Poll: What sort of species should we aim to evolve into through this period of Great Weirding and arrival into the anthropocene?
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an immune system would prevent individuals from becoming ideologically possessed
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I think I agree with
@simpolism here. An immune system is a boundary enforcing gatekeeper that can be both good and bad (as in autoimmune diseases, organ transplant rejection). The map to ideologies is close. In fact, I'm playing with this analogy myself. -
an ideology would be an artificial facsimile of an immune system. it has no concept of the individual. only has hosts. it's not maintaining a self/other boundary w.r.t the individual. it's maintaining it w.r.t other ideologies.
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I think in this sense, your "organism" is not the human mind, but some conception of "the public sphere", in which a "virulent" ideology can cause mass change and potentially destruction. On the other hand, many people are not fond of Habermas these days...
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this is an interesting discussion point, and probably worth deeper examination. we're now having to confront where individual minds end and collective minds begin. in the internet era its getting harder and harder to draw a bright line there, and that's accelerating.
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if we can just identify an informational boundary that constitutes as reliable and definitive a boundary between the individual mind and the collective mind as the skin differentiates between the self and the other, i'm sure everything will be fine (i'm being deeply sarcastic)
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"well, it's like your digestive microbiome, but for information, and good insights are like probiotics"
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this but literally, no scare quotes
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If ideologies are a pathogen, what exactly are they infecting, and what is the normal/functional state?
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at risk of torturing the analogy, but lets keep going for now. they infect minds. the healthy state is a mind where there is no strong commitment to any ideology, rendering ideas on equal footing to be evaluated contextually, and weighed against evidence.
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sounds like this "healthy mind" is merely a prioritization of one particular ideology (in this case some sort of enlightenment rationality) over the others... that said, I agree that enlightenment rationality is a reasonably good sort of ideology.
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no. I'm making a stronger claim than "enlightenment rationality is good". a healthy mind resists ALL ideological possession, including being possessed by enlightenment rationality.
@meaningness work on meta-rationality is about that, among other things -
I guess what I'm trying to say is: what if "rendering ideas on equal footing to be evaluated contextually, and weighed against evidence" is itself a "strong [ideological] commitment"? and what if that's okay/good?
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I don't want to get bogged down in semantics as to whether the stance of emptiness/receptivity counts as an ideology. I do agree that it's good though :)
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to switch analogies again: ideologies are very yang. too much in fact. need more yin.
End of conversation
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