(General method for dealing with people who announce they're super-concerned about abstract things that do not directly affect them -- hwhite genocide ed.):https://twitter.com/PereGrimmer/status/1011303772184809472 …
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It depends. I'd periodically encountered existential crises, and come out a "new man" - one could say the "rumination" was the product of my old sense of self-identity losing coherence in the face of new data; or one could look at a biophysical level, etc. It's complicated!
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have you read Seveneves (Stephenson 2015)? specifically the third and final section with the Moirans?
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Nope! Quite like Stephenson but not even caught up to the level of Reamde. Damn him and his low-internet use, high-productivity lifestyle!
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Reamde is terrible ignore it and burn any copies you own. Seveneves is good imo but he has not topped his career-best Anathem yet. anyway, so Moirans are a human descendant subspecies with insanely overactive epigenetics such that trauma triggers epigenetic reconfiguration.
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each life trauma will put a Moiran through what amounts to a highly compressed episode of puberty, where their body and mind are reshaped and strengthened in response. The Moiran cultural tradition is to number themselves according to how many epigenetic crises they've done.
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so 3 Dan would be recognized as fairly mature by 8 Claire would be a super-powered master.
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Oh snap he's done it again, taken the aspie "must rank everything" tendency and applied it to a messy area like emotional maturity! Sounds good! [Anathem is far and away my favorite of his, too -- that scene where Fraa Jaad shows alternate future paths is $$$$.]
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the scene where he one-shots the password panel lock and just shrugs like "what? infinite other selves tried all the passwords that didn't work. I tried that one that does."
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rumination is a kind of destructive loop that many suffer from on occasion (or constantly in some cases). the presence of ruminations is highly correlated with a lot of things that are successfully measured. but the specific contents of those ruminations? who fucking knows.
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1/A good watchword re: anxiety (and rumination) = "the content is not important." You're not going in circles because you've decided to engage in a course of destructive circular quasi-reasoning, rather, you're more or less stuck in an unproductive loop of thought that can be
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2/usefully understood as a manifestation of the processes of a normally-functioning brain run amok. If rumination has metaphysical significance, it should be robust to getting up and taking a nice walk in the sun!
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sure, but that's kinda therapeutic advice whereas what I'm more interested in is why specific ruminative contents manifest in specific persons. i.e. what are the necessary conditions to produce the "white genocide" anxiety rumination and how to shunt that into something else?
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1/Well, the latter question is therapeutic, and easier, the former has to do with the workings of the brain & how it perceives, stores, and processes info, and is much harder. Re: the former, I'd note that, to take root, an anxiety-reinforcing construct typically must map on
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2/plausibly to "identity" in some way, and then usually to various common factors of anxiety (status threat, fear for physical safety, etc.). As to the actual processes involved, I tend to think Hofstadter's work (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies …) is directionally informative, &
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3/there are many modern formalisms & levels of analysis that could provide useful insight (e.g., see my earlier tweet-storms re: Friston's free energy and character disordered people), but to my knowledge we're nowhere close to having anything like definite answers.
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the infohazard levels have gotten so high I'm grasping at straws for memetic vaccines
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