Conversation

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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Replying to
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.
Replying to
I'm meh too, especially on ANY narrative that presumes some kind of teleological movement forward and back, whatever proxy you are using to measure it. Such narratives usually ignore a lot of data that doesn't support that story...