#sensemaking

[futuramb]

Daniel Schmachtenberger on the challenges of accelerating technologies in general, and more specifically the challenges of AI as primarily an accelerant boosting all the others.

[censemaking]

Whole System Learning and Evaluation

There aren't extraneous factors anymore: systems awareness and evaluation are what's necessary for making sense of what we do and the influence we have #eval #evaluation #systemsthinking

Persistent, dramatic changes are taking place that influence our work, communities, and personal lives and understanding what it means to learn, respond, and succeed will take changes in how we evaluate it all. A key feature of change in a complex system is that once its shifted, it never goes back; there’s no ‘undoing’ what’s been done. We can change it again to something else, but we will not…

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[driftglazz]

Jim Rutt: What is your concept of the meaning crisis and why do we need to awaken from it?

John Vervaeke: …The meaning crisis has two components to it, the perennial and then the pertinently present.  Perennial is the idea that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent, [also] make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior.  That cognition is very complex, it is very dynamic, very self-organizing, very recursive, very embodied and enacted, and one-shot kind of interventions to try and ameliorate that self-deception are pretty doomed to fail.  As I’ve talked about before, you need complex ecologies of practices that can ameliorate that self-deception and then enhance that fundamental adaptive connectedness that’s at the core of cognition that people experience as meaning in life, which is a very high-value item for them.  And when you’re doing those two together in a coordinated fashion, I think that’s a very good understanding of what wisdom is.  One way of talking about meaning crisis is that, while we have plenty of good places to go for information and knowledge, they’re all contested but they’re readily available, it’s unclear to people where they should go to cultivate wisdom.  Now, wisdom is not optional, so either they try to make the legacy religions somehow work, or they try to cobble something together in order to ameliorate these things.  You can see this in one of the largest and growing demographic groups, the “Nones”, who have no official religious belief, they largely describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.  Which means, to my mind, they’re seeking something like wisdom and meaning but they’re doing it autodidactically, which has all of the perennial threats and risks of autodidactic education.  And so you have a wisdom famine.  These ecologies of practices as I mentioned earlier, they have to be honed (homed?), they have to be situated and lived by a community of people that will support you as you try to engage in them, and correct you and challenge you when it’s needed the way we always have when we’ve engaged in cultural education.  And so, the present problem is the thing that used to hone the ecologies of practices are the legacy religions, and for a lot of historical and other reasons they are now non-viable for a lot of people.  So you have a wisdom famine, people are looking but they can’t really find what they’re looking for by and large in the world religions.  We’ve tried political alternatives that have drenched the world in blood, so we’re sort of traumatized about that.  And so we’re stuck.

Rutt: Let me stick in just a question, you often refer to these as pseudo-religious ideologies as responses to the meaning crisis, and that’s a bad attractor on the road forward…

Vervaeke: Yes very much.  I’ve often said to put on my tombstone Neither nostalgia nor utopia.  We can orient pseudo-religiously backwards, and you get fundamentalisms and you can do that forward-looking with proposals for utopia, and then of course you get totalitarians.  And of course you can mix and match those in wonderfully bloodthirsty ways.  And so, what we’re trying to do, Jordan and I and other people, is we’re trying to say how can we help people address the perennial problems of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, a sense of absurdity, alienation, pervasive anxiety, all the other symptoms that are showing up, how can we properly give that a home and situate it within our current worldview.  And then an extra dimension that has come out in my covnersations with Jordan is how can we orient that so it can deal with the incredible accelerating rate of the complexification of our sort of technological milieu.  And so that’s the meaning crisis as briefly as I can make it.

Rutt: One last distinction, and I find this to be a very useful hook for people to hang on when they’re first starting to make sense of this, the distinction between meaning OF life versus meaning IN life.

Vervaeke: Yes, and this probably one of the ways that I would distinguish religion from the-religion-that’s-not-a-religion.  The meaning OF life is some metaphysical proposal about something that is a plan or a destiny for you and you must find it, in some important fashion.  It’s been pre-authored and pre-ordained and there’s various ways in which that can roll out.  It can be pre-ordained by an agent, it can be pre-ordained by a cosmic force like karma or something like that.  The idea is that the meaning of life is to find that and figure out how to orient yourself properly to it.  Meaning in life is at best agnostic.  I tend to be rejective of meaning of life because it presupposes a teleology to the universe that I find absent, but lets put that aside.  Meaning IN life is agnostic, it says no no what we’re talking about isn’t that metaphysical plant, we’re talking about the enacted senses of connection you have to yourself, to other people, and reality, that make life worth living given the inevitable futility, failure, frustrations, and loss that beset human life.  What is it that you’re connected to that makes life worth living.  That’s meaning IN life.

-from The Jim Rutt Show podcast #170 on December 1, 2022

[rawjeev]

"Where once there were spaces in the day between events to digest information, reflect on occurances, notice one's reactions, and be with one's thoughts and emotions, now there is only time to whip out the cell phone."

—Eleanor Rosch, in the introduction to the Revised edition of "The Embodied Mind"

[alchemisoul]

"Um…thank you. I’m not much for public speaking, or much for speaking, or, come to think of it, much for the public. And I’m not very good at lying. So let me just say that, in my experience, high school sucks. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have started advanced placement classes in preschool so I could go from eighth grade straight to college.

However, given the unalterable fact that high school sucks, I’d like to add that if you’re lucky enough to have a good friend and a family that cares, it doesn’t have to suck quite as much. Otherwise, my advice is: stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong; remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked; the truth and a lie are not “sort of the same thing”; and there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can’t be improved with pizza. Thank you.”

- Daria's Graduation Speech

#lalalalala

[stitchitup]

[lostconsultants]

Books Worth Sitting With: How Curiosity Comes Before Clarity

Curiosity precedes clarity. Before we can make sense of complexity, we must admit we don’t yet — and be willing to explore what we don’t know. These books helped me see curiosity not as a whimsical trait, but as a disciplined practice that leads to deeper understanding. This is not a generic “best books on curiosity” list.As part of Books Worth Sitting With, it’s a curated reading list for…

Books Worth Sitting With: How Curiosity Comes Before Clarity

[dualisticunity]

Page not found - Dualistic Unity

When change accelerates, memory becomes a refuge. Why? https://dualisticunity.com/why-nostalgia-feels-so-comforting-when-the-present-feels-unstable/