and I really wanted to learn what he had to say about the science. I read a bit, then posted a couple of posts.
Now, I’ve had a chance to go back and read earlier articles. It’s a bit painful. But not because the end of the world is coming. Because I had forgotten how much antagonism there is within the scientific community toward religion or spirituality. I’ve spent the last many years working in the clinical field in a hospital – that’s pretty much science – but also in Indian Health Services.
Native American cultures are deeply, deeply spiritual cultures.
All anyone had to be to know all the stuff that Guy works so hard to teach students was not white. I’ve known this stuff about empire and the United States and how it treats people ever since I can remember, certainly consciously by the age of thirteen, which was in 1963. I have American Indian blood and I grew up in my Native culture. This stuff that is so controversial is like “water is wet” to Natives. You can see their pain at the lack of respect for nature from everything they ever said, and still say. The elders talk about it now, and that very hard times are coming. I have heard this from traditional elders throughout Alaska.
And so far as religion goes – well, it’s a lot like science in at least one way – you know some people are scientists and they build bombs and other crap that does a lot of harm. Some people are scientists and they’re doctors and they heal a lot of people or animals.
Some religious people are stupid and heartless and the ran the Inquisition and the Crusades and some television networks now. Some religious people become Gandhis.
It’s really all what you do with it.
And I will say this – Native Americans knew enough not to screw the world up, and they had a deeply complex view of Nature and their relationship to it that has proven to be nothing but correct. They consider this view to be a spiritual one.
They were treated with contempt to the point of extinction, themselves, over the first issue – what nature is and how we should live with it. I find it so ironic that now that so many people who are so successful in this dominant culture who are now figuring it all out, still think they know everything.
You’re just now figuring nature out.
You have yet to figure out spirituality.
The landing, when it hits, is going to be bigger than the nature thing.
March 6th, 2013 at 5:22 am
When I write that traditional elders throughout Alaska say that hard times are coming, they are talking about the same things Guy is. But they barely speak English, much less have an education.
They know, though.
March 6th, 2013 at 5:56 am
@ Ess
Yes. Here’s a video with the same title as Guy’s blog post Point Of No Return.
http://youtu.be/roltJzTUTdM
March 6th, 2013 at 6:30 am
Thanks. Here is one for you.
Speaking of nutso – did you know that you can almost really and truly now say that Atlantis was real? This is so cool. I did not know about these archeological finds until a few weeks ago. This is the History Channel, and it is really good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gRkgXQyXjk
March 6th, 2013 at 10:29 am
Ess, that documentary on Atlantis showed how ancient civilizations utilized and took advantage of the ambient energy all around them. The same is see the world over like in machu picchu and other places. Today with fossil fuels, efficiency and learning to live with less hardly a consideration.
March 6th, 2013 at 11:03 am
Isn’t it cool? The engineering and architecture that is considered “innovative” today. Hot and cold running water in every house and indoor toilets that siphoned odors into a sewer system. Canal systems for easy travel – better than cars!
If you had light at night, what else would you need?
I so much agree with Guy regarding human needs. We don’t NEED that much. But what we do need, we need to have in its finest natural state – air, water, food, shelter. This philosophy was never spoken to me as a child, but it was lived by my elders. Our way of life, the one I grew up with having traditional people in my family (I was the youngest of five generations, each one more Indian than the last until you get to my great-grandmother.)
We were expected to do the work of taking care of business and then we were expected to make something beautiful. Like a shirt, or a dress, or a bookcase, or a flower garden, or some beadwork, or a carving, or some silver. Or maybe go make yourself beautiful, by taking a sweat for a few days and purifying your body so you can feel and think more clearly. Take care of the world, and the world will take care of you. After that, make something beautiful. A dance, a song, a story, a mask, a net, a canoe.
We WANT a lot more.
March 6th, 2013 at 12:46 pm
@Paul
[i]Wow. What a beautiful, elegant, eloquent vision! It is just the sort of “third way” perspective we need to keep ourselves from falling into the holes that litter the road. Thank you for bringing it to the table.[/i]
Thanks Paul, perspective can both reveal the truth and also conceal it. I think there is a perspective that is wider and deeper than just the constrained view of the scientific reductionist perspective of a mechanistic universe. The scientific reductionists may be the dominate voice at present but they don’t have a monopoly on using the scientific method. Biologists such as Rupert Sheldrake or physicists like Roger Penrose are also credentialed scientists that see reasons to suggest that there is more to the universe than just mostly lifeless matter that is winding down toward inevitable heat death.
March 6th, 2013 at 1:15 pm
@DaveF
My concern is more along the lines of this, “The universe is fully alive and conscious in its own right. But it has its own interests, which are not those of the “life” it creates to meet its goals.”
The problem, from our perspective, may not be that the universe is dead, but rather that it’s alive.
March 6th, 2013 at 6:13 pm
@Paul,
My concern is more along the lines of this, “The universe is fully alive and conscious in its own right. But it has its own interests, which are not those of the “life” it creates to meet its goals.”
This certainly seems to be true regarding the ‘individual’ sentient creatures. However, we know that cells are alive by standards which we consider ‘life’ and yet, in the end, they are just part of the whole body. The whole universe could be an evolving organism and we as cells to be lysed as needed. Just as the leaves are part of the tree, they serve a function for the tree and are discarded and replaced. Now I just need to expand my vision to that of the tree itself.