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Added 2024-07-11 09:01:31 +0000 UTCEverything you could want to know about Earth. The latest in our refresh of the Astrum ‘Our Solar System’ series, updated to reflect all we’ve learned about our planetary neighbourhood in the last few years.
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The long quoted passage is from: "Form, Substance, and Difference"—the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture, delivered January 9, 1970, under the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics. It was reprinted in STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, Gregory Bateson, © 1972 by Chandler Publishing Company, Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and Toronto, Canada, from the General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37, 1970, by permission of the Institute of General Semantics. I've taken the liberty of making a PDF of this chapter from "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" that can be downloaded from my public drop box if anyone is interested: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7579dewu0b950tpykfje8/Bateson-Form-Substance-Difference.pdf?rlkey=bemi7eiy3q46xpqn4jpmtemr9&dl=0
Michael Wells
2024-07-12 00:11:39 +0000 UTCAs I see it, we're at a "tipping point"—by "we" I mean not only humanity, but to a large degree, the whole of Earth. In human affairs, this tipping point is represented by (to name a few examples), the "crisis in cosmology," the "discovery that we are not the first advanced technological civilization to have existed on this planet—that there is hard as granite evidence that contemporary civilization was preceded by a another about which we know nothing [see: The examination of the complex geometries and extremely fine tolerances evident in pre-dynastic ancient Egyptian granite vessels, as presented in YT channels such as UnchartedX and Versadoco.]; the changing climate and the impact it is having on civilization; the UFO/UAP issue, including the power struggle between those who (it is credibly alleged) hold information about it, and those who want much of that information disclosed—as an emerging re-consideration of who and what we are as a species, perhaps not the only one inhabiting this realm; the influence of new and increasingly more powerful technologies, most notably how oxymoronically named "Artificial Intelligence" will integrate with them and what this will mean for civilization itself; in the on-going and age-old struggle between hierarchical and egalitarian distributions of power, wealth, and their manifestation of social realities. The power political power struggle going on in the U.S. right now between a reactionary Christo-fascism and those who want to conserve our democratic ideals, will have long-range consequences far beyond our borders. From the POV of my sensibilities, this "tipping point," is a very dangerous place: It may represent a kind of "evolutionary throttle" where—either we transition into a new, more integrated, perceptual understanding of ourselves as individuals and collectively as a species operating within the totality of EARTH (IOW, we embrace the emergence of an entirely new historical paradigm that will change everything)—or we will undergo the very "reduction to the absurd" Bateson forewarned us about. And all within (perhaps not 'my' but) your lifetimes. I offer all the above as a kind of "something to consider" to the whole ASTRUM community.
Michael Wells
2024-07-12 00:08:14 +0000 UTCAgain, the above was presented in 1970, over a half century ago. It was heard, and to some degree "understood," by many important people of my generation (I was 22 at the time). We're already a quarter century beyond his best guess as to how long we might have "before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us." What my sensibilities observe is our collective inability to learn to "think in the new way," is at the core of the many crises unfolding around us in nearly every sphere of our endeavor.
Michael Wells
2024-07-11 23:18:10 +0000 UTC“The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you [in this presentation] would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. “Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body-the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part-if you will-of God. “If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. “If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite. “If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind." “The step to realizing- to making habitual— the other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree that step is not an easy one. “And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.”
Michael Wells
2024-07-11 22:50:23 +0000 UTCIn a nearly prophetic presentation given in 1970, one of the true genuses of the previous century, (anthropologist, psychologist, ecologist, and cyberneticist) Gregory Bateson, describes "the fundamental unit of mind" as being, "news of a difference (that makes a difference) traveling in a circuit." He does this to suggest that, more correctly understood, "mind" *is* the "total dynamic systems operating within and upon EARTH." That said, this is *not* how we (individually and collectively) experience "mind" or "intelligence." His multi-faceted exploration of this topic leads him to say this:
Michael Wells
2024-07-11 22:50:08 +0000 UTCNo.2 is the most professional looking and I see it has gotten the most votes. Problem is, it may not get the most clicks. Being an old boomer, I don't like the use of adjectives such as "CRAZY" as in no. 4. I listen to enough YT vids by younger creators to know "crazy" is a very over-used word with no clear meaning other than 'exciting' or 'interesting' or 'far-out' as my generation might have said. Earth may be complex, but it isn't insane. What may be "insane" or "crazy" are its human inhabitants—or so my "ultra terrestrial entity only just visiting this planet" sensibilities suggest. This may be outside ASTRUM's focus, but if by "EARTH" we mean the totality of dynamic systems operating within and upon it, from its origins (which may not be as established astrophysics currently understands), to the present "tipping point" crises, the question that emerges through my sensibilities is this: How is it that Earth's currently dominant species does not consciously experience itself as an integral part of the whole planetary system of energy exchanges and transformations?
Michael Wells
2024-07-11 22:13:10 +0000 UTCI like number two the most, but they are all good.
Manfred Knorr
2024-07-11 16:44:31 +0000 UTC
