Becoming convinced the natural quasistable state of humans is a slight, steady regression. So if you become too suspicious beyond a point, you won’t merely stop moving as time leaves you behind. You’ll actively regress relative to even your own earlier positions.
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This is subconsciously smooth, but consciously like a staircase descending into a basement. So every so often, as your comfort with the present erodes in yet another 1000 little ways, you regress one more step.
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This is an ordinary phenomenological notion of progress, as in accumulating change driven by new knowledge. Not capital-P progress in any whiggish historicism or “Progressive.” Both of those are regressive positions on the downward staircase from the present into the past.
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Little-p progress in this sense is simple being future-positive. And since we know radically less about the future than the past, you get to positivity by tolerating a great deal more flimsiness and doubt in your speculations and adopting a deliberate skepticism towards “facts.”
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It’s as simple as being more indulgent towards babies than adults. Cf Ben Franklin “what’s the use of a baby.”
Kinda obvious, but hard to practice. Novelty flails and wails unimpressively before us while tradition never stops tugging gently from behind.
uh.edu/engines/epi219
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I feel like we've been here before, but I don't quite get why movement in time would only be even small-p forward or back. What if sometimes it's punctuated disequilibrium, where you pop forward to new state of enlightenment and then fall back into a pit?
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I am kinda meh on enlightenment and other subjective/consciousness based lenses of individual or collective evolution. Material progress is my proxy and yeah that sometimes leaps forward/backward.
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