Tue, Mar 5, 2013
[...] and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency”. For background to this, please see this comment (and those that follow it) by Paul Chefurka on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last [...]
[...] 1. My own advocacy of rational and reductionist thinking on Learning from Dogs. 2. The responses my recent “agnostic” remarks on this blog have received; and 3. The reaction I got when, on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last blog, I asserted that the Sun is not a living entity and therefore is not conscious. [...]
March 5th, 2013 at 9:03 am
Here we go again with some scientists claiming tipping points aren’t backed up by science:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Global_tipping_point_not_backed_by_science_999.html
of course it was countered by Hansen, Ehrlich and Mann as [bullshit]
March 5th, 2013 at 10:17 am
To be fair to humans alive at the time, in 1960, we already knew quite a bit about the problem of climate change. By 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson went public about it (and so began the campaign to deny the problem).
I really sympathise with Guy (McP) having friends, family and former colleagues who think he’s gone crazy. That is how I feel (that I am going crazy) and, I am sure, those that know me will say the same if I walk away from “normal” society.
Equating the pursuance of self-interest with extinction by natural selection seemed at first to be a novel idea. However, although very important, it is not novel: It is a very neat summary of the message of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ article in Science magazine.
I am very interested to hear about how Tuscon AZ was chosen (if not simply by inertia) since SW states have been suffering drought conditions for nearly two decades now.
The Earth could support 15 billion people living as the poorest do; but it can only support 1.5 billion living like those in the USA. Therefore, even if the Earth is not yet overpopulated, its current population / consumption distribution is morally indefensible.
I feel like this is a “Red Pill or Blue Pill?” moment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arcJksDgCOU
March 5th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Guy:
So after listening to the talk, we’re up to 10 feedbacks now? – i can’t keep up! i finally got the first eight down from a few posts back, but what are the two besides that original list?
March 5th, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Tom, I’ve updated this post to include all ten feedbacks. And I list them below:
Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too (Nature, August 2012)
Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)
Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
March 5th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
@Martin
I think your numbers are hopelessly optimistic. If we take the global per-capita fossil, hydro and nuclear energy use as a proxy for the “AT” term of I=PAT, and multiply by P, we discover that our Impact on the planet is now about 130 times what it was in 1800:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/TF.html
If we wanted to limit our planetary impact to what it was in 1900, the world could support at most 100 million people at today’s American standard of “living”. And I know of no one who would argue that even that limited level of impact is sustainable over the long term.
15 billion people all living like Bangladeshis would have the same impact on the planet as the Earth’s population of 1950. To achieve true sustainability your expectations need to be scaled back by about an order of magnitude.
The directionality inherent in the laws of thermodynamics that govern self-organized systems tell us that’s impossible until after we’ve used up most of the planet’s energy stores.
March 5th, 2013 at 1:27 pm
This is such a disappointing talk. It circled around the really important fact that nothing we can now do will make any difference. We have to live sustainably not because we think it will do any good, for it won’t, but because living properly is a gesture. We are like the defenders of the Alamo but instead of fighting to the end in a lost cause we have to do the reverse–stop fighting in a lost cause. The whole situation is almost too tragic for words. The best we humans can now do is make this gesture of piety.
March 5th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
@PaulChefurka They are not my numbers but they may well be out of date: They were cited, by Sir David Attenborough, towards the end of this BBC Horizon programme broadcast just over a year ago:
How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth (YouTube video)
March 5th, 2013 at 1:58 pm
@Martin,
Fair enough. It goes to show you that even men as august as Attenborough wear cultural blinders that cause them to be hopelessly overoptimistic.
March 5th, 2013 at 2:32 pm
I listened to the interview. I appreciated learning about your journey, Guy. In many ways, it reminded me of my own when I came to Alaska in ’90. I did not build a mud hut; I built a wood shack. On a mobile home I-beam frame, because I couldn’t afford a foundation, and it’s a long story. I do have electricity for a utility. Apart from the phone, it is my only utility.
We see the sandhill cranes here in the spring and summer. They are deafening when they call! It is so amazing to hear them! Also, trumpeter swans. One year I drove the Denali Highway and there were tundra swans in every puddle for miles, absolutly thousands of them, on their way to their nesting regions. I always keep bird feeders. Understanding birds and their territories, I was extraordinarily proud when I counted eleven species of birds and their babies at my bird feeders one summer. My area supported that many seed-eating species. There were, of course, others that did not feed from the feeder. I saw three kinds of warblers throughout the summer, as well.
I cannot bring myself to put pesticides or herbicides on my lawn. It looks it, too. I am a hillbilly, I fear. “Weeds” are us.
I saw a bald eagle yesterday. I see them frequently, and yet it is always still a thrill. Even now, after twenty-three years, I love to see the eagles. Spring is around the next corner, and each one is more precious as time passes.
March 5th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Hugo Chavez dies
Song for Hugo Chavez
by David Rovics
http://youtu.be/tkf_2pc2Wgk
March 5th, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Thank you Guy for your presentation. I just passed my five year anniversary (November 2007) when I walked away from my “career” at the Department of Homeland Stupidity. Walking away from empire is a real challenge but it has also been very rewarding.
March 5th, 2013 at 6:58 pm
Guy: thanks for the update. i knew about the glaciers (after making it a point to see Chasing Ice with my grandson a few weeks back), but i thought it was covered already. Also, didn’t i just read today somewhere where Shell is calling off its Arctic drilling for this year?
yeah, here it is:
http://www.alaskapublic.org/2013/02/27/shell-suspending-2013-arctic-drilling-season/
Randy C: thanks for making that choice!
Michael: i understand your viewpoint, but i think Guy does it right in his presentations by not hitting people over the head like, say, an Alex Jones might, but rather lets the information sink in to the point that people will, upon reflection, realize that we’re on our way out (and soon). All the cited work by scientists indicate that any ONE of the points he brings up could doom humanity to extinction and he points out TEN measurable changes that all interact and will cause calamity in the near future. Just sayin’.
March 5th, 2013 at 6:58 pm
Paul: Complexity expands fractally. I get that. What does this say about Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Systems? Is it another special case like genetic evolution?
Secondly, how can complexity be the fastest way to entropy? I don’t get that.
March 5th, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Haven’t we seen this movie?:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21576376
The era of drone wars is already upon us. The era of robot wars could be fast approaching.
Already there are unmanned aircraft demonstrators like the arrow-head shaped X-47B that can pretty-well fly a mission by itself with no involvement of a ground-based “pilot”.
There are missile systems like the Patriot that can identify and engage targets automatically.
And from here it is not such a jump to a fully-fledged armed robot warrior, a development with huge implications for the way we conduct and even conceive of war-fighting.
March 5th, 2013 at 8:04 pm
@ BC Nurse Prof
Secondly, how can complexity be the fastest way to entropy? I don’t get that.
Perhaps this helps explain ?
http://rodswenson.com/section6.html
March 6th, 2013 at 1:03 am
NOAA Data for February is out. Here is the YOY ppm increase by month:
2012 393.14 393.54 394.44 396.18 396.78 395.82 394.30 392.41 391.05 391.01 392.81 394.28
Difference: 1.9 1.7 2.0 2.8 2.5 2.1 1.9 2.3 2.1 2.1 2.6 2.4
2013 395.5 396.80
Difference: 2.4 3.3
The formatting is off due to page width. The take-away is atmospheric CO2 is accelerating at an accelerating rate. YOY change by decade is about 1.7 in the 90s, 2.1 in the 00s. January ’13 is 2.4, February ’13 is 3.3 ppm higher than last year.
March 6th, 2013 at 2:11 am
Good interview, Guy. I too wonder how many people actually alter their lives significantly as a result of not just your essays but of those of many people who explain the deterioration of our natural environment as a result of this set of living arrangements. I think I’m slowly getting there, though it may end up being the greatest mis-match in history (even worse than your claimed lack of awareness of the differences between a zucchini and a screwdriver). However, a five acre patch of nothing (though not in the middle of a desert – yet – thankfully) now awaits us (my wife and myself).
I have a question about the issues you’ve raised in your writings and talks over the recent batch of years. Is there any research or conclusions that you’ve mentioned which has either subsequently been shown to be wrong or from which you’ve discovered you’ve characterised incorrectly? I’m not talking of subsequent research or thought showing that things are worse, but that things are better (or, at least, not quite as bad).
One possible example of this is that some recent research by Professor Stork in Australia, published in Science, appeared to show that the extinction rate was probably nowhere near as bad as is often claimed, partly because estimates of species numbers are likely overblown. It wasn’t an optimistic piece of research but would not support a claim of 200 species per day being driven to extinction.
March 6th, 2013 at 3:55 am
Martin, you give no source for how many people this planet could hold at different rates of lifestyle. Do you have any or is it just your guess.
Going forward the planet would have held less and less humans and other life because we have so depleted the soils, the fossil water sources (like the Ogalla Reservoir) and perhaps most importantly depleted our favorable climate. Per Lester Brown ” Every one-degree Centigrade increase in temperature will reduce grain yields by 10 percent,” http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/01/20/207369/lester-brown-extreme-weather-climate-change-record-food-prices/ Already grain yeilds are decreasing due to unpredictable weather. It has been proposed that the reason agriculture took off when it did was that the climate settled into a 10,000 year climate that was favorable to agriculture.
I say would have because the methane time bomb, 400 Chernobyls, and nuclear war (take your pick) will finish us off.
March 6th, 2013 at 4:55 am
@Kathy: With respect, I have explained where the numbers I quoted came from (i.e. a BBC Horizon programme broadcast a year ago). The research cited by the narrator (Sir David Attenborough) is that of Professor William E. Rees at the University of British Columbia. I suggest that you and Paul contact him if you wish to dispute his conclusions.
March 6th, 2013 at 5:02 am
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/us-japan-fukushima-idUSBRE92417Y20130305
Just like with Chernobyl, “fixing” Fukushima is going to be a long process.
Paul, u, others: after reading Swenson i’m beginning to get the picture. Very neat conjecture. [It doesn't explain consciousness, but perhaps it's unexplainable.] Does the theory hold on the quantum level where perhaps inter-dimensional weird stuff is going on?
Kathy: yeah, i’m pretty sure one of these springs, real soon, we’re going to get the Silent Spring scenario – all over the globe – where nothing blooms, nothing greens-up, and nothing grows any more. That’s where the slow decline turns into rapid die-off. The overfished and toxically polluted oceans won’t be able to feed the masses either. i think the methane bomb may explode real soon too – this year or next possibly (look at the warming of the northern hemisphere over the past decade and it could very well be this year). Sure hope not, but i don’t see anyone changing the dominant fossil-fuel based paradigm anytime soon, so what’s to prevent it? (Geo-engineering? Don’t even go there.) i see a convergence of many systemic problems overwhelming us (and the planet) in the very near term: from infrastructure neglect and decay (like water, sewage and gas piping, the electrical grid, etc) to ramped up aggression by various nation-states to economic collapse here and abroad, resource wars between nations, states, counties, etc as drought bites down hard, storm damage on the increase (with less insurance company pay-outs), steadily less food production (and ocean harvesting), dying vegetation (of all kinds) from the increasing hydrogen sulfide, CO2 and ozone pollution, nuclear problems on the rise (and the inability of broke companies, states and countries to deal with them), sea level rise, the aforementioned methane bomb from the melting permafrost/peat bogs, the dying rainforests, the breakdown of society and civilization as martial law becomes evident (right now, here, FEMA is trying to sneak it around us, see my link below) and others associated with Peak Oil, huge unemployment rise (world-wide), panic, desperation and violence.
March 6th, 2013 at 5:06 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnsPktexpuk&feature=player_embedded
Everyone in the US should read the documents linked to here.
March 6th, 2013 at 6:41 am
Tony Weddle, you ask: “I have a question about the issues you’ve raised in your writings and talks over the recent batch of years. Is there any research or conclusions that you’ve mentioned which has either subsequently been shown to be wrong or from which you’ve discovered you’ve characterised incorrectly?”
Two items come to mind: (1) I cited the International Energy Agency’s “peak oil” claim of 9.1% annual decline rate, published in late 2008. It was clearly incorrect. (2) I probably misinterpreted the same organization’s “global change” claim of 3.5 C temperature increase by 2035. Apparently they meant 2100, although it’s unclear from their report.
March 6th, 2013 at 6:57 am
Martin, apologies, I was responding to your initial comment and didn’t see the reply to Paul. If that is what Attenborough I doubt that it is supported by Rees. I watched the whole video some time back and thought Attenborough was excessively optimistic. If he thinks that is what Rees says it would be an extrapolation of the ecological footprint idea and I suppose if you extrapolate the lives of those who use less than 1 planet you could fit a bunch more on, but that is ignoring Peak Oil and climate change which I am sure Rees is aware of. I would hardly think that Rees thinks that by just using the footprint numbers that that means that such a population is sustainable. The reason humanity as a whole is currently using 1.5 earths is because we are using up the ancient sunlight stored in oil, coal, gas and top soil. Sort of like someone who can live off the interest of money in the bank but wants more so starts using up the capital and for that brief exuberance pays with having in the end nothing.
I don’t know if Attenborough knows but I am sure Rees knows that post oil the planet cannot sustain as many as it now sustains much less more. Ecological overshoot reduces how many critters can be sustained.
For example we feed 100 chickens scratch on 1 acre of land. If we had say 4 chickens they probably could live on the 1 acre without feed. But if we stopped feeding our 100 chickens would eat everything living and then start eating each other and the land would be reduced to a state where it could not feed even the 4. The farmed land in this country and the world has been eroded because of overshoot, it has been poisoned because of overshoot. I doubt that it could sustain even the population of humans when agriculture began much less twice as many as today.
Doesn’t matter we are toast http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html
March 6th, 2013 at 6:58 am
Doesn’t matter we are toast http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon
March 6th, 2013 at 7:00 am
And then there is nuclear war – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
Pick your toast –
Besides everyone born dies, everyone not born does not die. The born are toast from the moment of their birth
By death I mean that event that is declared when brain waves can no longer be detected. (have to keep putting up the disclaimer to fend of the “there is no death” folks)
March 6th, 2013 at 7:00 am
@ Tom
Paul, u, others: after reading Swenson i’m beginning to get the picture. Very neat conjecture. [It doesn't explain consciousness, but perhaps it's unexplainable.] Does the theory hold on the quantum level where perhaps inter-dimensional weird stuff is going on?
Hmmm. Seems to me, that if the way I’m understanding it is right ( which it may not be ) and if what Swenson says is right ( which there’s a possibility it is not, in some way ) then prospects are far more dismal than anyone could possibly ever have imagined.
Previously people have theorised that we got into this mess because of our genetic heritage ( e.g. Guy mentions in his talk, human males like to show off to females, and females are impressed by displays, like flashy new gadgets ) or the discovery of agriculture, or people could blame capitalism with its inbuilt necessity for growth and consumption and exploitation, or they could blame religious or ideological or cultural beliefs that disrespected nature, or they could blame the Enlightenment myth of scientific progress, and so on and so on… many different analyses.
Basically, the idea has been, if we could identify and diagnose the cause, maybe we could cure the disease and fix the problem some how. Maybe if we are ‘bad’ we could become ‘good’, or if the economic system is wrong, we could change it, find a technofix, whatever.
But what appears to be the case, all that stuff is just stories we have been telling ourselves. Rationalisations. Bit like the ancients trying to explain why there are stars in the night sky.
If this entropy thingee holds up, what it means is that there is a much deeper, more fundamental principle operating, that must apply equally to bacteria, ants, and us, it’s built into the physics.
Just like those smoking energy vents on the floor of the deep ocean, whenever we find a source of energy, like blind shrimps, we’ll cluster around it and exploit the hell out of it, regardless of the consequences.
It’s not like ‘we’, as humans, or as people, are doing this. It’s what evolution has been doing since it began. It’s what the whole fucking Universe has been doing since it began.
This fills me with horror and dismay.
Worse than coming to terms with NTE.
Daniel wrote that superb and moving post about us here having had six months to come to terms with NTE, and most of us still not having fully come to terms with the shock.
I’ve had about a week to bounce this stuff about the Law of Maximum Entropy Production, LMEP, around in my head.
I wish someone would show how it can’t be correct. I’ve been reading pretty much flat out for days. i didn’t find any escape clauses yet
It’s almost like ‘It is written in the stars that you earthlings are doomed, whatever you do, because whatever you do, will result in your destruction’…..
I mean, why should that be so ? It’s kinda crazy… laugh ? cry ? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…
March 6th, 2013 at 7:22 am
Guy
Listening to the interview, and recalling some of the writing in ‘Walking Away From Empire’, I got to thinking about your term:
“living at the Apex of Empire..”
You self describe this is where you were when you decided you needed to walk away .
I accept this, and in some broard way I agree.
However, in the particular, and without knowing any details about your salary and perks, as a full tenured professor, I wish to contest that the Apex was where you were.
I propose, on balance, you were at the apex of the middle class of empire, or only at ‘Base Camp of Empire’.
Some points:
Empire rewards more people in the wealthier group than just those players in the political and business areas. A sizable group of dare I say well educated and highly efficient ‘Betas’ are needed to make all kinds of enabling agency occur, and they would not do it for love of Empire alone, so they get rewarded such that they feel close to the wealthiest tier of the Empire.
These are the ones who are rewarded to the extent that ego concerns are meant to block the deeper levels of critical thinking, and reflection on the bigger picture, IMO.
So without accusing you of anything, I’d say you enjoyed the great freedoms and highly pleasant distractions of that life, and that distractive power worked for a time, but not forever.
Once you discovered the ‘chink’ in the ‘armour’ of Empire( many more I suppose), which was thinking critically about the presumptions of Empire, and then (aka Arandati Roy), once you saw it you could not look away.
BTW, IMO this is an archetypal act where a hero makes the decision to be him or herself, and leaves the ‘mother’ behind. ( a bit nebulous and loadd I concede but I can go there with some confidence) In that act you became who you were on an inner level all along (for now at least), and left behind the shell, or skin of the old self, (snake oil is sold as grift to aging women for a reason…).
I contend that the Apex of Empire is somewhere higher up, to continue the summit metaphore, and you were living at ‘Base Camp of Empire’, (or maybe ‘Camp 1…how many are there?).
The apex is not something ‘we’ are ever supposed to actually see, (cloudy most days), except it can happen when extreme events come by, which they did in 2008-2009, and then we got a glimpse of the Apex.
The ‘Occupy’ initiative is continually trying to keep blowing the clouds back long enough for as many people to see as possible, for as ;long as possible.
I honestly don’t mean to detract from the general thrust of your argument, or metaphore, regarding the ease of living that your position had brought with it to you. I am only posing to reset the baseline for what is uber-wealth and ‘freedom from social obligation and true honour’ enjoyed by an unknown number, who are not ever really desiring to be known.
That is the Apex.
Am I splitting hairs here?
When you considder how those in non Anex-1 nations now live, and their poor, I might agree you are hovering much closer to the Apex than they, but IMO still no banana.
No disrespect intended,
I hope you do hear that?
I like the interview.
March 6th, 2013 at 7:30 am
Thanks for that response, Kathy.
As I have said on my blog, it seems reasonable to assume that, as a maximum, a post-Carbon and post-Industrial world will not be able to support more than a pre-Carbon, pre-Industrial world did. Therefore, I guess I should not be surprised at the disputation of the numbers put forward by Attenborough: I think he may well have been trying not to be too alarming…
Therefore, since the greater the overshoot the greater the derogation of ecological carrying capacity (William Ophuls – see link below), I should not actually be surprised that you dispute what Attenborough said in the video.
http://www.greatchange.org/ophuls,ecological_scarcity.html
March 6th, 2013 at 7:32 am
Michael Doliner says: This is such a disappointing talk. It circled around the really important fact that nothing we can now do will make any difference. We have to live sustainably not because we think it will do any good, for it won’t, but because living properly is a gesture. We are like the defenders of the Alamo but instead of fighting to the end in a lost cause we have to do the reverse–stop fighting in a lost cause. The whole situation is almost too tragic for words. The best we humans can now do is make this gesture of piety.
We’re not going to bow out with grace;
Instead, the last humans will face
The most depraved, base,
Brutal, horrible place
In the history of the human race.
March 6th, 2013 at 7:42 am
U; maybe this is a different way of saying the same thing, but as I see it, all life forms need energy to function and energy has always been very hard to acquire; it has always been diffuse. So the selection process selected for the organisms with the highest EROEI because every organism with an EROEI of less than 1 died early and didn’t reproduce. If we now lived in a world of scarce energy, we would not even be having this discussion; everyone would be spending most of the day doing the primary business of the day: getting some more energy. Farmers are now doing this for the other 99% of the population as they play with their smartphones and computers and look for something meaningful to do or talk about.
Life has been around for 4 billion years and 99.99999% of that time there wasn’t abundant energy. Our “flash in the pan” era is not normal life on earth.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:06 am
I am bothered by the talk of people who are attracted to apocalyptic info…I fear I am one of them..on a cyclic pattern of trying to find peace within myself,then being angry at our folly,then worrying for my grandchildren and thinking about how to help them,then working on plans for my gardens,water harvesting,how to build a rocket stove,etc. to make life easier when things get bad..whether or not to arm myself,then back to realizing I need to develope spiritually so I can be helpful and somewhat at peace.Or am I a sicko who wants the end to come? I DO want something big to happen that will maybe stop the “growth” in the nick of time…a miracle….
How to deal with this….I’ll be a tad better when spring allows me to get happy in my gardens and work off some tension.I am definitely angry at this point and feel stuck on the grieving cycle…anyone?
March 6th, 2013 at 8:07 am
First time posting after 2 years lurking in the shadows…
I don’t doubt that David Attenborough is a thoroughly decent, sincere guy, but he is a) a naturalist; b) a LONG term employee of the BBC. Therefore not an independent expert on population carrying capacity.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:14 am
@ dmd
I think you’re talking about something very different really.
This is about the principle or law in physics, concerning thermodynamics.
That came out of people studying the way that heat moved, when they were building the early steam engines, and trying to figure out how to make them efficient to do work. So they wanted to measure how heat flowed, and what happened to it.
So they came up with this concept of entropy. Then other people worked on that idea and applied it to the whole Universe. The result is the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Physicists have been very happy with all that. Biologists never took much notice. So what this Swenson guy has done, is extend those laws, and say that ordered systems create entropy more effectively ( if that’s the right language, I’m new to this ) than disordered systems. It doesn’t matter whether the ordered systems are alive or not, that’s irrelevant. Galaxies do it better than empty space.
Just so happens that in the case of Earth, the more ordered systems tend to be the living ones, and that evolution has produced ever more complex ordered systems, all the way from termite colonies, to rain forests, to human cities.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:15 am
@OzMan – I happen to know that Guy is rather busy for a few days so, I hope he will forgive me for answering on his behalf (and correct me if necessary). I believe the phrase “Apex of Empire” to be intended to convey the unsustainable nature of Tuscon AZ as a collection of human beings living in an environment that cannot support them. The “Apex of Empire” is thus a label that can be applied to anyone not living in a sustainable fashion; and is the reason behind the name of the book. I am quite certain that Guy would not want people to think he was just referring to the fact that he may have walked away from a high-salary low-stress job at the University.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:24 am
@ Michael Doliner “We are like the defenders of the Alamo but instead of fighting to the end in a lost cause we have to do the reverse–stop fighting in a lost cause. The whole situation is almost too tragic for words. The best we humans can now do is make this gesture of piety.”
There are essentially two options available for those who have reached enlightenment: the path you describe above, or, my preferred approach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcW_Ygs6hm0
It’s quite obvious that while Guy talks a good game about letting go, he still possesses some remaining vestiges. I would posit that Guy and other CC scientists will truly be free when they decide to re-enter the world-of-pay ie their Major Kong moment. Specifically, as experts in the service of the DoD and other TLAs.
Take another look at that list Guy posted. Now, consider the potential outcomes for both offensive & defensive weaknesses & advantages from a military standpoint. It doesn’t matter if NTE is 10, 50 or 100 years away – the goal is to ‘win’ in the interim. And by winning, let me assure you every one of those contingencies are presently being evaluated within the context of conflict.
As Hiram Maxim and countless others have discovered, if people are going to pursue killing each other regardless of what you personally do, then why not profit? To summarize, you can choose the Alamo path or the Kong alternative. Either way, you’re not going to be around to remember (nor is anyone else), so it’s immaterial what you do.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:31 am
@ dmd
You’re looking at it from the point of view of organisms, or humans, wanting to get energy to survive.
The perspective I’m talking about is not like that at all. It’s more like saying that gravity pulls stuff. It’s much more basic. Gravity doesn’t care whether the stuff it pulls is alive or dead or where it is or what it is. It just does it. Nothing we can do about that.
In this case, it’s not gravity, it’s entropy, which is quite a hard concept to understand until you get familiar with it. Also ectropy, and extropy.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:35 am
martha, perhaps you are in the bargaining stage.
I think that is where I’m going, so maybe I’m projecting, but hear me out. You want something big to happen. So do I.
The list of feedbacks grows longer. If something (like a revolution) were to happen this year or next, could it stop NTE? If enough people monkeywrenched the system, ground “progress” to a halt, and gave us some time to shut down the nuclear reactors, could it stop NTE?
One year or two, that’s what I think we’ve got to use, and I mean big bad seriously “fucking shit up” (as the Marines put it).
Yeah, I know, not likely, but what if?
March 6th, 2013 at 8:40 am
“Energy is Eternal Delight”
~William Blake~
Life appears to be nothing but a blob of energy chasing it’s own tail, the Ouroboros.
It’s always been, always is, and always will be, all at Once.
One is the loneliest number, so this ‘Eternal Delight’ has to pretend to be different to Itself and play hide and seek through endless iterations of Time and Space and unnamed dimensions, knowing deep down It is utterly Alone, despite the self contrived diversion of ‘Eternal Delight’.
The ‘delight’ knows no bounds, and hence can take any Form. Not content just with the ‘positive’ forms of the word ‘delight’, It often appears to embrace an eternal no-holds barred voyeurism which can often look like sadism and masochism, which It manifests as just another Form of Eternal Delight.
There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to It.
‘Morality’ has no Place in the Scheme of Things.
Chasing It’s tail and remaining in Motion is the Soul purpose of Energy.
I read someone who said, “There is no opposite [to entropy] as entropy is just a measure of disorder, of chaos..”
Silly Wizard, there is most certainly an opposite to entropy, it’s the other half of Eternal Delight.
Just because no one coined a catchy term for it doesn’t mean it doesn’t Exist.
Everything ‘outside’ Nothing is perfectly balanced by a counter part, it takes two to Tango.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:47 am
.
Are we now at the end of our rope?
Is there really no hope? Nope.
Perhaps we’ll still scope
Out some way to cope?
Um…sorry, Charlie, no soap.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:53 am
@ Speak Softly
Yeah… I’ve been thinking along much the same, somewhat senseless, lines…
But what’s so amazing, there’s some energy, in the form of alternating waves of pressure and less pressure in air, sound. And they hit a patch, a blob, of water, or sand on a steel sheet, or myriad other materials. And suddenly, from nowhere, we have patterns and forms, and symmetry and beauty…
It, whatever ‘it’ is, can’t help doing this, it’s innately creative, order is inherent in the disorder.
http://youtu.be/A-oxWXLhVRk
March 6th, 2013 at 9:13 am
Michael D The best we humans can now do is make this gesture of piety.
Someone a while back posted what had been said to them by someone else – so I hope I get this right, but at least I am sure the sentiment is right.
The person in question was asked why they recycle when recycling is so futile – they said “because if I didn’t I would be a person who doesn’t recycle”
Which seems to me to be what you are saying. Whatever we do now we do because of how we feel about ourselves. I have often said that my one hope is that when I die, at the moment of death (because I think that is the last moment I will have), at that moment I hope I don’t look back and find that I am ashamed of myself. Ashamed perhaps for some of what I have done, but not of the whole of who I am. My last thought I hope will be “not too bad”.
But as Benjamin notes, that may be quite difficult.
March 6th, 2013 at 9:21 am
.
Of course, the denier view stinks:
Do the math, using Google and links;
Despite all down-dumbing,
The end’s surely coming,
No matter what anyone thinks.
March 6th, 2013 at 9:51 am
Me, still pondering the strange relationship between inanimate forms that emerge from the laws of physics, and animate forms that have biological life.
This damn thing could be in a biology or medical text book as a microscope photograph of a seed, pollen grain, fungal spore, oceanic plankton or some other structure of organic origin. It’s actually the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
“And, of course, that is what all of this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs – that song, endlesly reincarnated – born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket ’88′, that Buick 6 – same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness.”
– Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather
http://tsutpen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/aciidental-surrealism.html
March 6th, 2013 at 9:56 am
I was just reading an article from “Nation of Change” regarding GMOs in our vitamin supplement supply. The article pointed out that most vitamin C for example is extracted from corn and, since 85-90% of our corn is from Monsanto produced genetically modified seed, most of our vitamin C supply contains GMO material. The article suggests that the same is true for most of the other supplement products.
Now I guess I’m slow on the uptake, compared to most of you, but I only just realized that again this is a case of life imitating art. In this case you movie fans will recognize that MONSANTO = CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS.
On the climate front, we still have knee deep snow here and it is snowing again today, however, the spring migrants are arriving early again this year, and the first chipmunk of the year is just having a wonderful time running around almost a month early in temperatures about 10°F warmer than the historical norm.
Michael Irving
March 6th, 2013 at 10:10 am
Martha “How to deal with this….I’ll be a tad better when spring allows me to get happy in my gardens and work off some tension.I am definitely angry at this point and feel stuck on the grieving cycle…anyone?”
Try this – everyone dies, species go extinct, suns die one way or another. None of this is something that wouldn’t happen sometime. Its just that it is going to happen sooner rather than later. The sooner it happens the less people who will die overall and in an untimely manner. If death is bad, extinction at least eliminates that.
Weird way to get OK about things. Maybe but it is true. If we all died today it would be perhaps 350,000 less people than if we all died tomorrow.
March 6th, 2013 at 10:13 am
Ah HA!
“if ordered flow produces entropy faster than disordered flow (as required by the balance equation of the second law), and if the world acts to minimize potentials at the fastest rate given the constraints (the law of maximum entropy production), then the world can be expected to produce order whenever it gets the chance.”
Swenson
Now I get it!
Good. Now I can withdraw and watch the entropy grow.
I see everything differently now. I see the point of it all.
March 6th, 2013 at 10:32 am
@BC Nurse Prof
That’s quite the moment, isn’t it? That moment when the whole thing becomes clear. I know I’ll never be the same again.
A lot of things burn up in that atomic flash of clarity – all the blame, the shame, the anger and outrage and resentment. In their place is – what? – wonder, awe, a tinge of fading sadness, and a feeling of privilege for being granted a glimpse behind the curtain.
March 6th, 2013 at 11:00 am
@ BC Nurse Prof
Yes. And, for example, if some new crack in the crust allows super heated steam to create a thermal vent thousands of feet down on the ocean floor, with very high water pressure, in complete darkness, spewing out highly toxic chemicals at temperatures deadly to life, somehow, living organisms will find it, and cluster, inches away from certain death. Bacterial mats form, starfish and shrimps and crabs and all kinds of weird things form a food chain… for as long as it lasts.
Is this really so very different, in principle, to the scumbags at Exxon or BP sitting around their board table, and the Deep Water Horizon and Corexit and all the spin off industries that attach to petrochemicals ?
Of course, you can look at the superficial level, they are trying to make money, or they are part of the capitalist machine, or they are a product of the industrial revolution, and so forth, and there’s truth in all those observations, but if you stand right back, and look from as far away as you can get from all this, energy arising in the Universe, creating order, dissipating energy, transforming into disorder, and so forth….
That’s how I’m seeing it. I’m not completely certain if that’s accurate.
If it is, what could we possibly do ? I was thinking about those flowforms. Does anybody know those ? They are sort of cascades that energise and aerate water, slowing down the flow. Quite beautiful, too.
I mean, if we are smart enough to understand this entropy thingee, then ffs, let’s do something with it…
Instead of a straight concrete channel at 45 deg that lets water rush downhill in a straight line, e.g. the stupid idea that most engineers install to get rid of excess water into drains, if you look at nature, at natural streams, they meander, they have pools, they bifurcate and wiggle about, they have mini water falls and eddies.
Flowforms are a bit like that. Mimicing nature.
So, seems to me, entropy is sort of attracted toward the quickest easiest route. The concrete channel. OK. Ban them. Law against straight concrete channels. Make it as unacceptable as incest. All human systems would have to be the equivalent of flowforms.
Hahahahaha. That would probably work. The only problem would be finding anyone in any position of power or authority who could actually spell entropy or flowform… let alone understand what the words mean… sigh….
March 6th, 2013 at 11:11 am
Yes, it’s clear now, and yes, it explains Exxon board members thinking about how to “order” the next round of drilling or refining, or whatever.
Yes, matter and energy inevitably take the quickest path to entropy. However, it seems to me that taking the path of the straight concrete spillway is NOT the quickest path to entropy. The quickest path is the one with the fractal “spreading out”, the one like the stream, the one that looks like one of those fractal diagrams, because that produces the most order, that decays to the most entropy.
Did I get that right?
March 6th, 2013 at 11:21 am
@ BC Nurse Prof
Don’t know.
The quickest way the balance, between inside and outside, is open the door.
Let’s have Paul explain it !
March 6th, 2013 at 11:25 am
Imagine any out of equilibrium system with multiple available pathways such as a heated cabin in the middle of snowy woods (Swenson & Turvey, 1991). In this case, the system will produce flows through the walls, the cracks under the windows and the door, and so on, so as to minimize the potential. What we all know intuitively (why we keep doors and windows closed in winter) is that whenever a constraint is removed so as to provide an opportunity for increased flow the system will reconfigure itself so as to allocate more flow to that pathway leaving what it cannot accommodate to the less efficient or slower pathways. In short, no matter how the system is arranged the pattern of flow produced will be the one that minimizes the potential at the fastest rate given the constraints. Once the idea is grasped, examples are easy to proliferate…
March 6th, 2013 at 11:41 am
U: are you familiar with this?
http://www.jayhanson.us/page137.htm
March 6th, 2013 at 11:47 am
I’m not sure here. In that exerpt he’s talking about the constraints. Paul, can you weigh in here?
March 6th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
OK, here’s the way I understand it.
The “fastest pathway” takes into account both the number of pathways available, and their individual and aggregate capacity. The “number of pathways available” is where the fractal insight come in. The “individual capacity” aspect is where the size of the open door comes into play. Thermodynamics doesn’t care if you punch a hundred holes in the wall, or open a door that has the same area as those hundred holes. Both number and size count.
So from a human point of view, the best way to maximize entropy production is to maximize both the number and the individual size of the pathways. As in, population and per-capita energy use. It comes back to the I=PAT equation: P is population, “AT” is per-capita energy use, and out pops I, which is … entropy.
The constraints Swenson is talking about would be things like how fast can we drill for oil or mine coal, how many people are able to work in entropy-maximizing industries, how fast can we move the waste products out of the way, etc. None of those are infinite, so they all act to constrain the entropy-production process. The primary funtion of human intelligence is to overcome those constraints wherever they are detected.
(speculation)I think the reason human birth rates are heading down now is connected to this. We have (through our intelligence) created technology that is so much better at maximizing entropy than people are, that the system doesn’t need as many people any more. The ones it needs are not entropy producers (miners, farmers etc.) but entropy production managers – machine designers and controllers. Having too many people gets in the way, so the system has slowed down the birth rate. This is why birth rates have gone down faster in industrialized countries. (/speculation)
March 6th, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Thanks, Paul. That’s more clear.
Now, the news of the day: Ice behaviour in the Arctic…
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-cracks-of-dawn.html#more
March 6th, 2013 at 12:24 pm
So, if you want a ship to sink quickly, shoot as many holes into the hull as fast as possible… and that’s what we are doing ?
March 6th, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Boom, boom, boom. Yup. And to get the job done with a minimum of manpower, design a machine gun. Or an automatic cannon…
March 6th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
This got me thinking about laminar flow and its relationship to the “hundred holes” example. Here’s a thought experiment:
Consider two closed systems (A and B), each one being a box divided in half by an insulated wall. In the dividing wall of system A you punch a million tiny holes, each with an area of 1 mm^2. In the wall of system B you make a single hole with the same total area as those thousand timy holes, or 1 m^2. System B with the big hole will achieve equilibrium faster than system A with the million tiny holes. This is because the heat flow through the tiny holes is disordered by air turbulence. The flow through the big hole is orderly, smooth and fast.
This shows again how ordered systems maximize their entropy faster than disordered ones.
This is why we developed hierarchies in our culture – to create more order within the system, and increase its rate of entropy production.
March 6th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
Let me try that again, I missed a beat:
Consider two closed systems (A and B), each one being a box divided in half by an insulated wall. In each, one compartment is heated to a starting temperature of 100 degrees C, while the other starts at 0C.
In the dividing wall of system A you punch a million tiny holes, each with an area of 1 mm^2. In the wall of system B you make a single hole with the same total area as those million tiny holes, or 1 m^2
System B with the big hole will achieve equilibrium (i.e. both compartments are at 50C) faster than system A with the million tiny holes. This is because the heat flow through the tiny holes is disordered by air turbulence. The flow through the big hole is orderly, smooth and fast.
March 6th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Thanks, Paul, I get the idea of constraints and the advantages of different paths now. I’m sure I’ll have more questions, but that at least answers that one.
Now, here is more commentary on the Beaufort Breakup of February 2013:
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-beaufort-break-up-of-february-2013.html
March 6th, 2013 at 1:32 pm
“We’re killing the planet”. Here’s a good picture of that.
http://www.zengardner.com/post-chavez-latin-america-beware-the-imperialists/
After watching the video, NTE can’t be soon enough.
March 6th, 2013 at 1:34 pm
NYT comments on Australian weather:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/world/asia/australian-government-blames-climate-change-for-angry-summer.html
March 6th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Where There’s No Government
In Dmitry Orlov’s latest excerpt from his up coming book, he says:
“Modern societies rely on the government to defend property rights, enforce contracts and regulate commerce. As the economy expands, so do the functions of government, along with its bureaucratic structures, laws, rules and procedures and—what expands fastest of all—its cost.
All of these official arrangements show an accretion of complexity over time.
Each time a new problem needs to be solved, something is added to the structure, but nothing is ever taken away, because previous arrangements are often grandfathered in, and because simplifying a complex arrangement is always more difficult and expensive than complicating it further….
I like that last sentence, “because simplifying a complex arrangement is always more difficult and expensive than complicating it further…”
This is a great feature of the human complexity klusterphuck. It’s always easier to complexify, it’s the path of least bureaucratic resistance, which in complex societies, is the only place decision making counts, not with ‘the people’ at the grassroots level.
Complexity has a self limiting quality and this might be one reason why. It’s less trouble in the grand view to add complexity than it is to simplify large established system. Increasing complexity literally has a better EROEI and simplicity. Slap another coat of paint on rather than strip it down to bare metal a paint it right. Human Nature’s of way baking collapse into it’s complexity cake.
From a guy who knew, I Got Hoes
March 6th, 2013 at 1:45 pm
(think Colombo)
ehhhhh, lemme get dis straight: if everything is affected by this entropy production (state of dissolution), why is the timeline millions of eons in some cases while instantaneous in others (ie. cold universe vs striking a match) – why doesn’t the universe just go from bang to cold singular atoms in the blink of an eye? Is there some intent somewhere hidden in the equations, some (as you brought up) turbulence or resistance to entropy innate in everything created? If so, why? i thought the “goal” was to equilibrium (everything cold and dark in the end) as quickly as possible, so why does the universe choose to draw it out? Or is it just OUR universe, with other examples being different?
How about black holes? What are they doing and what eats them?
March 6th, 2013 at 1:57 pm
Oh look, the garbage gyres of humanity:
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-continent-found-garbage-gyre-ii.html
Scientists recently took a close look at this northern garbage continent, and were shocked; but now we find out is has an evil twin.
Scientists will now go to the even larger southern garbage continent next, Garbage Gyre II, where they have been afraid to look up until now:
“We’re afraid at what we’re going to find in the South Gyre, but we’ve got to go there,” said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Only humans are to blame for ocean debris, Goldstein said. In a blog entry posted a day before the science ship arrived in Newport, Ore., she wrote the research showed her the consequences of humanity’s footprint on nature.
“Seeing that influence just floating out here in the middle of nowhere makes our power painfully obvious, and the consequences of the industrial age plain,” she wrote. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
The use of the phrase “the consequences of humanity’s footprint on nature” shows the continuing ignorance and erroneous duality in the mind of far too many people.
It is as if they think nature is some separate entity we can do things to without consequence to us, instead of the truth that we are nature, so to the degree that we harm “nature” is the degree to which we harm our species.
March 6th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
B9K9,
Do you have a blog or is there anyway I can email you directly? I’m interested in your perspective and how you make it work for you. I’m only 26 so this whole reckoning is quite the load for me to carry. I’m trying to hear as many people’s perspectives and stories as I can to help me decide how I might live my life as well as possible. I’m both overly analytical and lazy by nature so it would be all too easy for me to wallow in this until the end without ever doing anything for myself outside of getting intellectual quick fixes or insight porn as i’ve seen it described.
March 6th, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Gee Tom, I hope I’m not starting to look like a teleological physicist or sumfin’.
Black holes? Dunno.
Why not all at once? Well, speed of light could be a factor, as could the inherent clumpiness or turbulence instilled in matter/energy by the Big Boom. When you have clumpiness you get organized sub-systems like stars and planets, that take a while to do their thing. Issues like the thermal conductivity of planets come into play, or the length of time it takes large assemblies of matter like stars to finish turning some portion of matter into energy.
The big question is what caused the raw energy of the Big Boom to turn into quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, leptons, pi-mesons etc. Why did it become matter? Why did the energy not not just stay as gamma rays? Quien sabe? We’re just stuck with the consequences.
March 6th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
Paul Chefurka: I have an elderly aunt in Australia who is a retired microbiologist, who made an interesting comment regarding the Maximum Power Principle, which was this: “Some species of bacteria can swim but that hardly classes as useful work. And with humans our basal metabolism is about maintaining our bodies in life and this cannot be classified as useful work.” Would you care to respond to that criticism?
March 6th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
U “It’s almost like ‘It is written in the stars that you earthlings are doomed, whatever you do, because whatever you do, will result in your destruction’….. I mean, why should that be so ? It’s kinda crazy… laugh ? cry ? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…”
Should, what does should have to do with it it. Should implies a should-er just as meaning implies a meaner. If that is what it is that is what it is. We can and will each still act as though our acting matters, in big or small matters because that is how we are programmed. We will seek meaning in big and small things (does that sound mean a rattler is near is an example of the small). That is how we are programmed. There is no should-er, no meaner, things just as they are and however they are. so it goes….
March 6th, 2013 at 3:32 pm
Martin Lack
Thanks for your kind reply, clarification. I see now how my interpretation of the implication that Tuscon, Arizona, is an example of Empire’s apex, and the unsustainability of same is Guy’s main point.
I still like the idea of Base Camp of Empire, or Camp 1. But my argument can still run as there is all that hidden privelage of the uber-elite whose needs and whims are met anywhere they wish to reside, or sit for an hour or two. That counld still conceivably be the Apex, for how much of Empire infrastrcture, think Mars Rovers, Space Shuttles, and the deaths of participants in the failures are all for that apex group to keep their hegemony, in secret.
I mean, even as it is only a work of popular fiction, ut run again the movie “Eyes Wide Shut”, (dir: Stanley Kubrick), and you have a metaphore for (shut eyes) for the educated classes not seeing what is in front of them.
I was for a long time perplexed by the apparent ease at which the main female prostitute in the film gives her life for that of Tom Cruises character, Dr. William Harford. Why would she do that?
Reading the brilliant recent book ‘The First 5 000 Years of Debt’, by (I think anthropologist…?) David Graeber, I feel I can see why she does.
MO she has been so degraded as a pawn of sex slave uber-traders, but not so she is a crack whore, still very young and beautiful and high class, but nevertheless, without dignity, and trated as sex property.
In that situation, the fact that the Doctor saved her life,earlier, and needed to be redeemed, she was reclaiming her honour, and dignity by giving her life for his.
I reveer the film even more now, and the womans act of sacrifice, which perhaps was the most human experience of hnour she had encountered in her short life.
Just sayin…
March 6th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
@Martin
“Some species of bacteria can swim but that hardly classes as useful work. And with humans our basal metabolism is about maintaining our bodies in life and this cannot be classified as useful work.”
One would have to ask the bacterium if it felt that swimming was useful, or the person at rest if they felt that staying alive was useful. I think in both cases the answer would be a resounding “Yes!” I think your aunt has a rather myopic inner definition of utility.
March 6th, 2013 at 4:15 pm
@ Paul, Martin Lack’s Aunt
Yes, indeed. The ability to move, even a few millimetres, intentionally, up a glucose gradient ( as Stuart Kaufmann says on the NTE forum ), is a fantastic advance over being static and at the mercy of random forces.
Essentially, that’s the beginning of life. It means one blob of stuff can move over to meet another blob of stuff, to mate, to to devour it, or lots of blobs can join up together into a bigger blob. That’s all very useful for their survival from their perspective.
http://neartermextinction.ning.com/forum/topics/paul-chefurka-s-thoughts-re-rod-swenson-s-ideas-concerning?commentId=6613799%3AComment%3A2403
@ Kathy C.
Okay, edit. Replace, ‘Why should that be so ?’ which is slightly old fashioned, with ‘Why is that ?’ which is more modern, and makes not the slightest difference to my intended meaning.
March 6th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Also, the second point, keeping our bodies basal metabolism functioning. That’s got to be ‘useful work’ too, if it essential to our continued existence.
March 6th, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Re the holes, Is there a formal definition of order in this kind of context ? I have not seen one anywhere yet.
March 6th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
March 6th, 2013 at 5:14 pm
Regarding basal metabolism – think of all the work that has to be done to keep the “resting” body functioning. Blood must be pumped by the heart; food digested and moved through the gut; muscles moved to breathe; and the brain must be kept functioning at all times, requiring 20% of all energy expended at rest. All that motion and energy transformation is “work”.
March 6th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
Hahaha, love this line I just came across :
…… the most general interpretation of entropy is as a measure of our uncertainty about a system
That sums up so much.
March 6th, 2013 at 6:40 pm
@ Tom
(think Colombo)…etc
Can’t answer any of that, but neither can anyone else…
Egan and Lineweaver’s new value for the entropy of the universe is still a billionth of a billionth the maximum possible entropy that researchers have estimated. Nonetheless, the new value “indicates that that the universe is a bit closer to the heat death than previously computed,” comments theorist Paul Davies of Arizona State University in Tempe.
Not everyone agrees that the higher entropy contributed by supermassive black holes puts the universe closer to heat death. Theorist Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles says that because the extra entropy is locked inside the black holes, the rest of the universe should have lower entropy and be further away from heat death.
The new entropy calculation also highlights a cosmic puzzle, Carroll says. The entropy was relatively small in the early universe (1088), bigger now (10104), but still falls far short of the maximum (10122). No known physical principle can explain why the cosmic entropy is so low. But it’s a good thing because the low value “is responsible for everything we experience about the [unidirectional] flow of time — breaking eggs, growing older and dying, remembering the past but not the future,” notes Carroll. “The universe is incredibly more orderly than it has any right to be. Egan and Lineweaver have shown that it’s just a bit more disorderly than we thought.”
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/10/05/new-calculations-suggest-universe-may-be-a-bit-closer-to-heat-death
March 6th, 2013 at 6:50 pm
Thanks, Guy. I think that there have been a couple of others, but it’s good that you acknowledge that you’ve been wrong. You could never be a politician!
I’ve said before, though, that no-one can predict the future with accuracy. Though it’s inconceivable that our situation can improve, especially whilst we go on denying that there is anything critically wrong, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that the models used to “predict” extinction are wrong. Consequently, for those who think that NTE provides a reason for giving up, it’s just possible that NTE will not happen, at least not for humans.
March 6th, 2013 at 8:02 pm
You may already know Guy, but I was reading an interesting article about the strategy of targeting Keystone XL, clicked on a link in comments and there was the “Two Sides of the Fossil Fuels Coin” video!
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2013/03/05/why-environmentalists-are-wrong-on-keystone-xl/
March 6th, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Robert Rapier is a moron and a shill for the oil industry masquerading as a concerned citizen, a ‘real’ environmentalist talking ‘hard’ numbers about energy. He is a flunky from The Oil Drum. A washout even there.
Bill McKibben has embarrassed himself enough with the 350.org number thing and needs to fess up, in public, about how badly we as a species have already shot by 350ppm without even blowing it a wet kiss.
Choosing between them is a no win, but at least McKibben has a conscience of sorts, Rapier has none. He wants to argue about how many geologist can dance on the top of a 55 gallon barrel of Crude.
It’s like the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Neither is presenting the issue of climate collapse in an honest fashion, both think they are the Doyen of rational realism, neither is.
When it all turns to ashes in their mouths as the climate tips over the edge into a point of no return, they will be standing on the rumble blaming each other like kids on the playground.
Both are hidden an ugly truth which NBL trying to put forth.
Both are engaged in propaganda for their two respective loser view points.
The Owners are laughing their asses off at the spectacle of the Keystone Environmental ‘debate’.
March 6th, 2013 at 11:05 pm
Speak Softly: what you said!
Paul U wrote:
“(speculation)I think the reason human birth rates are heading down now is connected to this. We have (through our intelligence) created technology that is so much better at maximizing entropy than people are, that the system doesn’t need as many people any more. The ones it needs are not entropy producers (miners, farmers etc.) but entropy production managers – machine designers and controllers. Having too many people gets in the way, so the system has slowed down the birth rate. This is why birth rates have gone down faster in industrialized countries. (/speculation)”
To use Swenson’s cabin analogy perhaps birth rate is slowing as the potential inside and outside the cabin reaches equilibrium.
On a flat planet with infinite energy sources to be exploited birth rate would theoretically increase (volume to surface area considerations aside) Perhaps the only biggest hole left in the cabin wall is increasing efficiency (managers) as there aren’t enough resources left to maintain the true producers (farmers, miners, fishermen etc. . .). Additionally, there are more than enough consumers to direct the remaining and declining energy through. . . .so can slow down their replacement rate.
We are systematically reducing complexity as well as we channel more and more energy through humans. It could be theorized that declining birth rate is a signal that the planet has dipped below a complexity threshold and therefore the rate of entropy through humans is slowing.
March 7th, 2013 at 12:48 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_%28climatology%29
@ Guy:
Someone said to me tonight, “Well, I don’t know how you determine when we’ve reached the tipping point.” I simply replied that there are already ten positive feedback loops in play – nine of which are irreversible – and that some scientists believe we’ve already reached the tipping point. (I’m sure the matter is far more complex than that.)
Is there one major tipping point that is determined by our having reached a number of lesser tipping points? How do you view this whole matter? And how many other scientists see the planet’s present tipping-point situation the way you do? Thank you.
March 7th, 2013 at 2:17 am
This person does, David Wasdell: (I live 2 time zones ahead of Guy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3sgwZXRvxc
March 7th, 2013 at 2:27 am
Spreading the Horror is featured at Doomstead Diner.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2013/03/06/spreading-the-horror/
March 7th, 2013 at 2:43 am
@Paul C and ulvfugl
I see no legitimate reason to be rude about my aunt. She was offering an opinion (probably not that well considered). For the record, I happen to agree with both you – both movement and metabolism are useful. In fact, what work done would not be useful? So, then, does competitive advantage go to the organism that does the most work; or the one that works most efficiently? Since the two things are not the same, which is it?
March 7th, 2013 at 2:59 am
Martin; Both.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:04 am
Watching experts soberly discussing what they see and its implications is quite frankly frightening.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=iSsPHytEnJM&NR=1
Sorry to hog the airwaves while you were sleeping.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:26 am
Speaksoftly “He wants to argue about how many geologist can dance on the top of a 55 gallon barrel of Crude.”
How nice to have a good laugh. It took me a bit to realize what was up with the Oil Drum. But when a comment I made about climate change was banned because the subject of the post was not about climate change I finally got it. Trouble with the reasoning, was that the post clearly mentioned climate change in a dismissive way…..Bet if I had agreed with her my comment wouldn’t have been deleted.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:27 am
@ Martin L.
Was there any rudeness ?
I think it’s not so much that movement and metabolism are useful, but in their absence, at the microscopic level, there’d have been no life, no evolution. So they are more than useful, they are essential. They are difference between a living thing and a non-living thing.
I’m not sure what you mean by competitive advantage. I think the organism only has to do the work required to survive and to reproduce.
Organisms will compete or cooperate or both, as part of the larger system, life evolving on Earth
March 7th, 2013 at 3:42 am
U “Okay, edit. Replace, ‘Why should that be so ?’ which is slightly old fashioned, with ‘Why is that ?’ which is more modern, and makes not the slightest difference to my intended meaning.”
As my father used to quote me “Their’s is not to reason why, their’s is but to do and die”. Funny thing to say to a little kid. Perhaps that is why death has never bothered me? I heard it as “There is not a reason why….” I think in the end that poem about the Light Brigade works as an analogy for human life, for there is no reason for our existence and the one thing we have to do once born is die.
As for actual explanations of why any particular law of the universe is in place, the only explanation that can be found is another law. Its laws all the way down. Or turtles – take your pick
“Turtles all the way down” is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox. The phrase was popularized by Stephen Hawking in 1988. The “turtle” metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of a “primitive cosmological myth”, namely the flat earth supported on the back of a World Turtle. per wiki
The impersonality of it all, the futility, the vanity….don’t let it get you down.
Here is what Mochizuki said this morning, driven from Japan by the radiation, trying to get out the real news about Fukushima to a world where people have forgotten, moved on…
The glasses shop staff didn’t speak English at all. None of them even understood the most basic words such as today or tomorrow or better.
The other staff was fluent in English the day before the day.
Being fretted (It was actually my fault, I should study Romanian more), I had a cup of coffee at Mc Donald’s. I needed to use their wifi. and then, I left my glasses on the table, which I had fixed at the shop.
I noticed it before going too far.
Soon as I came back, 2 of the customers who were having hamburgers on my right side and left side waved hands to me and said the glasses were picked by the shop staff and it was safely kept behind the casher. They politely escorted me and gave me the glasses.
I was so happy by their civilized goodwill.
I think this is what the happiness is.
When you never expect it, when you even forget the presence, it suddenly comes to you. After all, we are just tumbled on the hand of god or universe or perfect randomness or whatsoever. To keep the hope even when you are stuck in a ditch, you must believe in this god or universe or perfect randomness or whatsoever. Some people call it faith.
There’s the other kind of happiness, which is more artificial.
Drinking alcohol or taking something might make you feel happy. In the same way, posh cars, new couch, flashy clothes, they might make you feel happy
for one day.
After the effect bought by money, you just feel empty like debt.
http://fukushima-diary.com/2013/03/column-happy/
There it is, a little happiness from humans being nice. Forget your quanta, forget entropy, the truth is that we have the ability to be happy in little ordinary things. Grab some while we can.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:56 am
@ Kathy C.
Forget your quanta, forget entropy, the truth is that we have the ability to be happy in little ordinary things. Grab some while we can.
I am happy. Quanta are the ordinary things.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:06 am
@Martin
Sorry, I didn’t intend to be rude to your aunt, but I was a little surprised that a microbiologist could hold such an apparently anthropocentric view of utility. “Useful work” in this sense means something more like, “Work that changes the state of the system” as opposed to “useful in the view of the human observer”.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:11 am
Kathy, we can do both – we can be interested in entropy and grab a bite of happiness on the way by. For some of us, comprehending a deeper truth doesn’t preclude being happy in the world – it can even enhance it.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:29 am
Paul, ulvfugl: thanks for the reply. i’m not trying to put anyone on the spot by asking unanswerable questions. i’m trying to get at the “intention” of the universe (remember: “What the fuck is the point?”) through its laws and actions, but it appears that there are no answers or that the way it is IS the answer (as i think Kathy is saying). This is a really interesting development nonetheless and i appreciate the discussion.
Bluebird: This is just my opinion, so you can skip it if you wish. Perhaps all the tipping points, being as they interact and effect one another, add up to (or “are”) the big tipping point (like Arctic ice sheet loss and the potential methane bomb from the melting permafrost/tundra/peat). In other words we can’t go back on any of them now that they’ve been breeched and it’s only going to get worse (from our perspective) in the coming near future due to the accelerating pace of (unwanted) climate change (including sink holes, volcanic action, etc). Just sayin’.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:33 am
@ Paul C., Kathy C.,
Kathy C.’s position today seems to be a recommendation for ignorance, we wouldn’t know anything about radioactivity or CO2 or any of the stuff she reminds of every day, if it wasn’t for the enquiring minds of scientists… but when the enquiring minds of scientists touch on quantum theory or entropy or anything that disturbs her world view, then ‘it’s turtles all the way down’… but that’s fine by me too, I’m happy to grab some happiness by counting the turtles…
And amazingly enough, it turns out, way, way down, there’s the grandaddy turtle, the primaeval foundational original Turtle of Turtles, without whom there could not be any stack of turtles…. so, if I had followed Kathy C.s defeatist advice, that is a discovery that would never have been made !
The laws of thermodynamics are special laws that sit above the ordinary laws of nature as laws about laws or laws upon which the other laws depend (Swenson & Turvey, 1991). It can be successfully shown that without the first and second laws, which express symmetry properties of the world, there could be no other laws at all.
March 7th, 2013 at 5:40 am
metaphor for a tipping point
http://youtu.be/glPUtcvDBzM
1 min vid.
March 7th, 2013 at 5:41 am
All “natural laws” or “principles” are inferences, derived from other inferences, derived from other inferences. They all rest on direct perception. Perception of light and dark, of colour, of shapes, from which is inferred the presence of objects. Perception of tactile sensations, from which is inferred the presence of objects (or phenomena, such as wind) that can be correlated with visual phenomena. Perception similarly in the other senses. It is quite another matter to perceive the Witness Itself: that the Witness is the witnessing and the witnessed.
March 7th, 2013 at 6:03 am
U, “primaeval foundational original Turtle of Turtles, without whom there could not be any stack of turtles…. ”
In positing that are you not making an argument for ignorance yourself, for if you posit a foundational Turtle you have not answered the question of what that turtle sits on or if it sits on no Turtle, or on nothing why is that?
I think the law of infinite regression holds.
March 7th, 2013 at 7:09 am
If we can define energy, we have the answer. That’s what everything is made of and it doesn’t need to sit on anything. I say this because I expect we can’t define energy.
March 7th, 2013 at 7:45 am
dmd I suspect that the definition of energy would contain terms that also need to be defined. This may be part of the rule of infinite regression or perhaps is part of the vicious circle principle of definitions.
But seriously why doesn’t energy need to come from somewhere? How did it come to just be? Why is that the foundational turtle? Why is there anything?
March 7th, 2013 at 7:49 am
Most could care less of the 100′s of species going extinct daily. Well how about the olive? I bet people will care about this..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/olive-oil-shortage_n_2819297.html
March 7th, 2013 at 7:59 am
@dairymandave
If we can define energy, we have the answer. That’s what everything is made of and it doesn’t need to sit on anything. I say this because I expect we can’t define energy.
Tracing the ‘trail’ of energy to its fundamentals, it is the release of photons as electrons fall to lower energy states ‘orbitals’ within atoms. However, the genesis of energy has to do with the evolution of the universe and lighter elements transforming into heavier elements in the stellar furnaces. As the universe ages, matter is being transformed to more stable heavy elements (notably iron). When this is completed, say goodbye to energy.
March 7th, 2013 at 8:56 am
@ Robin D.
All laws are based on perception etc
Except that the Laws of Thermodynamics came out of engineers messing with steam engines. They couldn’t see the heat. They couldn’t even measure the heat, at that time, with any accuracy, to find out where small amounts of heat were going in the system.
So all your logic in your statement, re direct perception doesn’t apply. They had to arrive at their conclusions, concerning something invisible and unmeasurable, by mathematical calculations.
March 7th, 2013 at 8:57 am
apparently you think biological “Life” is a disease.
Is our sun “alive?”
Is our earth “alive?”
What is the difference between the Sun burning itself up to nothingness and the deer eating all the food on the island until they all die?
Is the Sun stupid? Are the deer stupid?
March 7th, 2013 at 9:10 am
Forgive me Pat, but, who is the “you” in your comment?
The Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Earth is a self-regulating system. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Sun is not a living entity, so it cannot be stupid. Deer are living entities, but they have not got the self-awareness to make rational decisions about what is or is not sustainable.
Humans, on the other hand, have no such excuse. They just seem to be stupid.
March 7th, 2013 at 9:16 am
Where Has All the Ice Gone?
Emily E. Adams
As the earth warms, glaciers and ice sheets are melting and seas are rising. Over the last century, the global average sea level rose by 17 centimeters (7 inches). This century, as waters warm and ice continues to melt, seas are projected to rise nearly 2 meters (6 feet), inundating coastal cities worldwide, such as New York, London, and Cairo. Melting sea ice, ice sheets, and mountain glaciers are a clear sign of our changing climate.
http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C50/ice_melt_2013
March 7th, 2013 at 9:17 am
@ Kathy C., dmd
In positing that are you not making an argument for ignorance yourself, for if you posit a foundational Turtle you have not answered the question of what that turtle sits on or if it sits on no Turtle, or on nothing why is that?
I think the law of infinite regression holds.
You assume it’s true a priori, so you don’t bother to look. I looked and found a Law of laws, so to speak, a Golden Turtle.
Of course, that’s not the end of the matter, but my question was, ‘Where are the laws hiding ?’ I made some progress ! If you don’t seek, you don’t find.
Nobody says that you or dmd or anyone else MUST be interested, anymore than you MUST be interested in keeping goldfish or playing golf… I have even tried to move the subject to NTE, so as not to irritate people here, but it bounces back…
‘Why is there anything ?’ is a very good question, a zen koan, but that’s a different stack of turtles, for another day…
@ dmd I think the physicists have a pretty good understanding of energy, E=MC2 and all that is ancient history, you say ‘energy doesn’t need to sit on anything’, but there is space-time, which, I think, is produced by the energy of the Big Bang expanding…
March 7th, 2013 at 9:29 am
@ Martin Lack
Forgive me Pat, but, who is the “you” in your comment?
The Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Earth is a self-regulating system. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Sun is not a living entity, so it cannot be stupid. Deer are living entities, but they have not got the self-awareness to make rational decisions about what is or is not sustainable.
Humans, on the other hand, have no such excuse. They just seem to be stupid.
And ‘we’ must accept these statements just because ‘you’ say so ?
How can you demonstrate that the Sun is not a conscious living entity, self aware, and self-regulating ?
I mean, I know you have been told by someone that it is not, and you believe what you have been told, but did you actually ask for any evidence to back up the claim, as I’m asking you now ?
March 7th, 2013 at 9:32 am
Speak Softly, I couldn’t agree more. The big green organizations (aka Gangrene) have been corrupted by funding from corporate foundations – meaning they are almost (?) worse than the out-and-out delayers, deniers – and obfuscators (like Repier/Revkin) – because they give their less-informed, well-intentioned constituencies the false notion that signing petitions and engaging in publicity stunts orchestrated with the police is going to make any sort of difference at all.
Most annoying to me is that they persist in a totally failed strategy (as you pointed out we’ve blown past the namesake 350 never to return in the lifespan of our species) of targeting obscure sources of fuel when it is absolutely critical (although too late!!) to target consumption, especially in the wealthy nations, and overpopulation. As one commenter at the post complained why are they picking on Canadian tar sands instead of going after coal mines and power plants in the US? Obviously, because the US consumer would complain if they had no electricity! Plus, the activists would’t be able to jet across the country to conferences and protests, they wouldn’t be able to produce movies like Dirty Lying Bastards, they would terribly terribly miss the cocktail parties and awards and press, not to mention their electronic toys.
Here’s a followup on 350 funding:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/02/14/rockefellers-behind-scruffy-little-outfit/
March 7th, 2013 at 9:40 am
So, if early humans had adopted sustainable lifestyles due to their being smart, then they would not have overpopulated the planet and we wouldn’t be facing NTE of not only ourselves but of all living things on the planet. Okay.
We know that early humans were smart enough to know they needed to manage their resources, preserve food, migrate around the seasons, etc. And, it seems to me, that more recent humans were REALLY smart as they built the pyramids and the temples of Rome. But, the evidence I see is that we never stopped just consuming all the fuel we could, producing all the children we could, etc. So, I think being self-aware has made no difference – we are no different than the burning sun or the herd of deer.
We have two cats, they both want to eat out of whichever bowl the other is eating out of – they go back and forth. I guess the idea is to eat all the food with the consequence that the other cat starves. Yet, they sleep together all cuddled up and they happily play together most of the day. However, at feeding time, all bets are off.
I say we are no different. And, maybe our “self-awareness” is an illusion, maybe our “smartness” is an illusion. Maybe if an advance alien visited us, he would think prairie dogs had the most advanced civiliations on Earth.
What does it all mean? It means nothing. I remember my days as a child on the beach – you had to build your sandcastle close to the water because that’s where the good sand for building sandcastles is located. I spent all morning building – never forgetting to keep one eye on the incoming tide…
March 7th, 2013 at 9:42 am
@ Robin D.
The First Law of Thermodynamics = En Sof = Sunyata
Discuss ?
March 7th, 2013 at 9:46 am
@ulvfugl. Please forgive my earlier suggestion that you had been rude. It was Paul Cherfurka’s comment I felt was somewhat unkind. However, he has apologised for and/or explained it and, in any case, it was trivial.
As for your most recent remarks, I presume you are trying to surpass the humour attempted in my own? If not, please feel free to interpret my statements of fact as personal opinion based on observational evidence.
March 7th, 2013 at 9:52 am
Guy, is there any reason to include ocean acidification in the feedbacks? It would seem to be irreversible unless we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and as it is killing coral reefs and phytoplankton and other calcium-based life, would ultimately affect the atmosphere and climate, no?
Similarly, there have been many studies in the past several years demonstrating conclusively that forests globally are in decline – not just Amazon, and boreal peat, but boreal trees and other vegetation (see this study which is restricted to the eastern US – supposedly just about that last place where forests aren’t dying: http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=26250).
I’m not sure if we’ve reached a tipping point with forests already – but I’m certain that if we continue to poison the air, we absolutely will. And trees, in addition to being a major CO2 sink, regulate climate through evapotranspiration.
The olive oil video is interesting. Of course, they are having a drought in southern Europe, but it says that there was a bumper crop last year. That is what trees do when they are slowly dying from pollution – they put all their energy into reproduction a season or 2 or 3 before they give up completely. You can see it on many pine trees, that are covered with cones the year before they die…and nut trees as well. Even trees that make smaller seeds, like maples and ash, have been laden the past few springs.
Kind of poetic, really.
March 7th, 2013 at 10:39 am
@ Martin L.
…I presume you are trying to surpass the humour attempted in my own? If not, please feel free to interpret my statements of fact as personal opinion based on observational evidence.
No, man, I’m very serious, or rather, I’m trying to make a very serious point…
To reiterate :
The Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Earth is a self-regulating system. As such, it is not a living entity.
The Sun is not a living entity, so it cannot be stupid. Deer are living entities, but they have not got the self-awareness to make rational decisions about what is or is not sustainable.
Humans, on the other hand, have no such excuse. They just seem to be stupid.
This is the standard orthodox paradigm, is it not. This is the belief system that is getting taught to most kids in the Western world, for the last few generations ( apart from the ones we are told are crackpots, the Creationists, religious fundamentalists, etc…. in case anybody thinks I’m arguing in their support, yes, I think they are crackpots ).
But look, this set of ideas that you just expressed IS the root of the human stupidity that you complain about, isn’t it ? It’s not wisdom.
When you say that ‘the Sun is not a living entity’, this is pure bullshit. You want to claim it as ‘fact’. We can’t define awareness, consciousness, we can’t locate it, we don’t know how it arises, or what its limits are, or wether these stars have it in some form or whether they are vital to the functioning of the overall ‘intelligence’ of something that is so far above our heads we can’t even begin to conceive of where it’s at…
So you cannot claim that the Sun is ‘not a living entity’ any more than anyone else can. It’s a belief that has been handed down for years and years by scientists via text books, that nobody is allowed to question.
Well, fuck that. Science says that EVERYTHING in science is ALWAYS up for questioning and review, nothing is ever finalised and fixed.
If we don’t know what the Universe IS, and what it is DOING, we’ve got no business telling people, in this arrogant way, that we know for certain that such and such is such and such, when it’s simply not true.
What you are doing, when you lay out your beliefs in the above statement, that the Sun is this way, the deer are that way, humans are stupid, etc, is overlaying your own particular belief system onto reality.
It is this very belief system, amongst others, that allows the destruction that is going on. It’s the one that says, ‘This lump of rock that you people say is a Sacred Mountain inhabited by a Goddess, is just geology, we know this from science, so we are going to quarry it until it is flat, to get all the minerals out of it, because we need the copper for our machines, and our belief system is right, and yours is just superstition and nonsense’.
It’s the belief system that says it’s okay to clear fell virgin forest because it’s just trees and new trees can be planted somewhere else, they are only big vegetables after all, and we can genetically engineer better ones, it’s the belief system that has contempt for everything because it’s all just stuff, and it’s all been explained by science, so we can manipulate it and exploit it…
March 7th, 2013 at 10:58 am
Ulvfugl, your last comment is a breath of fresh air! And fresh air is desperately needed these days. Thanks for that.
March 7th, 2013 at 11:07 am
@ DaveF
Hahaha, well, thanks for the compliment, I have to admit an element of devil’s advocacy
Thing is, I AM on topic, Guy says, an hour of critical thinking, well, as I understand it, that means looking at one’s own most cherished beliefs, and beating the shit out of them, and seeing what’s left, if anything… I mean, if they really ARE strong, they’ll survive..
One of my all time favourite quotes from B. Russell’s A Theory of Knowledge
..at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.
March 7th, 2013 at 11:23 am
This is one for dmd, dear friend across the waters, who milketh the cows and tilleth the soil and dreams of aliens making crop circles, bringing messages from other worlds and dimensions….
What if the Sun and all the stars are indeed conscious entities sending us messages, but we have been too dumb to listen and notice ?
It’s now generally accepted that dolphins are highly intelligent conscious creatures with sophisticated language and ability to think and learn. But that’s a very recent achievement on OUR part. Most of history, we were too stupid to notice. Now we are beginning to decode their language, as we are for many other birds and animals, and to actually understand what they are saying to each other.
Here’s messages coming from the stars. Each has it’s own voice. Perhaps we are just too dumb to decode their language ?
http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/astrophysics.html
March 7th, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Dear Doctor McPherson,
I really appreciate your trying to get the word out, like you and a few brave others are. I’ve been pretty sure since the 60′s that we would never be able to stop the “Death Machine” that we were born into, and the evidence was certainly there at that time.
However, in spite of the inevitability of it all, aren’t we compelled to at least try some form of junkshot approach of geo-engineering at this point?
After all, we’re done anyway, whether we make a complete hash of it by either making things worse or being ineffective. Which, as you say, is likely.
March 7th, 2013 at 1:01 pm
If you think that even the idea of human-driven global warming is commonly accepted, let alone understood as to its gravity, see
http://www.hubberts-arms.org/general-discussion/michael-ruppert-interview/15/ and subsequent pages of that thread. A friend of mine told me about how it took a turn towards discussing global warming, how one participant discloses a complete failure to understand Guy’s take on it, and the administrator of the site, no less, a site whose focus is Peak Oil, then comes in with a pretty much denialist take on the whole subject.
And then check out http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/89538 Towards the latter part of the program, there’s an interview with the environmental writer for the Nation, who talks confidently about how society can lower CO2 levels below 400 ppm by planting lots of trees, and thus avoid a 2 deg C rise. That station, the Berkeley outlet for the Pacifica Network, is heavily influenced by the ideas expressed in the new book Catastrophism, by Eddie Yeun and Sasha Lilley, who contend that analyses such as put forth by Guy, do nothing but scare people into passivity and are not valid anyway. Lilley is in fact pretty high up in the KPFA hierarchy.
March 7th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
The name of that Nation writer, by the way, is Mark Hertsgaard.
March 7th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
The Cliff’s Notes version of my insight, as posted just recently to an email list:
My view of the current clusterfuck and my pessimism about the outcome stands on the following tripod:
1. The “Law of Maximum Entropy Production” by Rod Swenson. The emergence of order, structure and self-organization in the universe is inevitable due to the laws of thermodynamics. All ordered structures are dissipative (i.e. the “goal” of order is to degrade energy gradients as fast as possible). This applies fractally at all scales from sub-atomic particles to human culture.
2. The “Maximum Power Principle” of H.T. Odum : “During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.” This is essentially a re-statement of Swenson, and is similarly applicable to all systems from thunderstorms to human institutions like economics. It clarifies the reasons for the observed growth in all human activities from energy use and general consumption to population. It also explains the succession of empires, why the USA and Russia won WWII, and why the USA defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
3. The principle of “Infrastructural Determinism” by Marvin Harris. In the tripartite framework of human culture (i.e. the “infrastructure” of resource-manipulation technologies, the “structure” of human social institutions, and the “superstructure” of values and beliefs). Cultural influences flow probabilistically up from the infrastructure. This means that all our social institutions values and beliefs exist to support and explain our resource-directed activities rather than to control or constrain them.
It should be noted that the work of Harris and Odum preceded that of Swenson. Their work did not have a nomological foundation until Swenson came along. It is also worth noting that Swenson’s work shows that Darwinian evolution is probably a special case of LMEP.
The upshot is that the whole of human culture is oriented towards executing, supporting and justifying the thermodynamic imperative of degrading energy sources as fast as possible. Population growth and material consumption are intrinsic parts of this process. We don’t recognize that most of our values and beliefs are responses to this invisible, universal pressure. As a result our behavior is remarkably sensitive to education directed towards enhancing this activity, and remarkably insensitive to any education directed at counteracting it. In fact our culture as a whole acts defensively towards such threats. What Mother Nature wants, she ends up getting.
March 7th, 2013 at 1:19 pm
The word “energy” is a portmanteau word and means, approximately, something that can be used to produce heat. Since heat, in turn can be used to produce motion and electricity they too can be measures of “energy.” Energy must be measured in the units of one of its forms. There is not and cannot be a unit of energy in general. There is no comprehensive unit of both mass in motion and electricity except insofar as both can be transformed into heat.
“Consciousness” is what you regain when you wake up either after being knocked unconscious or having been asleep. It is a word of very little other usefulness in day to day life. The idea of it as some kind of inner spark that suddenly appears in complex life is mythology. “Consciousness” is a remnant of “the soul” something that we believe might allow us to live after death. But the soul has much more reality. (You can be ashamed of yourself without being ashamed of your body.)
March 7th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
@Michael
I’m partial to “joules”. My partner is partial to “jewels”. I’m conscious of it taking a lot of the first to acquire any of the second. But I’m not ashamed of trying.
March 7th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Michael, I think you would enjoy Peter Watts scifi novel that explores what consciousness is and what it is good for. Watts has made it available on the web through the creative commons. http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
March 7th, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Consciousness has become a very popular and equally ambiguous term. Without reference to sentience, what does it really mean? To my understanding, there must be an I-thou, subject object relationship for an abstraction like consciousness to make any sense. However, I do not believe there is any such ‘thing’ as ‘nothing’, but beyond an a-temporal state, there may be “no-thing-ness” (as in no particulars).
March 7th, 2013 at 2:14 pm
Wonder what the asteroids are trying to tell us????
Here we go again: Big asteroid set to buzz Earth
By Mike Wall
Space.com
A newly discovered asteroid the size of a football field will cruise through Earth’s neighborhood this weekend, just days after another space rock made an even closer approach to our planet.
The 330-foot-wide (100 meters) asteroid 2013 ET will miss Earth by 600,000 miles (960,000 kilometers) when it zips by on Saturday. The space rock flyby will come just days after the 33-foot (10 m) asteroid 2013 EC approached within 230,000 miles (370,000 km) of us early Monday.
When asteroid 2013 ET passes Earth, it will be at a range equivalent to 2.5 times the distance between the planet and the moon, making it too faint and far away for most stargazers to spot in the night sky. But the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, run by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, will webcast a live telescope view of the space rock’s flyby on Friday, beginning at 2 p.m. EST. You can access the free broadcast here.
There is no danger that 2013 ET will hit Earth, researchers say, just as 2013 EC posed no threat. But their flybys are slightly unsettling nonetheless, since both asteroids were discovered mere days ago.
Indeed, many space rocks are hurtling undetected through Earth’s neck of the cosmic woods. Astronomers estimate that the number of near-Earth asteroids tops 1 million, but just 9,700 have been discovered to date.
Undetected objects can strike Earth without warning, as the surprise meteor explosion over Russia last month illustrated. The 55-foot (17 m) asteroid that caused the Feb. 15 Russian fireball detonated in the atmosphere before astronomers even knew it existed.
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/06/17210723-here-we-go-again-big-asteroid-set-to-buzz-earth?lite
March 7th, 2013 at 3:08 pm
@ Michael Dollner
“Consciousness” is what you regain when you wake up either after being knocked unconscious or having been asleep. It is a word of very little other usefulness in day to day life.
Yes, that’s the kindergarten version. Until the person eats some mushrooms, or does some intensive meditation, or has some other experience of ‘non-ordinary reality’ that shakes things up and then ‘Wow, who would have guessed…’
As in Huxley’s Doors of Perception, the brain is like a valve, with a tendency to only let through what a person needs to perceive for day to day survival, but the tap can be opened, which makes existence hell of a lot more interesting…
March 7th, 2013 at 3:24 pm
@ Michael Dollner
“Consciousness” is what you regain when you wake up either after being knocked unconscious or having been asleep. It is a word of very little other usefulness in day to day life.
You are exactly right, that is exactly what consciousness is.
Just because drug users THINK they have some special view of the world doesn’t make it so. People with Cotard’s syndrome think they don’t exist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard_delusion but they do. People with other syndrome’s think one of their legs or arms doesn’t belong to them (and try to get surgeon’s to remove them), or think their parents are impostors who look just like their parents, etc. Mess with the brain through brain damage, introduced chemicals, or self induced visions and people think they have some special view of the world.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Re: Sun and Consciousness and nuclear fusion therein:
I was of the view that the Sun was a nuclear reactor too, from my early schooling in Science, until I found a group of scientists and ‘researchers’ who are posing a different mechanism at work inside stars and between stars – and electromagnetic one – ‘Electric Universe Theory’.
Their work was revealed to me in a series of y-tube vids:
Link below:
‘Thunderbolts of the Gods | Official Movie’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AUA7XS0TvA
I have heard the term ‘The Transcendental Sun’ around the traps over the years, and have inferred from this that some people(s) believe that the Sun has some consciousness, but I can’t confirm or deny that assertion yet. It is a great idea though, worth exploring IMO, but how you do it with scientific processes I’m not certain.
There may be other ways, more ‘spiritual’, that require some preperation and understanding, but that is another topic I guess.
Why discount something when it may be so?
I am interested in this Electric Model of celestial formations, and even though there is some fuzzy confluence of ancient myths and modern astrophysics in the Thunderbolts video presentation, I am willing to look further there.
So much energy coming through the Sun portal or locus and from where…?
To be honest I was never really convinced that nuclear fusion was at the heart of the Sun. Can’t say why though, just a ‘hunch’.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Why discount something when it may be so?
Why not believe in the Easter bunny and Santa? It may be so – it’s not provable that they don’t exist.
Of course most children grow out of those fantasies but alas, adults replace them with others cloaked in science.
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2013/03/humans-are-clueless-about-themselves.html
March 7th, 2013 at 3:39 pm
Michael, a qualification, some neuroscientists distinguish from ordinary consciousness (being awake) what they call extended consciousness – which is sort of a feed back loop that says creates the illusion of I and of conscious will. This human characteristic does seem to have some usefulness. I think of it as an additional sense organ – the eyes look for visual clues, the nose for smells etc. The conscious brain searches for meanings and processes what it finds more thoroughly than in other animals. It seeks out social meanings as well. All this information along with the information from the other sense organs gets fed to the unconscious brain, the decider, and the decision is made. The self that the brain creates gets to take credit for the decision made before it knew a decision was made. My take on the work of Daniel M. Wegner as described in The Illusion of Conscious Will
The feedback loop is proposed by Antonio Damasio – The Feeling of What Happens, and I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
March 7th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
@ulvfugl
“Yes, that’s the kindergarten version. Until the person eats some mushrooms, or does some intensive meditation, or has some other experience of ‘non-ordinary reality’ that shakes things up and then ‘Wow, who would have guessed…’
One can be conscious of more or less. Drugs or meditation can open you to higher consciousness. Two people at the same place at the same time can experience, be conscious of, different things. But these are all words that have meaning in a common language. If we want to talk about what has and what doesn’t have consciousness we are talking about what is awake and what isn’t. What would we be talking about if we said the sun has consciousness? You cannot define your terms, as many think you can, for you always import ideas that are not in your definition that way. If you want to define a term make up a new word. Then you will see just how little such a definition gives you.
March 7th, 2013 at 3:53 pm
@ Kathy C.
Just because drug users THINK they have some special view of the world doesn’t make it so.
And just because YOUR view of the world, produced by drugs that your body produces, is what you consider to be ‘normal’ and the only official standard approved reality, does not make it so.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:00 pm
@ Michael Dollner
One can be conscious of more or less. Drugs or meditation can open you to higher consciousness.
But then you need to define your own terms and your own language, because what you are talking about is awareness, one can be aware of more or less, which is not the same thing as consciousness, and what do you mean by ‘higher consciousness’ ? You are implying gradations ? A scale ? How are you measuring that scale ? Who is measuring ? Where can I look to read the citation ?
March 7th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
To my mind neuroscientists are poor misguided souls hopelessly locked into the mind-body dichotomy that has doomed the west from at least the time of Descartes. They toil away in the hopeless task of trying to find body correlates for mental activities. They never twig to “mind” and “body” having independent vocabularies and being logically independent.We could not study the body to determine that I had such and such an intention, for intention is ruled out in physical science. That does not mean we can’t find, for example, portions of the brain that show activity while I am say, suffering pain. But the correspondence can only be temporal, never logical. And since what we call pain can range from a knife stab to the anguish over something you remember doing as a child, and often depends upon a particular language, it would be quite surprising to find such a correlation over the whole range of the word’s meaning.
So If I know how to get to New York, even if their is road work on my usual route, the neurophysiologist would search for some physiochemical condition that would correspond to this knowledge. They can’t imagine that knowing something in this way might not reflect any physical condition in particular. Theirs is just an assumption they make because of their rigid picture of reality as a building block kind of thing that forces them to deny what is in front of their faces. They are, to be ironic, not conscious. People do things for purposes–science declares this essentially impossible.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:30 pm
@ulfull But then you need to define your own terms and your own language, because what you are talking about is awareness, one can be aware of more or less, which is not the same thing as consciousness, and what do you mean by ‘higher consciousness’ ? You are implying gradations ? A scale ? How are you measuring that scale ? Who is measuring ? Where can I look to read the citation ?
I don’t care whether it is higher consciousness or not. I merely recount what people say about their own experience. They use “consciousness,” the word, in this way. I agree that such talk comes to nothing. I thought it was you who thought mushrooms and the like had something to do with the case. I ask how the word is used. If someone is knocked unconscious his friends might lean over him and ask, “is he conscious yet, or should I call an ambulance?” That would be using language to some purpose, the kindergarten version as you put it. But would I watch someone meditating and ask, “has he achieved higher consciousness yet?” What would the question mean? You might take the person’s word for it but then what? What can his answer mean to me? It falls afoul of Wittgenstein’s private language arguments.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:33 pm
@ Michael Dollner
I’d tend to agree with that, but you can’t lump them all together, they enjoy their own vigorous disputes over every facet of the subject.
But all of that is a slightly different topic, from where you began, isn’t it ?
March 7th, 2013 at 4:35 pm
@ Michael Dollner
Sorry, cross-posted, previous comment was in response to To my mind neuro scientists…
March 7th, 2013 at 4:39 pm
@ Michael Dollner
I don’t care whether it is higher consciousness or not. I merely recount what people say about their own experience. They use “consciousness,” the word, in this way. I agree that such talk comes to nothing. I thought it was you who thought mushrooms and the like had something to do with the case. I ask how the word is used. If someone is knocked unconscious his friends might lean over him and ask, “is he conscious yet, or should I call an ambulance?” That would be using language to some purpose, the kindergarten version as you put it. But would I watch someone meditating and ask, “has he achieved higher consciousness yet?” What would the question mean? You might take the person’s word for it but then what? What can his answer mean to me? It falls afoul of Wittgenstein’s private language arguments.
Okay. Well, I can use the word consciousness in the kindergarten sense, or tmore advanced and sophisticated philosophical senses. Which ever you prefer.
March 7th, 2013 at 4:52 pm
Philosophy is when language goes on holiday. There’s a lot of fun but it’s time out from life.
March 7th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
@ Michael Dollner
Philosophy is thinking. It is very hard work.
It means asking a question. It means asking whether the question is being posed in a way that makes any sort of sense. That, in itself, is a big challenge.
Then, it means considering possible ways to answer the question.
You touched upon Wittgenstein. Yes, all that too. Before even starting to think about philosophy, and questions, what about language and words and meaning and communication ?
If we are to give up on those things, then this blog and these comments might as well be closed, because all we have are words and text, and all we can do is attempt to communicate ideas, despite the obvious difficulties.
March 7th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
@ dairymandave: Thanks for posting the link to the video of David Wasdell on the IPCC! It led me to the paper he presented in July 2012 at the 4th Global Conference on Global Warming in Istanbul: “Feedback Dynamics, Sensitivity, and Runaway Conditions in the Global Climate System.” http://www.apollo-gaia.org/Climate_Sensitivity.htm
Quoted from David Wasdell’s Web site:
For over three decades, the search for a definitive and accurate value of Climate Sensitivity has been the “Grail Quest” of climate science. The assessment of climate risk and the development of a strategic international response to global warming depend on answering two fundamental questions:
“The first question concerns the amount by which the feedback processes of the global climate system amplify the effects of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change”
“The second question addresses the dilemma of the possible existence of a critical threshold, or tipping point, in the global climate system beyond which climate change might be precipitated into a period of self-amplification, or runaway behaviour.
The current ensemble of climate models has great difficulty dealing with the complexity of the feedback processes involved. Their outputs are known to be too conservative and have a high degree of uncertainty. In contrast this paper presents a definitive value of climate sensitivity with much lower levels of uncertainty. The multi-disciplinary approach is independent of global climate models and is grounded in empirical data concerning the dynamics of the whole earth system. The derived value of climate sensitivity is significantly higher than current estimates which it should now replace. It will require a radical revision of the strategic approach to the mitigation of climate change. It lays the foundation for a new assessment of non-linearity and the relationship between feedback dynamics and sensitivity. It also enables exploration of the critical threshold between equilibrating and runaway behaviour in the global climate system.
March 7th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
U wrote:
“It is this very belief system, amongst others, that allows the destruction that is going on. It’s the one that says, ‘This lump of rock that you people say is a Sacred Mountain inhabited by a Goddess, is just geology, we know this from science, so we are going to quarry it until it is flat, to get all the minerals out of it, because we need the copper for our machines, and our belief system is right, and yours is just superstition and nonsense’.
It’s the belief system that says it’s okay to clear fell virgin forest because it’s just trees and new trees can be planted somewhere else, they are only big vegetables after all, and we can genetically engineer better ones, it’s the belief system that has contempt for everything because it’s all just stuff, and it’s all been explained by science, so we can manipulate it and exploit it…”
Harks back to Daniel Quinn’s “Great Forgetting”. Our culture is not humanity. I find the correlation between reduction in human brain volume in the last 20,000 and the rise and domination of our culture interesting to ponder. Some researchers think our brains have become more efficient and so decreased in volume. I go with the line of thought that like all domesticated animals we lost brain volume and became less intelligent along the way. The ways in which we might have become less intelligent remain mystifying to me. But I’m thinking spiritual ability and the associated ability to understand species other than our own might be in the mix. As our scocial constructs and language developed to support abstract thought it overshadowed other perceptive abilities and we lost them. Maybe.
Regarding the comments on consciousness; it is a trap to believe that our current level of knowledge and understanding gives us certainty, which while comfortable is generally not the truth of the matter.
While supervising some students conducting investigations and making up tests yesterday I had a fun little thought:
Anthony’s Exponential Law: By the time exponential change is noticeable programs will have no influence on the outcome.
Hahahahaha!
March 7th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
@ Anthony
Yes, seems born into captivity, domestication, likely explanation…
Domestication of other species has lead to reduced intelligence.
The ‘less civilised’ peoples don’t have any problem re the spiritual stuff that seems to cause some people here so much difficulty.
Yes, add Anthony’s Law to the nomological basis of NTE
March 7th, 2013 at 5:57 pm
Re what Anthony said
For example :
http://youtu.be/5vHB6lh2HDE
March 7th, 2013 at 6:04 pm
And
Doesn’t need mushrooms or meditation, every culture has known how to find it, as what might be loosely called ‘cosmic consciousness’, except for modern Western materialist rationialist ‘civilised’ culture.
http://youtu.be/yEDqeu3s-tg
March 7th, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Anthony, your exponential law (By the time exponential change is noticeable, programs will have no influence on the outcome) reminds me of what David Wasdell said in 2007 in this video on “Feedback Mechanisms & Catastrophic Climate Change”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg (from 18:46 to 22:56)
March 7th, 2013 at 6:48 pm
Kicking back.
Just having a drink or two (or three) down at the roadhouse a little off Highway 61
March 7th, 2013 at 7:02 pm
@ Speak Softly
Wow, fantastic version, never heard that before, thanks !
Similar voice ?
http://youtu.be/4KP9PNSUME4
March 7th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
@ulvfugl
Love Robbie Robertson. I think it was in the documentary on Dylan called ‘No Direction Home’ by Martin Scorsese, that he had a hilarious description about playing backup to Dylan in various dives along the tour, right around the time Dylan switched from folk to electric, and how the audience hated them so thoroughly they would literally throw anything at the band they could get their hands on, from food to shoes to bottles, you name it.
I remember being at Newport Folk in 66′ when they booed Dylan off the stage for his electric guitar.
Here is Dylan afterwards. ( that’s Robertson in this opening clip )
I thought ‘Highway 61′ was such a brillant trip first time I heard it, I never looked back.
March 7th, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Sometimes you just have to play the hand that’s dealt you .
March 7th, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Speak Softly says: Highway 61
Ballad of a Thin Man
You don’t understand the unknowns
When you first enter doom twilight zones;
Something’s happening, yo,
But you don’t know
What it is, do you, Mister Jones?
March 7th, 2013 at 8:33 pm
Aw, man, I lived through that, I was a deeply serious player of acoustic guitar in folk clubs, and amongst all my friends the consensus was that this electric technology was evil, we wanted the genuine old trad revival, the working class songs, the gypsy ballads, and I hated pop music, that shallow capitalist consumer shit… and then Dylan sold out and betrayed us all… and then I hear THIS and I knew in my heart it couldn’t be evil, this man was sent from HEAVEN, pure genius… like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, it was in him and it was coming straight out, no pretension….
http://youtu.be/z_L4RtU1iRg
March 7th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Gail
You mean that the Easter Bunny and Santa are not real…?
It was my understanding they both got some authenticity from their relation to pre-Christial agricultural rites and festivals of fertility(Easter Bunny) and gift exchange in northern tribes (Santa-Saint Nicholas) both in thear own ways being subsumed into Christianity and thence Industrial Capoitalism. Two big earners now for Retail.
As cultural customs, personified in our newer manifestations, do you really have to use these two as counter-examples to my statement in relation to celestial dynamics?
My question: ‘Why discount something when it may be so?’
granted may be a bit vaguely termed but it was meant to be founded on the idea that if there is no conclucive evidence to discount a possibility, why ditchit in favour of a belief that may be largly uninspected?
So much we normally do not perceive may be occurring in this domain and at long distances from ‘here’(relative term), and we just don’t know about it. I just like to keep an open mind on these issues, not a easilly fooled, nor a psychophantic mind either.
I mean the presents were there every Christmas morning, without fail, and white powdery boot prints were tracked to the chimney.
( Now that I think back, that white powdery stuff tasted alwfully sweet, like icing sugar, if I wasn’t mistaken. )
March 7th, 2013 at 9:13 pm
ulvfugl says: http://youtu.be/z_L4RtU1iRg
Don’t get excited, just wait:
You and I know what’s our fate,
Which we don’t disavow;
Let’s not talk falsely now—
The hour is getting late.
March 7th, 2013 at 9:18 pm
@ B the D
Yes, indeedee… Fingers on the buttons…
http://rt.com/news/north-korea-cuts-hotline-981/
March 7th, 2013 at 9:43 pm
@Anthony
The ways in which we might have become less intelligent remain mystifying to me. But I’m thinking spiritual ability and the associated ability to understand species other than our own might be in the mix. As our scocial constructs and language developed to support abstract thought it overshadowed other perceptive abilities and we lost them. Maybe.
I recently watched Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, documenting the Chauvet cave drawings which were done about 30,000 years ago in S. France, some sets of drawings done 5,000 years apart. It caused me to, once and for all, do away with any assumption that biological/cultural evolution has resulted in a more advanced human species. We are so distracted by increasingly intricate forms of “entertainment”, that our connections with nature have suffered, not just in the obvious ways of subsisting, surviving, etc…but feeling at home in the world and trusting the universe. As an artist, I can imagine making those drawings, I can feel the charcoal on my hands, I know the time it takes. But I can’t imagine walking into the recesses of some cavern by the ocean, also used by other animals such as bears, with only a flickering torch and creating these images from memory and experience. I think I used to mistakenly assume that surviving as a “cave man” would consume most waking hours, but when I see those drawings, I realize that’s probably not true. Maybe farming, yes. But nomadic hunting/gathering, especially amid ice ages, there must have been a lot of time for the mind to really do it’s thing in a far more free and creative manner than now, depending on your circumstances and how entrenched you are in society, of course. I think many have simply lost their ability to imagine…
March 7th, 2013 at 9:53 pm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/lead-poisoning-ignored-scandal/
Long before the Baltimore toddler study was even conceived, millions of children had their growth and intelligence stunted by lead-contaminated consumer products—and some five million preschool children are still at risk today. One expert even estimated that America’s failure to address the lead paint problem early on may well have cost the American population, on average, five IQ points—enough to double the number of retarded children and halve the number of gifted children in the country. Not only would our nation have been more intelligent had its leaders banned lead paint early on, it might have been safer too, since lead is known to cause impulsivity and aggression. Blood lead levels in adolescent criminals tend to be several times higher than those of noncriminal adolescents, and there is a strong geographical correlation between crime rates and lead exposure in US cities.
March 7th, 2013 at 10:58 pm
ulvfgul:
“Doesn’t need mushrooms or meditation, every culture has known how to find it, as what might be loosely called ‘cosmic consciousness’, except for modern Western materialist rationialist ‘civilised’ culture.”
The vast majority of cultures on this planet have utilized psychoactive plants/fungi. Western industrial desert-monotheism-practicing society is one of the very few which not only doesn’t, but in fact represses such practices. It’s very interesting that tribes living in the north of Alaska retain many of the stories associated with mushroom use in Siberia, from where their ancestors came, and that tribes which pushed further south after coming across renewed these practices once they came upon suitable plants/fungi.
March 8th, 2013 at 3:08 am
Any comments?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FDoW8sJ7HMI#
March 8th, 2013 at 3:39 am
Here in New York state, we had an orange fungus growing on our lawn last summer as well as on all 250 acres of grass hay. After mowing with our 12 foot mower, the mower was covered with orange powder.
March 8th, 2013 at 4:18 am
@ Ozman, Jeff S.
Yes, Santa and his reindeer and sledge, seems to come from shamanic winter solstice mushroom festival, the ‘chimney’ looks up to the axial pole star, or whatever was at the center of the heavens, where the smoke left their house, not sure what it would have been called, but the roof represented levels that the human spirit rose through on its journeys, as a sort of mind map toward death or eternity or the shamans journey to bring back wisdom messages from the gods or whatever, so as the people lay in bed, they’d have that as an aid for memory to look up to… from N. Scandinavia, Lapland all across Siberia.
I didn’t know about the Alaska connection, Jeff, thanks for that, the ice moved south and retreated several times, so the culture might go back deep into the palaeolithic, 30,000 years or so, wolf may have been domesticated to dog on several separate occasions, right back to mammoth hunters.
All of that subverted by Christianity into a different story about Father Christmas and Jesus’ Birthday, and then subverted again by capitalist consumerism.
McKenna
http://youtu.be/79L8BDrkyWc
March 8th, 2013 at 4:46 am
The ancient shamanic beliefs, all across the northern hemisphere
http://www.stavacademy.co.uk/mimir/naturesiberian.htm
March 8th, 2013 at 5:24 am
dmd: i just finished watching that video and was about to post it here!
i think that pretty much sums it up – we’ve gone into hyper-crazy and the masses by and large are clueless. Yes, the effects are felt, but no one is questioning (in the msm) why? As Gail has been pointing out – it’ll soon become apparent that most of the vegetation is dying due to all the toxic crap being spewed into the air, being absorbed into the ground via rain (it too containing radiation and other toxic particulates) and that food production is almost over (on the massive industrial scale) while at the same time the oceans are not only being depleted of fish stocks but also the very base of the food chain and major source of our oxygen is being decimated by the acidification we’re causing.
And here i thought we had about 20 years. We may not even GET TO the 2020′s!
March 8th, 2013 at 7:31 am
Late winter storm hits weather-weary N.J., causing wind damage and flooding
Shore residents duel with state over FEMA’s new house elevation requirements
Yeah. That’s the ticket!!! Raise the elevation of your seaside home.
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha!
March 8th, 2013 at 8:36 am
@dairymandave
the Vid: reminds me of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and the notorious ‘ice-nine’.
Ice-nine: A crystalline form of water so stable that in practical terms it would never melt (melt point 114.4° F degrees)
Ice-nine from Cat’s Cradle: ,“Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an original thinker, found the “outside-the-box” answer; a single crystal of Ice-Nine would crystallize every bit of water it touched……on planet Earth……”
“…In fact, there really is a form of ice called Ice-IX. Ice-IX was discovered in 1968. It exists only under high pressure and does not have the properties of Vonnegut’s ice-nine…”
Kurt Vonnegut’s brother held a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT; he was one of the first to publish papers on silver iodide and ice formation (cloud seeding). So that’s one possible source for the [book] idea.
Look, the largest consumer of weather data, local, regional and global, both raw and formulated in the last 100 years has been the U.S. military.
Do you really think the MIC are unaware of the implications of global climate change during the last several decades?
Do you really think the MIC have not been ‘geo-engineering’ for decades?
Do you really think the MIC would tell the Sheeple People anything about it, even if the WWM (well washed masses) could comprehend the science of it?
I’ve seen attention span studies were the ‘average citizen’ in 1960 had an attention span ‘window’ of approx 50 seconds in order for them to ‘engage’ in a subject and follow it with comprehension.
By the late 1990′s it was about 7 seconds.
That is about the same as a small rodent.
Could that help explain why Guy’s message has fallen on deaf ears. More like deaf, dumb and blind minds.
With a 7 second ‘engagement’ attention span you can only dangle sparkling shiny objects before The Public to catch their eye.
The Owners undoubtedly ordered ‘geo-enginneering’ from the MIC lackey running dogs decades ago, primarily to extend the Rape of the Planet awhile longer and preserve their perverse ‘status’ as Masters of the Universe.
March 8th, 2013 at 9:00 am
I don’t personally care if people want to use mushrooms or whatever to get visions. I think the idea of meditation, especially if used to look inward for self examination to be a good idea. But it has been proposed that this is also a good way to better get to know the universe. I think that is a big problem.
Here is an illustration: If you want to buy a used car, what is the best way to determine if it is worth buying. Do you want to trust your own or someone else’s vision while doing mushrooms? If I tell you I had a dream that says BUY AT THAT PRICE, do you want to believe me and my interpretation of my dream. Or might you just want to take it to a mechanic and have the mechanic tell you what he thinks. In fact might you want to take it to two mechanics. If they have the same assessment and better yet they can show you the parts that are not in good shape won’t you trust them when they say this is a clunker, rather than my reporting of my dream.
The problem with dreams and visions is that they are experienced by one person within the confines of their own head. Science has its flaws but it attempts to use shared experiences to tease out information about our world. If I say a particular leaf is green like the grass and you say it is green like the grass, we may not share the internal sense of green, but we share the matching of the light waves being reflected. A machine to do that might detect more subtle differences but would put them in the same area of the spectrum. A mushroom trip might see many other things, colors exploding, who knows, but if the tripper asks other tripper what they see the results could be all over the place and not consistent. All they have learned is what appeared in their own brain, not some information that can be agreed on, across all boundaries. Who doesn’t agree that if you stand up straight under a table that is not as tall as you are that you will bump your head? Only children who have not made that experiment and trippers who think that they can, penetrate wood. Unfortunately some trippers think they can fly and try. This only works in a Doug Adams novel http://www.extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php
It is perhaps of note that most scientists over time reach an agreement on well researched phenomena, while religious and spiritual views are all over the place. Yet people seem to have this love of visions, respect for their prophet’s visions no matter how inconsistent they are with someone else’s prophet’s visions or how inaccurate they may turn out to be.
March 8th, 2013 at 9:18 am
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. — Kurt Vonnegut
25% of our DNA is the same as a banana, get over yourself.
March 8th, 2013 at 9:35 am
@ Kathy C.
It’s obvious you have no understanding of meditation and no understanding of psychedelics.
Your example assumes what you imagine to be the effects. It’s just nonsense.
Francis Crick was on LSD when he got the insight that got him his Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA.
http://www.hallucinogens.com/lsd/francis-crick.html
March 8th, 2013 at 9:51 am
I don’t think it matters if any of us have any understanding of meditation or psychedelics. Why can’t you just ignore the comments?
March 8th, 2013 at 9:52 am
what does any of that have to do with anything anyway?
March 8th, 2013 at 9:53 am
@ Kathy C.
It is perhaps of note that most scientists over time reach an agreement on well researched phenomena, while religious and spiritual views are all over the place. Yet people seem to have this love of visions, respect for their prophet’s visions no matter how inconsistent they are with someone else’s prophet’s visions or how inaccurate they may turn out to be.
You’ve never grasped the mythos / logos thing have you. The requirements of mythos are not the same as the requirements of logos. The truths are poetic, symbolic, they don’t need to be accurate or consistent or logical. You’re judging by a totally inappropriate measure. The fault lies with you, not with humanity. You’re criticising the human culture, which is what it is, for having features which don’t fit your own personal preferences. But why the heck should they ? They are just YOUR personal prejudices, which confuses poetry with prose, and complains when poetry isn’t logical.
And anyway, re your point re inconsistency there is considerable consistency, if you care to look for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
March 8th, 2013 at 10:01 am
Speak Softly – I’m afraid you’re right. Kill it, whatever, everything and then mount it on a plaque. Then you will have the admiration that you deserve. You can look in the mirror and say “I did it”. I beat nature and nature thought she bats last. “I bat last.”
I read somewhere that the goal of the ego is death.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:04 am
Global Temperatures Highest in 4000 Years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/science/earth/global-temperatures-highest-in-4000-years-study-says.html
March 8th, 2013 at 10:05 am
I don’t like it when this blog turns into people telling other people what they got wrong.
Most of what is so contentious is of no consequence.
None of it will matter when America is burning from coast to coast with riots and the cannibals rule the cities…
March 8th, 2013 at 10:07 am
we can all individually decide to “bat last” via forfeit.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:46 am
James Watson & Francis Crick, PLAGIARIZED THE WORK OF Rosalind Franklin, a female biophysicist, was the one who actually performed the crystallography and took the photographs that Watson and Crick interpreted to obtain their data.
Kathy mad a good point, and IMHO, the value of psykodelliks is not in their visionary power, but rather, in how they open the mind to the absurdity of modern culture. It won’t help you find a good car, but you just might say fuck it and walk instead. If we could give enough people just one dose each, tuning up their heads, then afterward industrial culture would become impossible.
===
“Francis Crick was on LSD when he got the insight that got him his Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA”
March 8th, 2013 at 10:50 am
This is the end times myth of the Zoroastrians :
Zoroastrianism was one of the first belief systems to include a vision of the end of the world. It would be signaled by the appearance of three saviors, sons of Zoroaster. Upon the arrival of Hushedar, the first savior, the sun would stand still for 10 days, and people would stop eating meat. When Hushedar-mar, the second savior, appeared, the sun would halt for 20 days, and people would stop drinking milk. Just as the world neared a state of purity, however, the evil demon Azhi Dahaka would break free from his mountain prison. Only after he had been killed would Soshyant, the third savior, arrive. People would stop eating plants and live only on water, and each soldier of good would fight and defeat a particular evil enemy.
Then the world would be enveloped in fire and molten metal for three days. Everyone who has ever lived would return to life to cross the fire, but only the wicked would suffer from the heat. This final judgment would purge sin and evil from the world, leaving an innocent human race in a cleansed world to worship Ahura Mazda.
It’s very, very ancient, predates the Book of Revelations by a lot, and probably got somewhat garbled along the way. There are still followers of that belief, no disrespect intended towards them.
pat, what presses my button, is when Kathy C. denigrates other people’s belief systems as ignorance, and wants to replace them with what ? Modern Western scientific materialism ? Replace their ignorance with our superior ignorance ?
It’s not the Siberian peoples with their shamanic cultures or the Zoroastrians who got us into this mess, its the people who believe what Kathy C. believes, they are the ones who sold us ‘progress’ and capitalism and the industrial revolution nuclear power stations and industrial agriculture and Big Pharma and the military industrial complex and all the rest of the nightmare…
And ‘our’ own end times myth, the one based on logos, on science, the one we worked out using the Laws of Thermodynamics, Heat Death of the Universe…
So we send our scientific missionaries across the water, wherever, to seek out the misguided Zoroastrians, and tell them ‘Hey, look, you guys, you got the story wrong, it’s not like that, it’s like this…’
Are they going to be so pleased to hear the new version, the truth as revealed by science, the GOOD NEWS….
March 8th, 2013 at 10:58 am
I remember an interview with George Harrison years ago regarding psychoactives and he said something like,”It transforms your mind. You only need to take it once to see the whole world differently.”
March 8th, 2013 at 11:00 am
@ Hamlet Jones
Fair point, and Crick might have done a lot better a lot sooner if he had not been so stoned and tripped out of his skull all the time.
LSD isn’t a panacea, I wish it was, otherwise the ’60s wouldn’t have produced all the idiots there are today. A few wake up. Some just get more confused. Some just get into self-indulgence. It’s not the chemical, it’s the person.
March 8th, 2013 at 11:01 am
Joe Romm continues to be amazed at the rapidity of climate change. If he’d check in here, he’d be kept abreast of the latest data and models.
March 8th, 2013 at 11:04 am
@dmd
Any comments?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FDoW8sJ7HMI#
Well, personally I see no need to concoct conspiracies around supposedly 60 years of geo-engineering in order to account for climate change, extinctions, environmental toxins, yada yada. I don’t get it. I find it incredulous that people were spraying chemtrails 60 years ago (unknowingly at that). This is the kind of stuff which make me doubt almost everything I now hear.
March 8th, 2013 at 11:19 am
This discussion has come up a lot over the years. These powerful entheogens are dangerous drugs, you know, like guns and knives and cars, like cyanide, sulphuric acid, heroin, all kinds of things can cause damage, hurt, maim, kill.
So, what do you do ? Teach people about the risks ? Protect them from themselves ?
Ran Prieur thinks legalise everything, so people are forced to take responsibility for themselves.
I really don’t know. There’s ideal solutions, in theory, but we are never going to have an ideal world in practice. Corporations are poisoning people legally, committing violence that it is hard to avoid in all sorts of ways. Unscrupulous criminals exploit anybody who is naive and gullible. Vulnerable children get kidnapped and sold to paedophiles, there’s date rape drugs, all kinds of nasty stuff, the police are often corrupt, the law is often ineffective.
Vinay Gupta talked about tribal communities, who policed themselves, culturally by strict rules. There were no police, no courts. Everybody knew, that if a woman got raped, the offender got killed. They learned that as children. So rape never happened.
I suppose that works up to a point, until communities get too big and too anonymous.
March 8th, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Etheogens are now being studied in major universities in use for recalcitrant states of depression/anxiety, people dying of cancer etc. In the rights hands and training (experienced clinicians, shamans etc) they can yield experiences of peace, transcendence, connectedness etc. One can argue all day long whether these states are ‘real’ or not – but they certainly have beneficial effects for many which are real.,
March 8th, 2013 at 12:21 pm
Bailey:
I would like a lifetime supply please.
March 8th, 2013 at 12:24 pm
Bailey, I’ve had so many discussions with many, many people who are convinced that there is a chemtrail conspiracy. There are others – not quite so many – who think that trees are dying because of Fukushima, or Deep Water Horizon, or the Second Coming. They can see the visible damage on leaves and make these assumptions that its either the New World Order or the most recent environmental disaster, ignoring it when I show them evidence that the exact same thing is occurring in places where there is hardly any air travel, and also, that widespread visible damage began several years before Fukushima or the Gulf oil spill.
I take it as just another form of denial that we are all doing this to ourselves. We are spewing so much poison every day into the environment that no secret cabal has to do it for us, but most people don’t want to admit that they themselves are part of the problem, mainly because they don’t want to make any personal sacrifices.
U, I’m sorry but you are indulging in another form of denial to blame “modern” society, or the capitalist system. Humans have been driving species to extinction since pre-history, and destroying forests, turning them into deserts, long before the invention of chain saws. Sure, advanced technology has accelerated the process exponentially. But the problem of overshoot is part of our species, not part of any particular culture. There is no mystical place back in time when it was ever any different.
March 8th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
@ Gail
I think you are completely missing the point.
Paul Chefurka and I have been thrashing through the entropy stuff for days, that seems to show that, not just human culture, but biological evolution itself, and not just evolution, but the whole development of the Universe since the Big Bang, leads inevitably to where we find ourselves.
Nonetheless, there are belief systems which have a deep respect for the cosmos and the sanctity all living things, where they only take what is essential for their needs.
And there are belief systems, such as the one which you and Kathy C. share, which deny any spiritual aspect to existence, and, although you, as individuals, choose to a degree, to depart from the worst excesses, it is that mainstream dominant paradigm that is the major cause of the catastrophe.
Sure, we’d have reached the inevitable end, as Kathy C. keeps reminding us, when the Sun finally frazzles the Earth, or long before then…. but this insane rush to get there as fast as possible, in two hundred years, ( indeed less than that, it’s now become decades ), compared with the tens of thousands of years that other cultures managed to exist, is ENTIRELY due to the insanity inherent in one particular bundle of beliefs.
March 8th, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Hamlet Jones says: If we could give enough people just one dose each, tuning up their heads, then afterward industrial culture would become impossible.
The ineffable’s hard to discuss:
Widespread enlightened nonplus
Peaked in ’67
But failed to spread heaven;
Since then, it’s been downhill for us.
(IMH experience, of course.)
March 8th, 2013 at 12:52 pm
@ Bailey, pat
All the states can be achieved without taking any chemicals, if people learn the techniques. It just takes time and effort that most people are not willing to devote.
DMT is produced naturally by the body.
March 8th, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Dennis McKenna’s take
http://youtu.be/drIe39jSDbk
March 8th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
The ineffable’s hard to discuss:
It’s overwhelming, and thus
It causes a fuss
When we try to suss
Out what all it might mean for us.
March 8th, 2013 at 1:32 pm
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” („Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“)
—Wittgenstein (Wikipedia)
Yes, it’s the place that we seek,
But we might as well be talking Greek:
Even for nerds,
It’s a place beyond words,
And thus, whereof one cannot speak.
March 8th, 2013 at 1:41 pm
I’m still re-configuring my head. Yesterday I read that they have put thousands and thousands of LED lights on one of the bridges near San Francisco. Looks beautiful, but why? The comments included one that said something about people being unable to resist tinkering with a new technology that ostensibly is supposed to reduce energy use. But human beings somehow figure out how to use so much of it that it results in even more energy use than the technology it is supposed to replace. Ding!
Don’t you see the same thing in Christmas lights? Since LEDs are cheaper and use less electricity, people just buy multiple times the numbers of lights they would have bought if they were incandescent. Ding!
We can’t help it. Our very matter is programmed this way. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. We actually try to reverse the inclination some times, but it only lasts a short time and we’re back at it. Resistance is fertile. What a game! Makes me think that worldwide nuclear annihilation is what we’re headed for. Wouldn’t that be what thermo-goddammics would like best? No matter how many people think this would be a bad idea. No matter the horror.
This is determinism of the worst sort and I hate it, but it’s so deep, so elemental, that the beauty of the play between the inevitability and the temporary flashes of rebellious backwardation are stunning. You can resist the flow for a while, in fact that might be what being human means, but inevitability always wins. That’s why all human beings have a sense that life is both horrifying and phantasmagorical.
Consciousness is a late development in the complexity game, and it’s very effective at increasing complexity wherever it goes, in order to ratchet up the production of entropy. The spring is getting tighter and tighter. But now we’ve even figured out how this works and we STILL can’t stop doing it. Altered states of consciousness, however obtained, are still part of the inevitability. Fun, instructive, deceitful, enlightening, terrifying, rejuvenating, yes, all of those things and more. But none of them can take you out of this dance of decay.
I hate to see suffering, or even hear about it, even though I’ve seen a lot of it as a nurse, and I’ve alleviated some of it in my career. I now see that we could do much better at reducing suffering without interfering in the inevitable production of entropy. But overall, we won’t. That won’t stop me from trying, however. It’s just that now I know what I’m doing. And not doing.
Canada: Many are cold, but few are frozen.
March 8th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
And ‘our’ own end times myth, the one based on logos, on science, the one we worked out using the Laws of Thermodynamics, Heat Death of the Universe…
So we send our scientific missionaries across the water, wherever, to seek out the misguided Zoroastrians, and tell them ‘Hey, look, you guys, you got the story wrong, it’s not like that, it’s like this…’
Are they going to be so pleased to hear the new version, the truth as revealed by science, the GOOD NEWS
This is deliciously ironic, well said. So there may yet be authentic good news, not found in the delusions of science (the reductionist materialist version) or in dualistic religion (salvation of the fittest).
March 8th, 2013 at 2:14 pm
“…but this insane rush to get there as fast as possible, in two hundred years, ( indeed less than that, it’s now become decades ), compared with the tens of thousands of years that other cultures managed to exist, is ENTIRELY due to the insanity inherent in one particular bundle of beliefs.”
No, U. It is ENTIRELY due to technological advances enabling overpopulation, exacerbated by more technological advances, and a blindness to habitat destruction and pollution.
It’s no different in KIND, only in SCALE.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:42 pm
.
All Along the Watchtower 2
No reason to get excited,
The doomer kindly invited;
It’s all over—relax,
Until doom attacks,
And folks become less than delighted.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
ulvfugl:
“Fair point, and Crick might have done a lot better a lot sooner if he had not been so stoned and tripped out of his skull all the time.”
Crick was NOT tripped out of his skull all the time and hobbled by that. He and Watson did something creative in that situation, they still put together the data into a model. Why the reluctance to admit that? Crick by the way formed a group of people who did a bunch of stuff preparing for what they saw as a time of increasing shortages, including those of fossil fuels, and yes, that group used psychedelics as part of preparation.
And FWIW, people who have had ayahuasca, regardless of cultural background, have reported extremely similar visions, in particular regarding jaguars. This even involved people who had never seen a jaguar.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
@Pat
Bailey:
I would like a lifetime supply please.
Yeah me too. When I have tried various meditation techniques in the past (and be assured I have), all I get is bored and restless.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:53 pm
A group influenced by Crick in fact engaged in some interesting activity.
http://www.serendipity.li/dmt/crick_lsd.htm
“”They have a philosophy,” Harker told me at the time. “They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people’s mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.”
March 8th, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Ayahuasca! Who has read “One River” by Wade Davis? Who has seen his TED talk on the ethnosphere? That’s one man who has done a lot of psychedelics.
Wish I could get some of that stuff. Davis says it’s like “being shot through the barrel of a rifle that is lined with baroque paintings and landing on a bed of electricity.”
March 8th, 2013 at 3:34 pm
Time for a break, don’t you think? This is just entertainment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itMdLTd1l4E&feature=player_detailpage
March 8th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
I decided to look into the amount of Aluminum on my farm. Never thought about it before. So I found an old 1981 Cornell Recomments with micronutrient tables. Aluminum ranges from 1-99 ppm with very high levels over 100. So average is about 50. My soil tests for 2012 show Aluminum as high as 1270. That’s 25 times higher than normal.
Thought you might want to know.
March 8th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
If we plotted all global human cultures/communities since prehistoric times (30,000-BC, cave painting time onward) on a sustainability graph what would we see?
Inherent in the idea of ‘sustainable’ is the Test of Time. If the culture/community only lasted a century as a distinct entity, it’s pretty much a failure on the ‘sustainable’ scale. It’s ‘business model’ was as a parasite on it’s surrounding environment.
All cultures change over time, sometimes ‘morphing’ into something else.
Roman started as a modest settlement around the Palatine Hill in about 753BC and ended poorly centuries later, but it was never a ‘sustainable’ example of steady state anything. Neither are any ‘civilizations’.
In fact all large scale collections of humans, no matter what they are called, have been ‘sustainable’ failures down thru all the ages, on all continents, all races.
The word ‘sustainable’ and the word human can only exist as a truth in the same sentence if they are qualified with a phrase like, small scale or low tech, never with the phrase large scale or high tech.
There is literally no evidence since 30,000-BC to now to support even the notion that h sapian sapian has ever been capable of ‘sustainable’ anything, aside from the almost irrelevant examples of tiny isolated enclaves dotted around the huge global surface.
So cheerleaders for the pluckiness of human spirit and enduring ingenuity have little to hang their hats on.
Anything higher than a clan/village either starts a conflict with or absorbs it’s neighbor in the inevitable consolidation towards the Great Death March to ‘Bigger and Better’.
That’s not my opinion, that’s history writ large. Social units want to consolidate into bigger social unit, period.
Anytime in the last 30,000 years a clan/village of humans grows enough to bump up against another clan/village of humans, they Fight or Fuck, but above all, they uniformly grow into a larger social unit.
It’s in our genes. Civilization itself is a Monkey Trap
March 8th, 2013 at 3:54 pm
@ulvfugl
but this insane rush to get there as fast as possible, in two hundred years, ( indeed less than that, it’s now become decades ), compared with the tens of thousands of years that other cultures managed to exist, is ENTIRELY due to the insanity inherent in one particular bundle of beliefs.
Pretty much everyone has the (behavior —-> belief) arrow backwards. The purpose of beliefs is to justify behavior, and they arise in response to behavior. Not the other way around: (behavior <–/– belief).
Marvin Harris makes this clear in his books, and it's embedded in the principle of Infrastructural Determinism that is at the heart of his anthropology.
The beliefs are insane because they had to justify insane behavior – behavior that was mandated by the thermodynamic underpinnings of human existence. We think it works the other way around because of the peculiar psychology of our consciousness: we can't see where the behavior comes from (its thermodynamic origins) so we decide it must comes from our thoughts. It doesn't.
March 8th, 2013 at 3:55 pm
@ Jeff S.
Why the reluctance to admit that?
Eh ? Reluctance to admit what ?
You then go on to quote a paragraph I already just supplied in the reference I gave.
@ Bailey
When I have tried various meditation techniques in the past (and be assured I have), all I get is bored and restless.
Yes, and one reason why meditation is superior to taking chemicals, it forces a person has to actually learn.
Who is it that is bored, restless, what are they expecting to find, why are they doing it ? Those questions are fundamentally important and don’t get addressed by ingesting mushrooms.
On the other hand, so many people as so grossly insensitive, and demanding constant entertainment, that they need a smack over the head with a shovel, so to speak, to wake up, in which case the subtle, gentle approach of meditation probably doesn’t work.
March 8th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
@ BC Nurse Prof
Freely available over the internet here.
March 8th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
@ Softly, Paul C.
So what about the Kogi ? Kept their population stable, didn’t take up the available technology, for 400 years or so, as a result of behaviour following belief.
March 8th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Politics and Climate Change
In the face of the reality of destruction caused by radical climate change, a Pew Research Center study found: “U.S. Public Still Unconvinced on Climate Change,” Worldwatch Institute, March 4, 2013:
Fewer U.S. citizens consider climate change to be a ‘serious threat’ compared to two years ago, even as scientific evidence demonstrates that the problem has become increasingly severe…. U.S. residents have been subjected to many confusing messages this year from conservative media, fossil fuel-dependent industries, and politicians who question the scientific certainty of climate change.
Meanwhile … China’s state-run media consistently concedes that man made climate change is proven science, and it is dangerous. Consequently, the government of China is rapidly installing renewable sources of energy, even as it emits more coal-burning CO2 than any other country on the planet. At least the Chinese government has the moxie to publicly recognize the true gravity of the problem.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/climate-concerns-plummet-to-new-lows/
March 8th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
@BCNP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfIOnJGhP8U
That’s part 1 of 2 clips with Terrence McKenna discussing Salvia Divinorum.
It’s supposed to be very close to a DMT/ayahuasca experience…and it is legal in most U.S. states.
Fairly easy to locate multiple vendors online.
If it is controlled in Canada, it could probably be shipped to a friend in Washington state.
Have a good flight…
March 8th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
The Kogi are footnotes. If they weren’t so isolated by unique geography, the Spanish would have stuffed them into the Woodchipper of the Inquisition.
The Kogi culture is not reproducible anywhere but where they are. It never spread to the rest of South America even during the heyday of Tairona Chiefdoms.
In fact, the Kogi are a small surviving subset of the original Tairona Chiefdoms and hardly an example of a sustainable model that would spread globally if given a change.
If their model of living is so good, why is it so unemulated down through the all the ages and essentially in no other continents in significant numbers?
It’s the monkey that got out of the monkey trap, the exception not the rule.
March 8th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Whoa. Chauvet cave was painted around 38,000 thousand years ago; it’s the oldest discovered so far. Lascaux was painted around 17,000 years ago. These caves are dotted around Spain and France, with one or two in Italy. This civilization lasted thousands of years.
Has no one read Jean Auel’s series that starts with the Clan of the Cave Bear? The last one in the series is the Land of the Painted Caves. I won’t say she’s the best writer ever, but her research is outstanding and her access is terrific because of it.
And I just want to point out that the decline of the human race could be almost entirely due to the shift from matriarchal, matrilineal societies to the fucked up world of White Male Culture. There is a hell of a lot of evidence that supports this theory.
March 8th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
@Speak Softly
Yes, I would agree. There are other unique, small, isolated populations of indigenous people in the world. The key is in the small populations, and the fact that they are insulated in some way from the direct pressures of civilization – usually because of isolated habitat. Small populations find it much easier to maintain traditional coherence. what they are doing is maintaining a way of life based around low levels of resource stocks, living instead off the flows of direct photosynthesis.
The dynamics of small groups are very different from what we are used to. Especially in stock-constrained environments, behavior will be very different than either small or large groups in a stock-abundant setting.
That’s why I expect sustainable behavior to appear only after we have burned through as much of the world’s resource stocks as possible, and had our population crash back to a million or so. then the conditions will be ripe for sustainability. Like profligate billionaire heirs and heiresses, only after we have been reduced by bankruptcy will we live within our means – because we will have no other choice.
March 8th, 2013 at 5:05 pm
@ Softly
But it’s the exceptions that we are looking for. They are of vital importance, for a whole lot of reasons.
First, so we can actually understand, clarify, the rule, which – so far – afaik, only Rod Swenson and Paul Chefurka have really got to grips with, I’m catching up…
Second, what do we learn from them, that defies the rule ?
I don’t see why it’s not reproducible elsewhere, what’s the reasoning ?
When you say ‘good’, isn’t that a value judgement, from, well, whose perspective ?
From there’s it’s got to be ‘good’ because they’ve survived, I guess, from mine, it’s ‘good’ because they don’t wreck their environment.
Obviously, if/when US or China corporations find there’s mineral in that there mountain, they likely get wiped off the map… they are lucky that they got overlooked by the Spaniards.
But according to Gail’s thesis, the rule is that people always adopt the ‘benefits’ of the new technoligy as it comes their way, the Kogi chose not to.
March 8th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
@ wildwoman
Mammoth hunters
http://www.cosmicelk.net/mammothhunters.htm
March 8th, 2013 at 5:43 pm
But according to Gail’s thesis, the rule is that people always adopt the ‘benefits’ of the new technoligy as it comes their way, the Kogi chose not to.
Not exactly. If they don’t adopt it (they almost always do – look at the Indigenous People now who are fighting the tar sands but fly on airplanes, helicopters, and drive snowmobiles rather huskies) they will be crushed.
Even if they’re not crushed directly, they will be crushed indirectly, by climate change and rising seas from the more developed world.
March 8th, 2013 at 5:45 pm
@ Paul C
I was first exposed to this idea from a talk by David Holmgren. He said a principle to consider in permaculture design and in understanding core ecology concepts was that energy rich ecosystems produce intense competition between players where as low energy ecosystems produce intense co-operation (symbiosis) between players.
I think this supports your energy ideas…“only after we have been reduced by bankruptcy will we live within our means – because we will have no other choice. Like co-operation (symbiosis).
His example was between the desert in Australia and a rainforest teaming with lifeforms. Western dogma about competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ as the end all be all of explaining how real environments truly function has blinded many even in scientific circles to down play and otherwise ignore co-operation (symbiosis) as an equal partner in evolution. The Western dogma/religious belief in ‘competition’ as the bedrock of capitalism vs the ‘socialist/community-ist’ phenomenon of co-operation (symbiosis).
This has ideological implication and IMHO has left the study of co-operation (symbiosis) in Nature, as an Equal player to competition, out in the dark, both in funding and support in academia and public policy.
We will not do anything positive or co-operative or symbiotic with our environment as a species until we are in, as Holmgren said, a low energy density environment.
March 8th, 2013 at 5:47 pm
@Gail
So perhaps the Kogi are like the chicken in the joke:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Col. Sanders: “What? I missed one?”
March 8th, 2013 at 5:54 pm
And in that vein, a chicken in the road mixed metaphor:
Don’t count your chickens before they cross the road
;>)
March 8th, 2013 at 6:17 pm
But there is evidence that humans have been turning rainforests into deserts for quite some time (we’re certainly doing it now):
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/vergano/2013/03/02/anthropocene-climate-farming/1955041/
Deforestation by early farmers likely kicked off an era of man-made climate change long before our present era, suggests a climate scientist taking a hard look at agriculture’s early effects.
Chopping down trees with flint axes, planting peas and shearing sheep — those all sound like the prosaic duties of the earliest farmers.
But those same Stone Age sodbusters were likely changing our planet’s climate, researchers are now suggesting, long before the greenhouse gas emissions of the industrial era. And that means the “Anthropocene” era, the time of humans making a mark on the planet more striking than natural forces, extends not just to the beginning of the industrial era but to the dawn of agriculture.
How could that be? Mostly because early farmers weren’t so good at what they did some 7,000 years ago, suggests environmental scientist Bill Ruddiman of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“How early farmers cleared forests is very different than today. They used a lot more land, and they cleared a lot more forest per farmer,” Ruddiman says. In an Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences analysis, Ruddiman finds that archaeology shows climate scientists have underestimated just how many trees early farmers needed to cut down to feed their families.
Early farmers didn’t plant prairies that needed plows or fertilize the same fields every year. They cut down forests fed by rainfall, moving on to the next one in slash-and-burn fashion every few years after a plot’s fertility faded.
“All that added up to a lot more forest clearance than climate scientists suspected thousands of years ago,” Ruddiman says, with concurrent atmospheric upticks in two important greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, long before the first fossil-fuel fires.
March 8th, 2013 at 6:37 pm
Yes, but the Amazon was not some empty virgin jungle, it was made, in large part, by humans, who engineered the forest and coexisted, as Speak Softly said, symbiotically.
They didn’t do the clear cut, or the slash and burn, they worked out a long term harmonious system that supported large populations of humans AND kept the forest intact.
March 8th, 2013 at 6:44 pm
What’s more, we know how to fix what we’ve broken
http://youtu.be/YBLZmwlPa8A
March 8th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
psychoactive hotlinks… some may be cold by now
http://www.entheogens.com/
March 8th, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Unnatural History of the Amazon
http://youtu.be/HUXLim2HIvU
March 8th, 2013 at 7:09 pm
Many scientists have gotten insights to problems they have been struggling with when doing such things as brushing teeth or sitting under an apple tree. I presume LSD or mushrooms could serve as such a distraction, but most people do not create novel theories from being bonked by an apple or doing LSD. The ones who do are the ones who have been doing the hard work of scientific research and thought and just need to let the unconscious brain have a whack at it. Something like that.
When someone gets an insight while doing meditation or drugs they credit the meditation or drugs. If they get an insight while brushing teeth should we all take up brushing teeth as the way to truth?
Come on, after meditation some people are convinced that Jehovah has talked to them. On drugs some people just act like stupid idiots. And a whole lot of science has been done without any drugs at all. The only thing one can say is that drugs or meditation might turn off one type of thinking and free up another type of thinking in a person who has already got a good foundation of what they are looking for. And it other cases it might make them think they can fly and cause them to jump out a window ending all thinking.
And of course drugs might make it easier to deny to yourself that you have stolen someone else’s work and not given them credit.
March 8th, 2013 at 7:32 pm
@ Kathy C.
As I said before, you are way out of your depth, talking about a subject you have no experience of and no understanding of.
Come on, after meditation some people are convinced that Jehovah has talked to them. Citation needed
March 8th, 2013 at 7:34 pm
Study: Magic mushrooms may help treat depression
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/story/health/story/2012-01-24/Study-Magic-mushrooms-may-help-treat-depression/52775096/1
Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression in Cancer
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/psilocybin-anxiety-and-depression-in-cancer
Magic Mushrooms Expand the Mind By Dampening Brain Activity
http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/24/magic-mushrooms-expand-the-mind-by-dampening-brain-activity/
Johns Hopkins study finds Psilocybin dosage ‘sweet spot’ for positive and lasting effects
http://www.gizmag.com/johns-hopkins-psilocybin-study-finds-optimum-beneficial-dosage/18981/
Psychedelic mushrooms ease OCD symptoms
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16304852/#.UTqe39bqlKU
Magic mushrooms really cause ‘spiritual’ experiences
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9522-magic-mushrooms-really-cause-spiritual-experiences.html
Want more? This is just for starters, and doesn’t even venture into the effects of ketamine, small doses of Salvia divornum, ayahuasca etc..
Sorry, but it would take a life time of meditation training to come close to some of the results that clinically applied use of these substance yield.
March 8th, 2013 at 7:51 pm
..Lets just say that the proper use of low dose of these substances has plenty of clinical evidence of their effectiveness in the right setting (adjunctive therapy, meditation, inner work etc.)
March 8th, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Dr. Dennis Mckenna (Terrance’s brother) who is psychopharmacologist, has posited that there were many natural tryptamines found among the flora and fungi what our ancestors foraged. These had an evolutionary role in balancing our emotional vs intellectual state. He feels that part of the mental problems with recent humanity (including the non connectedness to nature) stems from the absence of these substances in our diet.
March 8th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
@ Bailey
Sorry, but it would take a life time of meditation training to come close to some of the results that clinically applied use of these substance yield.
Who ever said it’s an either/or ?
What’s a lifetime for ?
The trouble is, I’ve spent a lot of my lifetime with people who’ve been partial to all kinds of drugs. They’ve had all kinds of jolly experiences, a far wider spectrum than the average. But profound insight ? Wisdom ? That’s very rare. Sadly, it doesn’t come automatically from taking tabs or mushrooms or any kind of chemical.
March 8th, 2013 at 8:35 pm
@ Bailey
Sorry, but it would take a life time of meditation training to come close to some of the results that clinically applied use of these substance yield.
Again, how can you make this statement ? What’s your evidence ?
Look, i’ve done the best part of a lifetime. I’ve plenty of experience of psychedelics and forty years experience of meditation and other related practices.
All a person has to do is to incorporate a zazen practice into their daily life as a habit. it’s no big deal, nothing special or exotic, just like putting on clothes and taking them off again, feeding yourself, cleaning up, all the other daily rituals, a small portion of time is devoted to taking care of ones inner being. Just common sense.
Seen from that perspective, shrooms and LSD and the like are desperate emergency measures for people who have neglected that self-care for so long that they have strayed far away from inner balance, so it’s a sort of therapeutic intervention to restore balance, but shouldn’t really be required.
March 8th, 2013 at 8:40 pm
@Ulv
Seen from that perspective, shrooms and LSD and the like are desperate emergency measures for people who have neglected that self-care for so long that they have strayed far away from inner balance, so it’s a sort of therapeutic intervention to restore balance, but shouldn’t really be required.
Well, the way I see it is ‘whatever works.’ I have just cited several scientific studies showing how these substances work in the RIGHT protocol. Meditation does not work so well for some as it does for others.
March 8th, 2013 at 8:43 pm
..Having said that, there are also dozens of studies showing the beneficial effects of meditation. Perhaps I have not yet hit on the one which works well for me.
March 8th, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Prison Labour in the US
http://prisonmovement.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/prison-labor-exposed/
March 8th, 2013 at 8:58 pm
@ Bailey
Yes, well, i’m not saying that anybody has to do anything, drugs, meditation, trance dance, or anything else, or believe any particular belief.
Everybody is different, so each individual has their own complex of characteristics, etc.
There’s people who are so precariously balanced they should NEVER take any sort of drug that might destabilise them even further. And I’ve seen aggressive lads who were totally into mindless violence and vandalism and stupidity take a trip or two and turn into completely different people who laughed at the stupidities around them without ever taking offence, enjoyed music, etc.
What I’m saying, from my own experience, knowing what it’s like to take all the common psychedelics, I have had, and can have, and do have, any of the range of experiences those drugs provided, at will, without the drugs. Yes, that’s because I’ve spent the lifetime of meditation, blablabla… Most of it doesn’t interest me.
I mean, I was prescribed a drug by the doctor, for my CH, which is related to LSD, and has side effects similar to LSD. You can’t imagine how fucking boring tripping can get, when you HAVE to be tripping
March 8th, 2013 at 9:01 pm
Like Bailey, I’m also an “insight pragmatist”. I’m one of the lucky ones who has had wisdom experiences stoned, in meditation, and just riding on the bus. In general I’ve noticed that holding an “insight intention” is far more important than whatever adjunct tools I might use to get there.
For instance in my latest journey I have used nothing but laser-printed pieces of paper bearing the Holy Words of “Lightning Rod” Swenson. I read them on the bus in the morning, and by the time I get to work 20 minutes later, my mind is 3 sizes larger than when I began.
I have also had breakthrough insights about non-attachment and equanimity while sitting in meditation. And I have understood what it feels like to be a tree – and why it’s important to be one – while wandering through a forest watching the leaves melt into paisley fractals.
In each case sincere intention was the key, not the tool I was using.
March 8th, 2013 at 9:29 pm
@ Paul
Well, if Robin was commenting, he’d give us the standard division in the wisdom traditions, between meditation designed to give insight and meditation designed to achieve transcendence or absorptions or whatever you want to call it.
I don’t personally subscribe to that structure, but I get what you mean. The Rinzai zen folk use an illogical koan to defeat logical thought, which presumably forces the right brain to prevail. Soto zen says the koan arises naturally in daily life, which sound clser to what you mention.
I say that everything is a koan. That is, any facet of reality, if you give it your complete and undivided concentrated attention, becomes a koan, and will open up the entire Universe. Depends how long and how intently you focus. Any artist know this. Just try drawing, say, a fork. It soon stops being a familiar piece of cutlery, starts being sculpture, then you draw the spaces around the fork that define it, and you keep on drawing the damn thing for hours from every angle, until you become a fucking fork, fork-ness, that’s the zen of drawing…
Look, I am a master of what I do. I’m not boasting or trying to impress anyone, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. Nobody’s opinion matters. If it’s of any help, that’s great. You still have to do it yourself, I can’t do anything for you. You just sit, for no reason, for no purpose, not trying to find anything, or achieve anything,or get anywhere, let go of everything, let the mind settle, every time a thought arises, let it pass.
If I do that for five minutes, I have what is technically called nirvikalpa samadhi. There is no sense of body weight, no sense of gravity. There is no sense of time. There is no sense of a me, an observer. There is a pure ocean of absolute endless infinite bliss, beyond description, which is enjoyable, then let that pass, because it’s even better to be released into absolute nothingness, except it is vast, filling the whole Universe, and then comes the final stage, which is beyond description, no knower, no known, which is called nirvana.
Doesn’t matter what this is called. Doesn’t even matter what it IS. Nobody really knows.
But it is therapeutic. It doesn’t take any effort. If I want, I can sit like that indefinitely.
Just been listening to Bruce Frantzis, he’s an interesting guy.
http://youtu.be/GQfEkCs4AwQ
March 8th, 2013 at 10:06 pm
@ ulvfugl
Thought is a force, even as electricity or gravitation. The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.’ #
Paramahansa Yogananda — in Autobiography of a Yogi
I don’t know about God but I do know
“whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass” is literally true.
However a demonstration of the fact will NOT convince most people – they will deny and rationalize to their existing belief system. There literally is no proof for them unless there is a severe penalty as in a Lady and the Tiger situation. Even then, they will still deny as soon as the pressure is off. I have seen it.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:26 pm
@ Brunswickian
Hi. Well, if you say so. If that works for you. There’s so many different ways of understanding this stuff, and as soon as someone puts them into words, there’s a gap between words and that which they are being applied to…
What I keep trying to say to everyone is get free from all belief systems, try to touch the raw reality, which is far, far more magnificent than any of our descriptions and explanations.
It’s not easy, because one has to stay sane, has to understand the ways of the world well enough to cope with all the nonsense, pay the bills, etc. at the same time.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:38 pm
@ ulvfugl
The raw reality may be magnificent, it may also be terrifying. Both or either it isn’t going to include homo sapiens sapiens for much longer.
March 8th, 2013 at 11:05 pm
Yes. Standing on the edge of the ten thousand foot cliff.
That’s what I am doing, when I do this practice, sitting here on my zafu. Neither afraid nor unafraid.
The first time I glimpsed that abyss, I was absolutely terrified and never wanted to see it again. I felt nausea, like vertigo. Everything began to spin, like a vortex
It’s what Dogen means, climb to the top of the 100 ft pole and keep going. You have to let go of everything. If you try to cling on to your ego, any sort of security, then you give in to cowardice, to fear. You have to trust that the Universe will catch you. It’s a sort of death. You actually feel it, sometimes, physically, in your nervous system. Like the quiver of shock when you lay back into the water in a bath, and the temperature change hits your nervous system.
This doesn’t really concern the future of the world, of the species, all that much, it’s a personal spiritual practice. It probably means a person can accept whatever happens to them with greater equanimity.
I was thinking about what you said about convincing people. I think it is pointless. If someone really wants to know, they’ll keep seeking, keep asking, keep looking, until they find what they want. Most people just argue for the sake of it. The way i see it, we’re on the beach of doom. I’m just passing the time. Now I sleep for a while.
March 8th, 2013 at 11:22 pm
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– Albert Einstein
“To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none… The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear …”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
– Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
March 9th, 2013 at 12:46 am
ulvfugl:
“Yes, and one reason why meditation is superior to taking chemicals, it forces a person has to actually learn.
Who is it that is bored, restless, what are they expecting to find, why are they doing it ? Those questions are fundamentally important and don’t get addressed by ingesting mushrooms.”
This depends on what you do. Set and setting. The early practitioners in fact were of the opinion that someone should learn meditation techniques before they do psychedelics, so that they get the most from the experience and also know what to do if they start feeling unbalanced while in it. Certain basic techniques are in fact general for various tribal practitioners around the world, it’s part of the preparation they go through. So this meditation vs psychedelics debate is in fact a false dichotomy.
Bailey Says:
March 8th, 2013 at 8:09 pm
“Dr. Dennis Mckenna (Terrance’s brother) who is psychopharmacologist, has posited that there were many natural tryptamines found among the flora and fungi what our ancestors foraged. These had an evolutionary role in balancing our emotional vs intellectual state. He feels that part of the mental problems with recent humanity (including the non connectedness to nature) stems from the absence of these substances in our diet.”
I do think he’s onto something here!! Lots of evidence for it.
Regarding salvia: very scary experience for lots of people. My informant (:-)) would not recommend it. One person’s opinion. Absolutely, though, do not do by yourself.
Regarding humans over the last 30,000 years not being sustainable: the Mediterranean/Balkans/Caucasus civilization which existed in the 10,000-5000 BC time period was quite sustainable in its practices, featured no ostensible hierarchy, sexism, regular warfare,… Investigated thoroughly by anthropologists such as Marija Gimbutas and James Mellaart. Regarding the western Hemisphere, see Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres.
March 9th, 2013 at 3:23 am
Based on the information below, why didn’t the Arctic ice melt 2000 years ago? Things don’t add up.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/08/marcott-et-al-claim-of-unprecedented-warming-compared-to-gisp-ice-core-data/
March 9th, 2013 at 3:52 am
ulvfugl Says:
March 8th, 2013 at 6:37 pm
Yes, but the Amazon was not some empty virgin jungle, it was made, in large part, by humans, who engineered the forest and coexisted, as Speak Softly said, symbiotically.
They didn’t do the clear cut, or the slash and burn, they worked out a long term harmonious system that supported large populations of humans AND kept the forest intact.
So how does this and many other exampes square with the Paul C/R. Swenson view of the inevitability of entropy?
It might be somewhat colored by western culture, yes? The idea that entropy rules therefore western organization/hierarchy/consciousness and technology that are ecocidal/sociopathic is something to be accepted I find abhorrent. It is an extremely clever “get out of jail free” card.
An alternative hypothesis is that human conscioucness arose to counteract entropy. There is plenty of evidence that this could be so. Many cultures lived for thousands of years in a balance way. Our culture destroyed them (along with their genes, behaviors and beliefs). The fact that one aberrant culture has overrun essentially all the other cultures ain’t necessarily proof of the premise.
Today even in our culture the awareness, behaviours, beliefs and scientifically informed knowledge exist to be in balance with most of the ecosystems on the planet. The fact that these have been overwhelmed by the sociopathic ecocidal tendencies exhibited for the past 10,000 years is not necessarily proof that “humans” as a species are proof of the Cherfuka/Swenson theory.
Acceptance that this ecocidal culture is ordained by some entropic determinism will be applauded by the BAU crowd, that is for sure.
Same, same as why tptb worked with MLK and not the Black Panthers, the Brits worked with Ghandhi and not Rash Behari Bose and others who were militant, not pacifists.
wildwoman Says:
March 8th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
“And I just want to point out that the decline of the human race could be almost entirely due to the shift from matriarchal, matrilineal societies to the fucked up world of White Male Culture. There is a hell of a lot of evidence that supports this theory.”
What Wildwoman said!
Validity does not automatically confer truth. A chain of thought or evidence while valid is not always the truth of the matter.
I myself will go with the concept that human (and other species) awareness and concsiousness developed to counteract entropy, including the ecocidal/sociopathic human conscioucnes that has overrun the planet.
March 9th, 2013 at 4:56 am
Except that the Laws of Thermodynamics came out of engineers messing with steam engines.
A steam engine is an inference. Light enters the engineer’s eyes. Light, shapes, colours are perceived. An inference is drawn that an object exists. Different patterns of light entering the eyes lead to an inference that the object is moving in a particular way. Stimuli from the senses of touch, hearing and perhaps smell are also organised to produce inferences.
All of these inferences are configured into a inference that it is a “steam engine”. There is no perception of a “steam engine”. The “steam engine” is an inference from a series of other inferences. Likewise, “Laws of Thermodynamics” are inferences in an even longer chain of inferences, even further removed from direct perception, mathematical calculations even more so.
From the Wikipedia article on Pramāṇa, in the section on Tibetan Buddhism:
“…….instead posited that the mental domain never connects directly with the external world but instead only perceives an aspect based upon the sense organs and the sense consciousnesses. Further, the sense consciousnesses assume the form of the aspect (Sanskrit: Sākāravāda) of the external object and what is perceived is actually the sense consciousness which has taken on the form of the external object.”
Buddhism, like Hinduism, recognises direct perception as the first base of cognising Reality. All inference is an edifice built on direct perception.
The First Law of Thermodynamics = En Sof = Sunyata
Discuss ?
They are all inferences (anumana), based in a chain of inferences starting with direct perception of the raw inputs of the five senses (“direct perception”, “the five senses” and “raw inputs” also being inferences).
To my understanding, there must be an I-thou, subject object relationship for an abstraction like consciousness to make any sense.
Indeed. A sensor, a sensing and a sense are all required for there to be a sense. None of them are “required” by Consciousness.
So much energy coming through the Sun portal or locus and from where…?
The entire universe is coming through the portals of the five senses.
I think of it as an additional sense organ – the eyes look for visual clues, the nose for smells etc. The conscious brain searches for meanings and processes what it finds more thoroughly than in other animals. It seeks out social meanings as well. All this information along with the information from the other sense organs gets fed to the unconscious brain, the decider, and the decision is made. The self that the brain creates gets to take credit for the decision made before it knew a decision was made.
The information from the senses is collated and configured by the manas (“mind” – cognate through Aryan roots with the Latin “mens”, = mind, from which is derived “mental”). It is presented to the chitta (“aware mind”) where constructs of meaning, purpose and causality are formed. This is presented to the buddhi (“intellect”) where decisions are made. Together they constitute the antakarana (“internal instrument”). All of these are coordinated under the aegis of the ahankara (“”I am” instrument”). All of this is the functioning of the unaware meat robot. Awareness is an effect of illumination by Consciousness, which itself is without characteristics or content, and so has no handle by which it may be grasped. It cannot be framed or boxed in by words or concepts. This does not imply either soul or God: both have handles, and they imply a “not-soul” and a “not-God”.
Awareness is Consciousness with apparent content. Mind in its collective sense is a function of the meat robot, like walking, eating, etc. Intention is an aspect of the mind.
I merely recount what people say about their own experience.
That, in effect, is just so many meat robots talking.
But would I watch someone meditating and ask, “has he achieved higher consciousness yet?”
It is neither achieved nor unachieved.
”It transforms your mind. You only need to take it once to see the whole world differently.”
Maybe many different ways of seeing the world. Perhaps an infinitude. All apparent content of Consciousness. Taking more substances will perhaps take one further afield. If the wandering is taken – mistaken? – for progress.
Joe Romm continues to be amazed at the rapidity of climate change.
The rest of the sheeple will follow, in due course. They say the difference between the services is as follows:
Air Force: If it looks like s**t, it’s s**t.
Navy: If it looks and stinks like s**t, it’s s**t.
Army: If it looks, stinks and feels like s**t, it’s s**t.
Marines: If it looks, stinks, feels and tastes like s**t, it’s shit.
In this context, most sheeple are Marines.
you (Gail) and Kathy C. share, which deny any spiritual aspect to existence,
There is NO spiritual aspect to existence. No”thing” – nothing – exists in Consciousness: hence it is called the Void in two extant traditions.
The ineffable’s hard to discuss:
Eff it – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Everybody is different, so each individual has their own complex of characteristics, etc.
Indeed. And meditation is the last item on the eightfold path. Without the others, one can be sidetracked while under the impression the it’s a helluva lot of progress. The other items are less dangerous, but each of them will yield the same result if pursued sincerely.
The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God.
The human mind is just another function of the meat robot.
March 9th, 2013 at 5:11 am
@ Anthony
All excellent points, which I have been trying to get my head around for some days now, and I’m hoping that people here will be able to sort out because I can’t answer those questions.
There’s another massive can of worms The First law of Thermodynamics is really fundamental in physics. One of the odd things about it, there’s no time arrow.
This is also one of the odd things about En Sof and Sunyata, which was why I posed the question to Robin, whether they equate. I think they do. Or could do. Which is pretty mind boggling.
There’s a couple of interesting videos here from Dean Radin, especially the second, although I don’t go along with the speculation from James Spottiswoode at the end re coming from another galaxy, etc.
http://youtu.be/FMXqyf13HeM
March 9th, 2013 at 5:14 am
@ Robin D.
Cross posted.
You say that that huge lump of machinery, that thundering locomotive, is merely an inference ?
March 9th, 2013 at 5:18 am
Reading what you said again, Robin, it is so much nonsense.
Look. people made that locomotive, they cast the parts. machined them, put the pieces together, and before that they designed everything on paper, and before that they dreamed it all up in their imagination. Your ‘inference’ is hopelessly inadequate.
March 9th, 2013 at 6:21 am
I think there is something more going on than ‘inference’ here, and this is only a small portion of the story surrounding the discovery and understanding of the Laws of Thermodynamics
Denis Papin, French physicist and mathematician (1647-1712). In 1679 he made a large cast iron vessel with a tightly fitted lid that locked. His invention raised the boiling point of water and at this higher temperature, bones softened and meat cooked in quick time. H promoted it as, “A New Digester or Engine, for softaing bones, the description of its makes and use in cookery, voayages at see, confectionary, making of drinks, chemistry, and dying, etc.”
and that lead to this… People had to mine iron ore, they had to mine coal, they had to lay railway track and build viaducts, lots of blood, sweat and tears, lots f planning and measuring and arguing and strife…
http://youtu.be/QWrILyekwOI
They could not see heat. They did not have modern sophisticated instrumentation to measure tempertaure. They calculatedthe laws of thermodynamics, using the abstraction of mathematics. All in the mind. Then, applied to ‘the stuff out there’.
That big dirty noisy heavy thing. Something more than inference, I think.
March 9th, 2013 at 6:54 am
@Anthony
The idea that entropy rules therefore western organization/hierarchy/consciousness and technology that are ecocidal/sociopathic is something to be accepted I find abhorrent. It is an extremely clever “get out of jail free” card. An alternative hypothesis is that human conscioucness arose to counteract entropy. There is plenty of evidence that this could be so. Many cultures lived for thousands of years in a balance way.
While I could easily wish that you are correct, the truth cannot be edited by our stories. I don’t like the implications any more that you do. However, I see no examples anywhere anytime, where humans have ‘counteracted entropy.’ Even living in balance with nature, in no way counteracts entropy. Though our very existence is a neg-entropic occurrence based on the asymetries and gradients of energy flow, it is temporal in that it resolves imbalances in keeping step with a rapidly expanding universe (to wit, the neg entropy corresponding to all energy flows resulting in order, end up as net increases of entropy).
My ‘gist’ is that Paul is not trying to escape responsibility but asking the hard question of whether we are hitting a hard ontological wall in trying to reprogram humans against that which is programmed even deeper than our genes.
The only ‘hope’ that I see is based on whether we being unique creatures which have such reflective awareness, can therefore exhibit corresponding reflexive properties. I don’t know that we could accomplish this mechanistically since that alone would be a entropic endeavor. However, though I am not a dualist, I also do not feel that we have an inkling of what so called ‘reality’ is. Psi, entanglement, and elements of QM, in my opinion demonstrate what our consciousness itself has some interplay with so called non immutable physical laws.
So perhaps (though flying by the seat of the pants), I attempt to work towards goals of greater harmony with nature, less use of energy etc, sustainable lifestyle, fleeing empire…but moreso in an ‘attempt at intent’ which might influence nature on a deeper fundamental level.
March 9th, 2013 at 8:12 am
If someone wants to point out cases of cultures that were balanced and ‘sustainable’ in the long run, they will always have to use the past tense.
And the past tense is a problem. It means they didn’t make it into the present, which is where the proof of the pudding is.
These examples of ‘sustainable’ cultures obviously weren’t enduring enough to bless us with their ‘divine’ presence, so I guess there’s a flaw in their particular model.
It’s kind of my point.
Co-operative symbiosis doesn’t seem to occur on Earth much in high energy density environments/ecosystems, hyper competition does.
Fossil fuel gives the entire planet a high energy density environments/ecosystem. There is hardly a speck of the planet that does not have plastic trash and debris in it.
I remember years ago taking an expedition into what I thought was an end of the world location and hiking for another week then technical rock climbing a very high remote peak only to find a fucking beer can at the summit.
Co-operative symbiotic cultures which are wide spread enough to give the planet some breathing room will never ever exist in the presence of the universal fossil fuel scourge or any other high density energy source.
God help us if fusion reactors worked or ‘zero point energy’. The human clown cultures covering this planet would completely lose their minds in megalomaniacal hyper competition, Not Co-operative symbiosis.
A new ‘unlimited’ energy supply at this point in time would be the last coffin nail in the farce of humanity hard wired into it’s energy smack.
March 9th, 2013 at 10:01 am
Investors Seek Ways to Profit From Global Warming
By Matthew Campbell and Chris V. Nicholson on March 07, 2013
Investing in climate change used to mean putting money into efforts to stop global warming. Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and other firms took stakes in wind farms and tidal-energy projects, and set up carbon-trading desks. The appeal of cleantech has dimmed as efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have faltered: Venture capital and private equity investments fell 34 percent last year, to $5.8 billion, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Now some investors are taking another approach. Working under the assumption that climate change is inevitable, they’re investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter. (The World Bank says the earth could warm by 4C by the end of the century.) Their strategies include buying water treatment companies, brokering deals for Australian farmland, and backing a startup that has engineered a mosquito to fight dengue, a disease that’s spreading as the mercury climbs
rest at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming
Hat Tip to Gail
March 9th, 2013 at 10:03 am
Entropy and Laws of Thermodynamics
This stuff is hard to understand
http://pcp.lanl.gov/ENTRTHER.html
March 9th, 2013 at 10:07 am
Keep talking. This discussion reminds me of the rats in my barn. They are very good at what they do, too: wreck everything as they consume everything. Entropy.
March 9th, 2013 at 10:14 am
Will 2013 provide enough moisture to grow crops and fill the Mississippi River?
USDA’s forecast for $4.80 corn and $10.50 soybeans as an average price for the 2013-14 marketing year may have shocked many people, just as did the forecast for a 14.5 billion bushel corn crop and a 3.4 billion bushel soybean crop. Both of those were a function of acreage, which is yet to be seen, and weather, which the USDA expects to be normal. And that is no surprise, since the estimate of normal weather is a policy when USDA makes projections. But will the weather be normal? And what do we know about that right now? But another big question is what about the Mississippi River?
rest at http://www.farmgateblog.com/article/1751/will-2013-provide-enough-moisture-to-grow-crops-and-fill-the-mississippi-ri
March 9th, 2013 at 10:17 am
Somebody measured the speed of communication between entangled photons.
Not that that statement makes any sense.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512281/chinese-physicists-measure-speed-of-spooky-action-at-a-distance/
March 9th, 2013 at 10:26 am
dmd: could yhis have anything to do with fertilizers/disruption of the nitrogen cycle? or is it just drought?
http://www.koamtv.com/story/18967342/toxic-grass-kills-six-cattle-in-southwest-missouri
March 9th, 2013 at 10:27 am
The image of the inexorable death of the universe, as suggested by the second principle, has profoundly influenced our philosophy, our ethics, our vision of the world, and even our art. The thought that by the very nature of entropy the ultimate and only possible future for man is annihilation has infiltrated our culture like a paralysis. This consideration led Leon Brillouin to ask, “How is it possible to understand life when the entire world is ordered by a law such as the second principle of thermodynamics, which points to death and annihilation? http://pcp.lanl.gov/ENTRTHER.html
It it any wonder that industrial civilization has triggered a mass extinction event with a worldview such as that. Scientific materialism has seduced and enthralled the world with its technological wonders but the tree of knowledge is the tree of death.
March 9th, 2013 at 10:51 am
@ dmd
… reminds me of the rats in my barn.
Yes. If the Universe is the barn, eventually, all order is reduced to disorder, all the stacks of sacks are wrecked by the rats, and in the end there’s nothing but dust and silence.
But that requires a closed system, as I understand it. The barn has to be sealed. Nobody knows for sure if the Universe is a closed system. Nobody knows for sure wtf the Universe is, although plenty keep saying they do and getting shown to be wrong.
If it’s not a closed system, if the barn isn’t sealed, then owls and cats get in and eat the rats… maybe ?
March 9th, 2013 at 11:27 am
@ DaveF
Yes, indeed, share your sentiments. But we have a big problem here. A whole bundle of them. We, on this blog, are way ahead of everybody, afaik. It’s clash of paradigms, of stories. Same as has happened before, when Darwin’s evolution collided with the biblical worldview. Same as happened when Einstein’s relativity collided with Newton’s physics.
Sometimes the stories can be readjusted, adapted, reconciled. Sometimes they are simply incompatible.
If science, physics, mathematics, empirical data, tell us that the Law of Thermodynamics is fundamental, and then we are stuck with it, and whatever it forces us to accept. We can’t deny it just because we don’t like it, can we.
Rod Swenson examined it rigorously and came up with LMEP which is even more grim, imo.
Perhaps, faced with NTE, as far as the end of the Universe is concerned, it doesn’t matter anyway. It may have some relevance still, as far as the Earth is concerned. I’d really quite like to know how it applies to our model of how evolution and the biosphere works.
I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think that the Universe cares about our sentiments, or whether we’d prefer things to be one way or another. My feeling would be that we’d need to be very humble, ask what Mother Nature, so to speak, wanted from us, and try and fit in. As I understand it, that’s the approach the Kogi take.
Perhaps there’s another approach, re looking at species that have survived previous mass extinctions, as this guy in the video does. Is it just chance, or did they find a strategy.
http://youtu.be/TDpVRAK2-bI
March 9th, 2013 at 11:40 am
The thought that by the very nature of entropy the ultimate and only possible future for man is annihilation has infiltrated our culture like a paralysis.
The concept of annihilation is not a source of paralysis. Arising, sustenance and dissolution are all necessary aspects of one phenomenon in the Kabbalist and Vedic traditions.
March 9th, 2013 at 11:55 am
If the universe is not a closed system, the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics then applies. Energy flows from a lower entropy connected system may result decrease entropy, but the overall trend will still be towards thermodynamic equilibrium.
March 9th, 2013 at 1:01 pm
forget Swenson.
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/cyborg.php
Introduction
Discussion of the identity of the modern human being tends to be relatively simplistic, requiring little comment. However the extreme dependency resulting from industrialization and development has effectively modified that identity in way of which there is only a limited degree of recognition. This is an exploration of how the human being has already been effectively transformed into a cyborg through immediate dependence on technology in daily life — with the technology becoming an extension of that identity. As argued here, similar transformations of identity are associated with human dependence on legislation, finance and medicine — through which identity is effectively defined.
Whilst cyborgs are a theme of imaginative science fiction, possibly characteristic of extraterrestrials (as with reference to the “Borg Collective” of Star Trek fame), the perspective to be explored in what follows is that those imagined characteristics are now a feature of human identity to an unexpected degree. Rather than anticipating extraterrestrials “from elsewhere”, development has engendered “extraterrestrials” on planet Earth — and “them is us” (adapting the much-cited phrase of Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us).
*****
As a consequence of industrialization and modern lifestyles, the development of the above argument suggests a degree of convergence in human transformation. Thus cyborgs, legaborgs, finaborgs, and mediborgs are on a course of rapid convergent evolution. The distinctive characteristics are combined into a transformed human, appropriately recognized more generally as a “borg” — consistent with the cited account from science fiction.
An alternative framing is of course the affirmation of transhumanism regarding the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
In principle it will continue to be possible to recognize the human being “under” the array of enhancements. Any reframing of their identity as “superhuman”, as a consequence of enhancements, may confirm the sense in which they are as “alien” as “extraterrestrials”.
Whilst the relative significance of enhancements may be framed like clothing which the individual is free to use or not, it is clear that it will be increasingly impossible for an individual to function in society without these enhancements. The example of clothing is significant in that in many contexts it is unacceptable for people to appear unclothed, if not forbidden (as reinforced by law). Borg-like enhancement may become a legal or social requirement — for survival. There is some irony to the fact that those “fully enhanced” may come to be regarded controversially as are the fully covered women of the Islamic tradition (Facism as Superficial Intercultural Extremism: burkha, toplessness, sunglasses, beards, and flu masks, 2009).
The “borg” framing helps to clarify the challenge of the individual to engage meaningfully with the environment. The case of finaborgs, omnipresent in institutions of governance of every kind, raises the question as to whether their mode of “spreadsheet discourse” inhibits all useful engagement — or transforms it into a kind of “modelling language”, fundamentally divorced from the grounded reality with which many problems are associated (cf. Uncritical Strategic Dependence on Little-known Metrics, 2009).
The reverse is also of relevance. How is it possible to engage meaningfully with the human being within the finaborg enhancement? Is there still a human being inside the cognitive exoskeleton? Transformation into various forms of borg, may then be essentially a process of dehumanisation in ways which have yet to be understood.
********
Clearly the modern emphasis on socio-technical enhancement according to the “borg principle”, together with possible biological adaptations (prosthetics, implants, etc), is only too evident. There is however the intriguing possibility of a complementary (or independent) psycho-spiritual transformation, as speculatively explored separately (Authentic Grokking: emergence of Homo conjugens, 2003).
Framed in this way, the various forms of “borg” can be understood cognitively as “conceptual exoskeletons” — as “languages” empowered by particular metaphors for engagement with the environment. The languages are then understood as cognitive tools. Such framing language has been described in terms of generative metaphor (Frank J. Barrett and David L. Cooperrider, Generative Metaphor Intervention: a new approach for working with systems divided by conflict and caught in defensive perception, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 26, 1990, 2). Curiously, as emerges from the above argument, these frameworks are to some degree usefully understood as metaphors of each other.
March 9th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
@ Robin D.
Arising, sustenance and dissolution are all necessary aspects of one phenomenon in the Kabbalist and Vedic traditions.
Yes, but it’s all handwaving. We’re talking The Laws of Thermodynamics, physics, which use numbers and measurements. Science.
If the universe is not a closed system, the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics then applies.
Depends which alternative model you choose. There’s the argument over Black Holes, whether they add or subtract, and the argument over infinite Multiverses, and so on and on. I think it’s mostly the land of clouds and cuckoos.
March 9th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
It would be wise to refrain from extrapolating even the consequences of LMEP, based on our current knowledge. Yes, the discussion on this blog is far ahead of mainstream discourse in many ways. However, a bit of humility is now called for.
This thermodynamic awareness is just being born, and we are among its metaphorical midwives. We have no way of knowing what it will become as it grows up, what may be revealed as more insight horsepower is applied to the question.
We can be fairly sure that we have opened a door and caught a glimpse of a much larger outside world. But what will we discover as we walk through that door and begin exploring the landscape? Yes, we can now clearly see rugged mountains not so far away. But we have no way of knowing, from here, what might lie behind them. Let’s speculate, while still taking care not to jump to conclusions based on nothing more than our prior experience. This is, after all, terra nova. The old rules may not apply.
Let’s set aside our fears, those paper tigers of the past. Let’s drop our comfortable assumptions, let go of our carefully nurtured illusions, and walk out the door. Let’s go and explore this new land.
What the hell else do we have to do between now and The End?
March 9th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
@Gail,
all those borgs look like just more consequences of the ordering process observed as a consequence of the Fourth Law.
Individual => troop => tribe => guild => factory => corporation => metacorportation (borg).
Each subsequent level subsumes its predecessor in the relentless march up the energy gradient to ever-greater levels of dissipative order.
We don’t need to “forget” Swenson. We can use his insight to help us understand what’s going on as we borgify.
March 9th, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Greg Brown – Billy From The Hills
March 9th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
@ Gail
I think that is quite old, I came across it in the 1990′s Donna Haraway
Simians, Cyborgs and Women, The Reinvention of Nature
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
March 9th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Er…that article was written tongue in cheek. My contribution to the chicken jokes.
March 9th, 2013 at 4:24 pm
dairymandave Says:
March 9th, 2013 at 3:23 am
“Based on the information below, why didn’t the Arctic ice melt 2000 years ago? Things don’t add up.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/08/marcott-et-al-claim-of-unprecedented-warming-compared-to-gisp-ice-core-data/ ”
See http://www.desmogblog.com/anthony-watts for the full lowdown on the man behind wattsupwiththat. More info at De Smog Blog on him and his site.
March 9th, 2013 at 4:35 pm
@ Gail
I thought you were teasing, but there’s lots of people who are seriously into transhumanism as the way forward, and it is happening whether we like it or not.
@ Paul
Yes, I really need to go back and re-read Swenson all over again from the beginning.
I’m thinking about the early stages of the French Revolution. People like Rousseau and Diderot had remarkable new insights, but the impacts upon the general population and responses from the authorities and from other intellectuals were often very different from what they expected, you know, ideas sometimes take on a life of their own…
Comprehensive knowledge will give “the power to change men’s common way of thinking.”[7] The work combined scholarship with information on trades. Diderot emphasized the abundance of knowledge within each subject area. Everyone would benefit from these insights.
Diderot’s work, however, was mired in controversy from the beginning; the project was suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed accusations arose, regarding seditious content, concerning the editor’s entries on religion and natural law. Diderot was detained and his house was searched for manuscripts for subsequent articles. But the search proved fruitless as no manuscripts could be found. They were hidden in the house of an unlikely confederate–Chretien de Lamoignon Malesherbes, the very official who ordered the search. Although Malesherbes was a staunch absolutist-loyal to the monarchy, he was sympathetic to the literary project. Along with his support, and that of other well-placed influential confederates, the project resumed. Diderot returned to his efforts only to be constantly embroiled in controversy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
March 9th, 2013 at 4:37 pm
A different way of looking at this question..
Is the Universe Conscious?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-nature-nurture-nietzsche-blog/201004/is-the-universe-conscious
March 9th, 2013 at 5:40 pm
Kiss economic collapse goodbye anytime soon. Lets all jump in, eat the sugar cube, and get this thing over with..
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/who-we-are/201303/why-the-stock-rally
March 9th, 2013 at 6:44 pm
Bailey Says:
March 9th, 2013 at 5:40 pm
“Kiss economic collapse goodbye anytime soon. Lets all jump in, eat the sugar cube, and get this thing over with..
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/who-we-are/201303/why-the-stock-rally ”
From the article: it’s truly rancid Kool Aid.
“The main reason for the rally is the improving economy and the growing perception that once again America will lead the world. America is solving its economic problems and is roaring back.
It is now clear that energy has gone from being a major drag on the American economy to a huge stimulus. Because we have an abundance of natural gas, energy is much cheaper here than in, say, China. Cheap energy prices have started a manufacturing boom in America that is creating jobs. It is cheaper to manufacture many goods in the USA than in China despite the higher labor costs here.”
Nothing is being solved especially by the shale gas bubble that’s being blown. See numerous articles at http://www.resilience.org/ which refute these claims.
March 9th, 2013 at 7:11 pm
@Jeff S
I wonder how much practice it takes to get to be as wrong as Steven Reiss?
@Gail
Sorry, it was hard to tell you were kidding. I’ve known enough transhumanists in all walks of my life not to be surprised no matter where their views pop up. :-/
March 9th, 2013 at 7:13 pm
Yeah but when the shale gas bubble pops the Arctic Ocean oil drilling should be in full swing. Nothing is going to stop those guys except the laws of physics. That’s why I’ve always maintained that nature really is going to have to bat in order to put an end to this empire. Until it does, and in a big crippling way, it’s always going to be “drill baby drill” and “kill baby kill.” Exxon is NOT going to leave money in the ground. No way. No how.
March 9th, 2013 at 9:50 pm
ulvfugl Says:
March 9th, 2013 at 10:51 am
“But that requires a closed system, as I understand it. The barn has to be sealed. Nobody knows for sure if the Universe is a closed system. Nobody knows for sure wtf the Universe is, although plenty keep saying they do and getting shown to be wrong.”
Heck, we don’t even know if it is a universe or a multiverse, and if a multiverse how many there are. Although I’ve read that the people who theorize about such things are debatine whether it is 11 or 22.
Maybe Hal is right and the answer is 42?
This ecocidal sociopathic culture we are of is wonderful at simplifying ecosystems, yet we also know how to increase ecosystem complexity. Increasing ecosystem diversity confers balance and resiliency.
I don’t agree with the view that it was pre-ordained that humans were civilization builders or that this is the best we can do. Our minds have been poisoned.
March 9th, 2013 at 10:28 pm
Paul Chefurka Says:
March 9th, 2013 at 7:11 pm
“@Jeff S
I wonder how much practice it takes to get to be as wrong as Steven Reiss?”
Isn’t that what college education is about nowadays? They’ll teach you how to be wrong enough to get a corporate job.:-)
March 9th, 2013 at 10:38 pm
It may not have been pre-ordained – it would be hard for us to tell. In any event, it’s where we’ve ended up, so it might as well have been.
the question for me is, can we do anything useful about it in the time we have left? And in order to answer that, we have to decide what “useful” means, and how hard the time limit is. If we’re really looking at NTE in 30 years (or anything within a couple of sigmas of that), we might as well do whatever we think is interesting or good in the meantime – which ironically is maybe what we ought to do no matter what the outcome is.
March 9th, 2013 at 11:56 pm
“we might as well do – what we ought to do no matter what the outcome is.”
Looking back at what we honestly, really, actually should have done 25 years ago – and over the ensuing time – in the interest of being “useful,” would have been to overthrow the dominant paradigm and governing structures by any means necessary, even if our guts were spattered out across the walls of infamy and history.
And that means that had we been interested in saving life on earth, we might have cherished and embraced those who were willing to take it to the wall, by any means necessary. And “that is what we should have done,” and that is exactly I what I say, weeping and despairing, to my modern day young charges. We failed you, my children. Completely, Totally and Utterly.
I cannot help but keep thinking of something like a Sonderkommando Revolt. That is, since we are all slated for a well-ordered, well-policed, fully compliant, happy-faced “solution” by the leaders, governing systems, traditions, police, courts, judges, the privileged and wealthy, and socially constructed thanatos-pathology, there is really only one way to go as far as doing what we ought to do.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”
March 10th, 2013 at 12:13 am
@ Wester
I did everything I could, sacrificed everything. I can hold my head high.
March 10th, 2013 at 12:59 am
Wester wrote:
“I cannot help but keep thinking of something like a Sonderkommando Revolt. That is, since we are all slated for a well-ordered, well-policed, fully compliant, happy-faced “solution” by the leaders, governing systems, traditions, police, courts, judges, the privileged and wealthy, and socially constructed thanatos-pathology, there is really only one way to go as far as doing what we ought to do.”
Agreed. I did the best I could with the level of understanding I had at the time. Unfortunately my level of understaning was pretty damn shallow, and in my neck of the woods radical thinkers and feelers were in short supply. The rate of learning sped up when we got our first computer at home. . . . about 11 years ago now.
I kept thinking that evidence and asking politely would finally win the day. . . . sad really how much of a dope I was.
March 10th, 2013 at 2:08 am
@ Anthony
Well, all any of us can do is try our best. All you can do, is all you can do, as they say. I’ve been trying to change the world since my teens. It’s been constant failure and disappointment the whole way. As Guy says, everything has got worse, whilst most people have been thinking everything has got better. I had one huge victory, far, far greater than anything I ever dreamed about or expected, quite enough for one humble person’s lifetime really. As individuals, I think we’re just raindrops in the storm…
March 10th, 2013 at 3:17 am
@ ulvfugl
If science, physics, mathematics, empirical data, tell us that the Law of Thermodynamics is fundamental, and then we are stuck with it, and whatever it forces us to accept. We can’t deny it just because we don’t like it, can we.
It may be fundamental as far as science can see, but it is not necessarily the ultimate truth of what the universe is or potentially can be. As you say, we really don’t know what the universe is; 96% of the mass/energy of the universe is dark.
The ultimately purpose and destiny of the universe has not yet been revealed, but I have a hunch that it will not be thermal equilibrium and eternal death. To the contrary, it will be the universal equitableness of life freely available to all that ever was and will be.
Some believe mathematics is an idealized, timeless truth that underlies all physical reality. Only the “priesthood” of mathematicians and scientists truly understand the language of mathematics and most of us must accept their pronouncements by faith. Of course that is not a blind faith for they have demonstrated great predictive (prophetic) power through mathematics and produced amazing “signs and wonders” through technology, which the vast majority of people look to for the solutions to the most pressing problems facing the world. Progress is the new hopium of the masses. Though I suspect that in coming decades as climate chaos intensifies and collapse becomes more pervasive this delusion will rapidly dissipate. They may then come to curse science and technology once they realize it has lead to a hell on Earth.
I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think that the Universe cares about our sentiments, or whether we’d prefer things to be one way or another. My feeling would be that we’d need to be very humble, ask what Mother Nature, so to speak, wanted from us, and try and fit in. As I understand it, that’s the approach the Kogi take.
The universe may not yet be capable of caring, but once it becomes fully alive it will become an empathetic universe that will negate the laws of entropy and all other laws that are death-dealing and constrain the free flow of life from the wellspring of creative, life giving energy.
March 10th, 2013 at 3:33 am
@ DaveF
Yes, much there to agree with, but unless you abandon science altogether and go for full blown mysticism, in which case you can imagine anything you wish for without any constraint, then we have to go with whatever the science tells us.
All decent scientists will agree, it’s a process, a project that is open ended, every discovery raised more questions, more mystery, and it may well be that we’re never going to reach any final complete picture ( especially given NTE ) because of some limit or other, but I believe it is worth trying.
I think we are due for a complete paradigm shift, a re-orientation, as to how we conceive of the Universe, in the light of the quantum stuff and consciousness, but I don’t discuss that here anymore, hahaha, so please feel free to start a thread on the NTE forum if you want to pursue the topic.
March 10th, 2013 at 4:42 am
Guy you may only be off by 1/2 year for your collapse hope
“We haven’t had a recovery, we’re not going to have a recovery” Interview with ohn Williams of Shadowstatsdotcom
http://youtu.be/O8kBDUw45uY
March 10th, 2013 at 5:14 am
Fracking in Colorado
http://ecowatch.org/2013/must-read-fracking-colorado/
March 10th, 2013 at 7:53 am
I’ve written and posted a new, self-indulgent essay. It’s here.
March 10th, 2013 at 9:37 am
9/11 addendum
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/aa-exposes-bushs-big-lie-flight-11-did.html
March 10th, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Kathy C Says:
March 10th, 2013 at 4:42 am
“Guy you may only be off by 1/2 year for your collapse hope
“We haven’t had a recovery, we’re not going to have a recovery” Interview with ohn Williams of Shadowstatsdotcom
http://youtu.be/O8kBDUw45uY
..”
Williams forecasts a dollar sell-off within four months, hyper-inflation by the end of 2014. Looks plausible, unless you know that Williams has been forecasting this for several years. There is no end to the economic swindle, unless Nature picks up the bat and administers the blow. The sheeple will do whatever they’re told, last thing they want is for the economic ship to sink. The vast majority are totally tied into the conspicuous consumption, that’s what gives their lives meaning.
March 10th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
That’s just the thing; unless we hit the blade of natures axe full on, there is no human initiated financial problem that will not be hurdled. The sad part is that ‘we’ were hoping for a human caused collapse to avert a nature caused one (i.e., too late for planet earth as we know it). I have heard collapse for decades and every bump has given way to further consumption and destruction.
March 10th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Guy,
Would love to get your thoughts on Joe Romm’s love fest with Thomas Friedman.
Additionally—- has he blocked you from CP comments?
If so, why?
More importantly—-thanks for what you (and all the others who post on this blog) do!
March 10th, 2013 at 7:08 pm
Do you think we may have a problem Houston? Nah, it’s no big deal. Carry on, nothing to see here folks.
Climate to Warm Beyond Levels Seen for 11,300 Years
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-to-warm-beyond-levels-seen-for-at-least-11300-years-15701
March 10th, 2013 at 7:22 pm
Carol, thanks for your comment in this space. I have no idea why Romm loves Friedman. There’s no accounting for taste.
Romm blocked me when I pointed out the numerous feedbacks and tried to post links to them. I don’t know why. There’s no accounting for taste.
March 10th, 2013 at 9:21 pm
Bailey Says:
March 10th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
“That’s just the thing; unless we hit the blade of natures axe full on, there is no human initiated financial problem that will not be hurdled.”
Well, upon re-reading my comment, which you’re responding to in agreement, i do think that there is at least one exception, and it’s a huge one. The various national QE efforts are running into each other, leading to currency wars, which are morphing into trade wars. There is no way of solving this within the structure of capitalism, irreconcilable interests are involved. Left to its own, this process will inevitably lead to a global war, as it did in the early 1910s and in the late 1930s. Of course, the result of that will be just like hitting the blade of nature’s axe. There will be no recovery from the next war, the few survivors will probably wish they hadn’t survived.
There is one more alternative. The world’s people could decide en masse that they’ve had enough of capitalism, that getting rid of it is an immediate imperative. I’m a lot less hopeful of this than i used to be, but one never knows.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:26 am
@Jeff,
The world’s people could decide en masse that they’ve had enough of capitalism, that getting rid of it is an immediate imperative.
From my vantage point, the crack addict(s) cannot seem to get enough. We have China and India destroying every facet of their former traditions and even completely destroying their environment to be ‘like us.’ We are the world’s greatest crack, meth, (fill in the blank) pusher.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:29 am
A prayer to the God who isn’t there: “Please sir or ma’me, let this shit collapse.”
March 11th, 2013 at 7:33 am
I liked this interview a lot since Guy succinctly outlines his experiences and motivations. I’ll be sharing this with others who can appreciate his fact based perspective.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:34 am
@Bailey:
“From my vantage point, the crack addict(s) cannot seem to get enough.”
That’s precisely why i’m a lot less hopeful than i used to be.