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spoken like a humanities person :D I think engineering mindset people in particular crave "physics extreme" experiences as much as humanists crave emotional/sensory extreme experiences. It's much more fundamental and visceral than politics. Closer to food/sex drives.
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though you are technically sophisticated and have some background in the close-to-humanities technology of computing, I suspect at some level this mindset is fundamentally alien for you... I think you get tech intellectually but not in this visceral sense...
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Yes, the political imaginaries matter, especially for explicitly political writers ranging from asimov to le guin who construct them very consciously, but the choice of space and its appeal is neither a casual accident, nor inconsequential...
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the canvas has properties that speak to the visceral technological drive... which I'd define at the primal level as the ab initio urge to see what matter does under extreme regimes... will it burn, will it float, what happens if I compress it like crazy...
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I'd contrast your "political imaginary" angle with a "promethean imaginary" angle. The urge to take the human condition/experience out of the narrow "natural" band it's evolved in, and re-situate it in the context of the full range of weirdness the material universe can dish out
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Replying to and
the overview effect is kinda made up, but I don't doubt that something in that neighborhood exists, simply from my own reactions to similar, more terrestrial experiences (first look at saturn through a telescope, first view of grand canyon, being out in open ocean etc)
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Sorry, late to this thread. I'll concede that I probably don't get the visceral joy of extreme physics of some (many?) engineers, though this feels like the engineering analog of Mallory's desire to climb Mt Everest "because it is there."
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That’s exactly what it is, and it’s an important human drive that I think gets under-theorized in discourses like this. It’s the material-exploration instinct. It gets bundled in with social-exploration instinct as “curiosity” or “openness to experience” but is very different.
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Oppenheimer: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
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