Retrospective 2024-12

This is a retrospective of week 12, 2024 (2024-03-18–2024-03-24).

I finished reading Co-Intelligence by Tom Atlee this week. We are all (more or less) co-intelligently participating in what is going to happen next. Here is my book review. Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language inspired Tom Atlee to create two pattern languages, one on group process and one on wise democracy. Christopher Alexander discovered that you cannot generate a living thing mechanically. A pattern language can only show what you already know.

I also listened to interviews with Jaron Lanier, Matthew Segall, and David Whyte this week. Jaron Lanier talked about people, Artificial Intelligence (AI), music, and philosphy:

If you start to think of people and computers as being equivalent, you’ll start to treat people like computers, and you can destroy society and destroy everything.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/caepEUi2IZ4?feature=shared&t=800

I have to really emphasize that it’s all about people, it’s all about humans; and so the right question is to ask, could humans use this stuff in such a way to bring about a species threatening calamity? Yeah, and I think the clear answer is yes. Now I should say that I think that’s also true of other technologies, and has been true for a while.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/caepEUi2IZ4?feature=shared&t=1878

It’s very important for us to not think too much of ourselves. … We should be humble.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/caepEUi2IZ4?feature=shared&t=2950

There’s no way to perceive without your pre-existing philosophy coloring what you perceive. It’s just not possible.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/caepEUi2IZ4?feature=shared&t=3647

I don’t believe in AI. I don’t think there’s any AI. There’s just algorithms. We make them, we control them. … They’re tools, they’re not creatures.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/Fx0G6DHMfXM?feature=shared&t=1283

I sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens, and for me it’s playing music, sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is. And it feels like there’s a lot more going on in it, and there is a lot more life, and a lot more stuff happening, and a lot more stuff flowing through.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/Fx0G6DHMfXM?feature=shared&t=5175

Instead of just being pure abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/Fx0G6DHMfXM?feature=shared&t=5306

If you have something that’s defined in terms of an outer context, [then] you can’t talk about ultimates… Meaning is in a context, and to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category [error]… It’s not a resolvable way of thinking. It might be a way of thinking that is experientially or aesthetically valuable, because it is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring, but to try to treat it analytically is not sensible.
—Jaron Lanier https://youtu.be/Fx0G6DHMfXM?feature=shared&t=6618

Matthew Segall talked about the scientific revolution, the sacred, freedom, the limits of reason, concepts, and the importance of embodied experience:

…human societies across all continents… looked around them and perceived an animate cosmos. In other words that the natural world was ensouled, and that life was sort of the rule rather than the exception. https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=716
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=363

In the modern period after the scientific revolution in Europe there was this new view of the universe as a kind of machine. And so the world was de-animated and, you might say, the human ego was over-animated…in this new mechanistic image of the cosmos… It seemed that the living world somehow didn’t fit [and] was some kind of anomaly in an otherwise mechanistic universe that could be explained in terms of the external relations among separate parts.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=790

[For] human beings to organize into communities [they] must in some ways relate to a sacred dimension of life, …something like human rights or freedom. And we might then want to scratch the surface on that a little bit and see what are human rights grounded in?
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=1219

I think reason is a powerful instrument—and there are some who exercise reason…as though it were a hammer and the whole of the world were nails… The problem is reason cannot explain everything. … Science, again, another powerful method that has transformed the world in many positive respects. … We need to be skeptical of claims made without evidence, but we also need to have a very broad sense of what is meant by evidence. …I think there’s a certain humility that’s required… I think we’re always dealing with the limitations of our cultural systems of symbolization and the way in which we’re trying to point at something which is beyond our capacity to finally articulate…
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=2223

The reasons that reason…is limited, I think, is that we have things like the principle of sufficient reason, we have things like the principle of non-contradiction—and that is really important in the context of logical argumentation—but when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of existence those type of rational principles they just break down…
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=3270

[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph] Schelling basically looked back at his own earlier work, and the work of Hegel, and criticized it as a form of negative philosophy which was merely conceptual… If it were to have been more upfront about the fact that it’s merely conceptual, [then] it wouldn’t be a problem… He’s very critical, in particular, of Hegel’s attempt to transition from the logic to the philosophy of nature, where there’s this sense in which the logic just freely releases itself into actual existence… Shelling just didn’t see how one could make that transition from the process of negation by which this dialectical logic could unfold to actual positive existence… What Shelling wanted to seek in his late philosophy was a more existential relationship to actual existence. And he called it a kind of metaphysical empiricism, where we’re not so much concerned with what the conceptual structure of reality is, we’re more concerned with the fact that anything exists at all. And he says that the fact that anything exists at all cannot be explained rationally… There’s something un-prethinkable or un-aprioriable about just the sheer fact of existence.
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=3495

Shelling, again,…refers to his positive philosophy as a philosophy of descendence… And he’s countering, inverting as it were, Kantian transcendentalism which would begin with concepts and try to derive the world, whereas the descendental approach begins with experience and recognizes that our own thinking activity, our own conceptual activity is in some sense derivative from the world of our embodied experience.
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=5042

…Goethe brought Shelling back to experience, back to his encounter with nature in its full concreteness…
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=5415

…our actual experience is the only reason or cause—and is of maximal importance—and the forms that we draw on to characterize that experience are themselves deficient in actuality…
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/-mxVOtDR2V0?feature=shared&t=5493

David Whyte talked about joyous conversation, vulnerability, articulation of truth, poetry, heartbreak, :

You can’t have any real joyous conversation without the same vulnerability that lays us open to trauma and woundedness and difficulty.
–David Whyte https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=660

I think that movability, the liquefication that we’re experiencing, the beauty of a falling stream on a rocky hillside, is the way that human beings slowly articulate truth. …the deeper you get into the silence of the body, the more movable it is actually…
–David Whyte https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=870

I do think a good poem, or [a] good speech, is listened into the world as much as it’s spoken. … You’re trying to speak to the listening ear. … Years ago when I was writing I would imagine myself whispering into a loved one’s ear in a very very low voice what needed to be said. … It’s that kind of close in whispering which is enchanting you into, and engendering you into, new understandings. … You are big enough, you are large enough, to actually meet the heartbreak that is your path. https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=1428
–David Whyte https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=1428

Every path that has any sincerity to it will break your heart.
–David Whyte https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=1510

[When writing poetry] you tend to be under the illusion that you’re going to find this part of you that will speak the truth, beautiful truth into the world, but actually you’re trying to find the part of you that cannot speak. And that’s the part of you that’s going to write the poetry actually.
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=3285

I always think that the only cure for grief is grief itself. Grief is its own cure. That’s the only way you get through grief is just by grieving.
–Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/1SfCq5lIi8s?feature=shared&t=4081

Och slutligen, ett citat jag hittade i Dagens Nyheter under veckan:

Jag gör så mycket våld på mig själv i relationer och det gör jag oombedd. Jag är så vaksam på vad de vill och vad de tycker och vad de känner, så jag slutar egentligen ha egna behov.
–Åsa Hellberg (DN 2024-03-19)

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