New podcast convo on economics & emancipatory social science, w/ Christian Arnsperger❤️🔥🎙️
- What is "emancipation"?
- Ken Wilber & post-neoclassical economics
- What complexity economics is still missing
- Existential variety, & policies to promote it
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Oshan Jarow
@OshanJarow
Consciousness • Economics • This is all very bewildering |
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Podcast: musingmind.org/podcast
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IV. The form of an answer is not phenomenologically available to us, so forget it.
Kant & Hume felt that any answer would require transcending the basic structures of our experience, like causality and time.
Since no answer could be grounded in our experience, forget it.
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III. God makes something from nothing
Aquinas & the idea of creation ex nihilo suggest that actually, something *can* come from nothing.
Now, "nothing" exists as an ontological possibility, which puts The Question on the table.
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III. Creation ex nihilo.
(According to Jim Holt) the concept of absolute "nothing" held no place in premodern creation myths. There was always some primordial stuff.
Which is sensible enough: how could something come from nothing?
Then, Aquinas and Creation ex nihilo.
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II. Robert Nozick → strangeness
Surprised to learn Nozick spent a lot of time with The Question.
"Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn't understand the question."
Which feels right—The Q is a perfectly secular portal into the strange.
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I. Logic
I don't get why this motivates one to dismiss the question, rather than dismiss totalizing logic. We already know all logic lives on an ignored contradiction (Gödel).
Pure logic cannot tell us everything. That's okay, and we don't have to shrink our lives accordingly.
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I. Logic
One irksome response is to show the impossibility of using logic to answer the question, and therefore dismissing the question as meaningless.
"What event is prior to all events?" You can't answer, since any event is contained in the set of all events, not outside it.
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Ok let's collect some perspectives.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
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Are there any good books that directly address the “why is there something rather than nothing” chestnut?
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psychedelic neuroscience ppl:
what is the relationship between entropy of brain activity & neuroplasticity?
does higher entropy necessarily mean higher levels of neuroplasticity, or are they not always correlated?
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It's here! I'm excited to finally announce the summer release of my second book, THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD, out July 25th!!!
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Stretching relevant muscles vs catapulting feels like good frame.
Psilocybin is nice in that it sort of gives you micro ‘warm up’ and ‘cool down’ periods (a few hours each, compared with years for meditation).
Also wonder if we know why, pharmacologically, MeO is so stark
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Replying to @nickcammarata and @sashachapin
There's just this massive difference between getting somewhere by slowly stretching the relevant consciousness-muscles for months or years and getting there via uncontrolled catapult, and this essay made me even more against catapults in most cases
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If you look at prevalence/absence of depression, it flips.
Countries w/ high "life satisfaction" also have the highest levels of depression.
Finland scores highest on life satisfaction, and also 2nd highest on depression (only the US has higher per capita depression).
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How the happiest countries in the world change depending on how you measure:
Using "life satisfaction"—Nordic countries.
Using "frequency of positive emotions"—Paraguay, Guatemala, & Costa Rica.
Using 'meaning & purpose in life'—African countries like Togo and Senegal.
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Replying to @NathanB60857242 and @TylerAlterman
Depends on how you measure it. Rich countries top the list when you measure happiness on a life satisfaction scale from 0 to 10, but the image is different if you measure amount of positive emotions, lack of depression, or sense of meaning. (from blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/f )
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For folks familiar with 5-MeO-DMT—does this difference from classical psychedelics match your experience?
"Classical" psychedelics seem to let your personality reassemble in a way that feels continuous with what came before.
Is 5-MeO more discontinuous?
open.substack.com/pub/sashachapi
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🤌
[Recalls 's point that an aesthetic spectrum that differentiates between "art" and "entertainment" is still very important. Here, instead of entertainment, it's therapy]
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While I was off Twitter I wrote this thebulwark.com/rupi-kaur-soci
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What are the best papers/resources on consciousness-as-topography?
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Any favorite quotes/books/refs on humanity's best attempts to put the full potential import & value of psychedelics into words?
From any time or place, William James to Timothy Leary to Indigenous cultures to the Ancient Greeks
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The return of industrial strategy doesn't offer, intrinsically, a vision of the good life that said strategy seeks to build.
Instead, it offers a window to debate what sorts of futures are worth building, and how we might get there.
noemamag.com/the-designer-e
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just learned that sometimes, paying for health insurance makes prescription drugs *more expensive* than if you have no insurance at all, and if you call the nice pharmacists up, they'll give you the uninsured cash price in person so you don't pay more.
nothing makes sense
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“12) Most life capable of meaningful interstellar travel is indistinguishable from technology.”
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I'm publicly outing my private beliefs about aliens. Here are my 12 assumptions about extraterrestrial life. kk.org/thetechnium/12
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A timeline to psychedelic licensed legalization:
2023 → Psychedelic clinics operating on adult-use models (like Oregon/CO).
2035 → "Licensed legalization"—like getting a drivers license, but for buying psychedelics
[Rick Doblin, in GQ: gq.com/story/rick-dob]
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Consensus forming around the idea that the existence of *something* is evidence that there never was a state of absolute *nothing* (dodges why one or the other, but still).
But ok, so there’s just always been something? Infinitely, beyond spacetime? An infinite something?? How?
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Are there any good books that directly address the “why is there something rather than nothing” chestnut?
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I have literally no idea what to make of this other than noting “conscious agents beyond spacetime” & wondering just how strange the universe might actually be.
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Our new paper, "Fusions of consciousness," is published today, and free. We propose a dynamics of conscious agents beyond spacetime, and a mapping of this dynamics into spacetime physics via our new application of decorated permutations to Markov chains.
mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/1
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Incredible account of how poorly equipped we are—linguistically, phenomenologically, culturally—for encountering the farther reaches of 'bad' psychedelic trips.
(also, weeks after injecting mescaline, Sartre would see lobsters following him everywhere)
bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/a-theological-
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if we take "aliveness/vitality" seriously as a property of living systems, how does its relationship to free energy minimization work?
understanding "vitality" as a global-ish maxima of free energy minimization doesn't feel right
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i feel like the most the free energy principle can say about flourishing/the-best-of-being-alive is basically 'minimizing free energy within the entire state-space of consciousness, as opposed to local maximas/canalisation'.
sounds sort of existentially flat. i have skepticisms
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My usual schtick: economic predistribution *is* mind predistribution.
But also, if consciousness is fundamentally intersubjective/relational, there seems a fun case to be made that society is itself—from the family, city, to nation-state—the relevant predistributional matrix
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The re/pre-distribution discourse, but for the mind.
Both basic income (tax-funded) & psychedelics are redistributive—taking a given state of affairs & fiddling w/ them.
If economic predistribution is higher wages/public ownership/unions, what is predistribution for the mind?
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i.e., rather than exerting all this effort to change the system, you can realize (experientially) that *you are not that system*, which makes all those jagged grooves you've been struggling to change far more cuddly & quaint & drains much of their suffering (i think).
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To critique myself a bit — it sounds like I'm implicitly framing the goal of meditation + psychedelics as *changing* the mind, á la Pollan's "how to change your mind".
Important, yes. But meditation (and psychedelics) can also help you de-identify with painful mind-topologies.
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Meditation helps you *perceive* the grooves as you travel through them. You get better at noticing patterns that underlie the mind.
Sometimes, observing is enough to change them!
But not always. Psychedelics can melt the grooves, making it easier to reshape them.
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ok what are your favorite biofeedback gadgets (for general, improve-understanding-of-my-physiological-processes-for-improving-health purposes)?
- Oura ring
- Whoop bracelet
- Any continuous blood glucose things worth the hassle/price?
- What else?
- Quantifying self is futile?
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Notice how well these can fit together (for better or worse, need skillful means!).
Both (being aware of the grooves) + (being increasingly able to reshape them) is a powerful stuff.
[image from sciencedirect.com/science/articl]
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Meditation helps you *perceive* the grooves as you travel through them. You get better at noticing patterns that underlie the mind.
Sometimes, observing is enough to change them!
But not always. Psychedelics can melt the grooves, making it easier to reshape them.
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The Waddington Landscape—handy visual to distinguish how meditation & psychedelics affect the mind differently.
The mind forms grooves over time/experience just as a river carves its own riverbed. The grooves are phenotypes (cognitive feature/patterns of behavior).
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i’d like is a montage of all the ‘deep YouTube’ videos of independent astrologers revealing the West’s secret plot to implement a New World Order of unelected officials, saying “…and this video will probably get taken down, but..” & then the video not getting taken down
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The new Avatar movie is:
- Bad / not worth watching26.3%
- Bad / but worth watching10.5%
- Good / worth watching47.4%
- Good /not worth watching?15.8%
19 votesFinal results
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Piano hand decoupling seems just as alien to me as octopus' semi-cerebrally-autonomous tentacle situation (also as marvelous). I wonder if the hands of very decoupled piano players develop whims, minds, agendas of their own. The Piano Alignment Problem! What do the hands want?
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A new adventure!
Will spend next year as a fellow w/ 's Future Perfect, writing about economics, consciousness studies, & varieties of progress🕯️
From taxes to psychedelics, the scope is wide: "finding the best ways to do good."
A few notes:
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