there's a certain kind of "following the dao" philosophy i think i know a lot of people who hold implicitly in some form, which i think if taken sufficiently seriously suggests the bizarre conclusion that literally everything follows the dao automatically *except humans*
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like compared to the rest of the universe we're these alien eldritch entities invading the harmony of the dao, the only things capable of disharmony. it's a weird, depressing, and frankly confusing pov. how did our ability to disharmonize evolve? do any monkeys have it partially?
the alternative, which is bizarre in a different way, is that everything follows the dao automatically *including* humans, that all of the indignity and suffering and horror of modern industrial civilization and so forth is still somehow harmonious
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distressing if true, click through for full thread
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Welcome to my TED talk:
Chasing Ourselves: How Persistence Hunting in Early Humans Explains the Origin of Consciousness and Spirituality
Alternate title: We're All Living in Our Fish FInders twitter.com/ChasingMyself/…
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good stuff in this subthread, roughly consonant with the above. really needed a multi-QT here
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Replying to @meekaale @QiaochuYuan and @JakeOrthwein
having to do with the capacity to create autonomous imaginary models and maps which become like a metaverse virtual reality where the properties of the wholeness are transcended
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Replying to @PrinceVogel @QiaochuYuan and 2 others
That is to say - mankind's sins are more notable because his light is brighter. He can support failure for longer periods of time. If a less grand system has a failure it just ends.
Brightest light casts the longest shadow. The Dao is beyond good and evil
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there is at least one large confusion in what i wrote last night, maybe two, and i’m frustrated i can’t pin it down more precisely. somewhere i’m failing to distinguish between ways the world could be vs. ways of seeing the world
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The conceptual mind is a new, incredibly powerful and incredibly unstable invention. It's an instrument biology can't preload a harmonious tuning for, so we have to put in effort to consciously learn to master it to avoid confusion and disaster
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One way of reading one of the Tao Te Ching lines is "if it was possible to leave the Dao, it would not be the Dao"
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cf. Jaynes, origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. not eden, per se, but babel; though it had been the course of the dao for us to become this way, so too will it be the course of the dao for us to return
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Unlike practically all other known entities, humans do have self-reflectivity and thus the rare ability to get in our own way and derail ourselves from our "natural" course 🤷
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