cobber2005

I guess I’d say we are, in many ways, not physically discontinuous. But that initially we are largely mentally discontinuous, until we learn and acculturate some shared meanings by making use of that physical connection (over which we can send and receive signals, and build some degree of similar understandings or affects about some things, which would be like a p-individual encompassing many m-individuals).

Schwitzgebel says “You might think, for example, that spatial contiguity is a necessary condition of objecthood, so that it makes no more sense to speak of a spatially discontinuous entity than it makes sense – unless you adopt some liberal views about ontology – to speak of an entity composed of your left shoe, the Eiffel tower, and the rings of Saturn”

The cybernetician Ranulph Glanville speaks of Gordon Pask’s conception of spatially discontinuous entities composed of bodies and minds in this way:

“A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. ... So, m-individuals and p-individuals, they’re bodies and minds. M is body, P is mind. They stand for ‘mechanical individual’ and ‘psychological individual’.”

https://ranulphglanville.org.za/pasks-p-and-m-individuals/

EDIT: added link

Sounds very interesting. Is there a link to your thesis?

This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

> In effect, these different cognitive processes together give rise to our self.

I think this describes what happens in Simondon’s ‘psychic individuation’.[1]

[1]https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...

“Democranomic is a type of founding game. A founding game is a game where the players play to constitute a real-world event or organization. A democranomic is a type of founding game where the players democratically choose what and how to constitute. They could decide to build something small like a one-time party or movie night, or reoccurring like a discussion group or lunch club. Alternatively they could choose to create something bigger like a street theater troupe, a group trip, a service club or a community festival. Very ambitious players could choose a goal of making a cooperative business like a restaurant, housing coop or charter school. Playing a democranomic is a way for common people to use table-top game mechanisms to democratically identify, implement and embody a shared organizational goal. Unlike conventional table-top games where players pursue game-designer set goals in imaginary worlds, in a democranomic players attempt to co-construct a goal and how to pursue it from the ground up (foundationally) such that its organization is enacted (founded) in the real-world.

The term “democranomic” is a combination of the words “democracy” and “nomic”. Thus in addition to being a founding game, a democranomic is also a type of nomic, one used to democratically forge a real-world project. What is a nomic? A philosopher named Peter Suber invented a game called Nomic where it is a move to change a rule of the game. It is a game of self-amendment in which all players can redefine the rules of play. In Suber’s original initial rule set, each player’s turn has two parts: First, the player can propose a rule-change which the others vote on. Second, the player rolls a die and collects its points towards the goal of being the first to reach 100 points. About this goal, Suber said, “this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves”. Since proposed rule changes must pass a vote of the players to be adopted, the goal can be changed (it’s just a rule after all), but only to something the players support. Like a nomic, a democranomic uses its rules to describe how to make other rules. But a democranomic goes further and also use its rules to specify coordinating actions that the group carries out to bring their chosen goal into a physical existence.“

I realize there's a lot out there on the subject, but do you have any specific reading recommendations summarizing the effect of the US dollar's reserve currency status on middle America? It's a history I've been interested in learning.

In addition to local journalism, cooperatives are another way democracy can show up close to home. Combining the two, I believe 404Media.co is effectively a journalist-owned outlet (i.e. a worker coop).

I too appreciate the clarity and structure of your writing. And the topics.

Non-consensual consent seems to me related to Heidegger’s ‘throwness’, which Google Gemini summarized as:

> In Heidegger's philosophy, "thrownness" (German: "Geworfenheit") refers to the idea that humans are passively "thrown" into existence in the world, without choosing their circumstances or having any control over their "being-in-the-world," essentially meaning we are born into a pre-existing world with a set of conditions and limitations that we did not choose; it signifies the fundamental fact that our existence is not something we actively create but rather something that has already happened to us.

Found the first few paragraphs an interesting exploration of the concept of “curation”. Also interesting was the concept of a semioscape, and its location within a broader latent sociosemioscape. Then talked about curation algorithms ability to both reflect the larger culture and also influence it. Suggested that algorithmic curration accelerates and recursivly affects itself, the content creators, consumers and the larger social context.

> The phrase “the network is the territory” captures the idea that the associative connections and relationships within a network—whether digital or physical—define how meaning is generated, interpreted, and circulated. In this sense, the network becomes a map of meaning itself, shaping the cultural landscape (the territory) rather than merely reflecting it. Networks, through their curatorial structures, dictate what cultural artifacts, symbols, or semiotic objects become visible, relevant, or influential. As these networks grow more complex and intertwined, they increasingly influence our experience of the sociosemioscape, the broader cultural environment where meaning is produced and exchanged.

Edit: misspellings

> The point about baby-eaters and wasps and starving elephants isn't, just, that Hart's God – the "Three O" (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) God – is dead. That's the easy part. I'll call it "shallow atheism." Deep atheism, as I'll understand it, finds not-God in more places. Let me say more about what I mean.

I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating.

[0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...

There is a model of nested dynamic systems called 'panarchy'.

> Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [which sometimes is a collapse], and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs.

https://islandpress.org/books/panarchy

This reminds me of the cybertician Gordon Pask's idea of m-individuals and p-individuals.

> A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. [1]

Also some interesting related ideas in an article named "The Autonomous Cognitive Agency of Social System" in a book called The Practice of Thinking by Marta Lenartowicz and Weaver D.R. Weinbaum (2022).

[1] https://rgon.co/pasks-p-m-individuals/

Edited to fix article name.

https://playingcards.io/ is a good tabletop simulator for card games. Can make custom decks and use their pre-made widgets.

Can't those who don't have children still influence other's children? Famous childless people include Rosa Parks, Arthur C. Clark, the Dali Lama, Edwin Hubble, Oprah, Angela Merkle, Bill Hicks, Dr. Seuss, T.S. Elliot and George Washington. Surely they influenced the future.

Interesting quote:

"""His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world."""

Related to deflation - I believe there are demurage schemes for local currencies where the value of a particular bill lessens over time. It incentivises circulation instead of hoarding.

Plenty of companies not using Holocracy have a lack of empathy to their employees as well as overly-bureaucratic processes.

What if a company ran itself under a nomic (a game where it is a move to change a rule of the game)? If employees where truly free to change any of the rules, perhaps they'd be able to modify the process to work better for both them and the company. (Which might only be possible in a worker cooperative, or a ESOP where the workers are also owners and thus have financial incentives to not just attempt to create a workers' paradise).

Principia Cybernetica introduced me to pantheism (not really a theism at all). It is wonderful that the internet still allows people to stumble upon things that can positively change their life, even if it is hard to find those things. It was probably harder to find such things before the internet.

I wish there was a community that use the Principia Cybernetica project (PCP) as it's core foundation:

"The PCP philosophy, which we call "Metasystem Transition Theory", is systemic and evolutionary, based on the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural selection."

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/NUTSHELL.html