The Web of Meaning

Summary

The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent is trying to give people a new worldview focusing on harmony, interconnection and cooperation, instead of competetion and exploitation. He argues that this is necessery because our current dominant capitalistic world view is systematically destroying the natural environment at a staggering pace. The natural world that we inhabit is lost, with ultimately catastrophic consequences. Humans single handedly destroy entire ecosystems at a scale and speed that has no historic precedent, we alter the face of the Earth and not for the better, destroying the possibilities of future livelyhood, even for ourselves.

Lent argues that all of this destruction comes about because we think of intelligence and reductionistic scientific principles as "the Truth" and "Good". Because of this we adopt ideas of competition and the dog-eats-dog mentality that helps us justify the destruction and domination of the entire natural world to our own benefits, as good and even inevitable. He urges us to be cautious of such an approach, because the world is inherently complex, filled with emergent phenomena and feedback mechanisms that we don't understand. The world, according to Lent is full with intricate webs of meaning, behaviors and loops that re-inforce, influence and depend on one another. If we break or eliminate one part of the whole, there might be whole catastrophic cascades that follow, unintended consequences that we didn't anticipate that might ultimately prove ruinous. By focusing on the workings of only the parts, we lose sight of the emergent whole, destroying it in the process of gathering more profit. He attacks this idea of selfishness as good. We should think about our actions in terms of the effects that they will have on others and our environment. We should become holistic instead of reductionist in our approach to life and society. And the whole includes the natural world, animals, plants and other organisms, who all can suffer and want to live, just as much as we do. Looking out for other living things, nurtuing them instead of destroying them, to Lent, is a moral imperative.

Fundamentally, all of this is more aligned with traditional Eastern (and Native American) rather than Western philosophy and thoughts. He further tries to connect these ancient insights and their wisdom to modern ideas and research from fields as diverse as neurobiology and complexity theory. Sometimes I think his mapping of ideas is a bit off, because he misunderstands certain concepts... slightly. But overall the idea of thinking that the ancient philosophers knew things because they thought hard about them and had insights into how the world worked that are analogous to more modern (and elaborate) ideas, but were simply describing them in different language is very interesting and often true. Especially Buddhism has some crazy detailed insights into the inner workings of the mind and personality, that are cross-confirmed by modern neuroscience all the time. That doesn't mean that Buddhism didn't get things wrong though, but Lent usually leans on the side of the Ancients over scientific knowledge in case they don't confirm to one another.

To me one of the most interesting ideas of the book is to think about the concept of a "spirit" as an emergent phenomenon over a set of interacting parts. The spirit of a city as an example is something immaterial, inherent in the interactions of all the inhabitants, the citys weather, its buildings and so on. It has a will of its own, developing the city and what is happening within and around it according to its own rules. New York feels different from Berlin it has another vibe... Personality in people is a spirit too, arising from the interaction of a bunch of cells of an organism and the neural networks. So are companies and their missions or even whole nation states and what they are doing. We can understand and grasp this concept intuitively, but scientifically it is much harder to study because reductionism fails to capture it entirely. The same idea, applied to the global system of all living things–the whole biosphere interacting–leads Lent to propose Gaia: The Spirit of the Earth. He further claims that Gaia is something that we are destroying through our actions, because we systematically kill off entire ecosystems both on land and in water, disrupting this emergent phenomenon. Humans are sorta like cancer but for a different complex system.

There are many many important and re-occuring concepts in the book. The ideas of wu-wei, Indra's net, the Windigo myth, Webers law of desire, the differentiation between I and self, the idea that everything is connected through innumerable strands to everything else, Yin and Yang, Dukkha, Eudaimonia, Qi, Li, the Holarchy, Fractals, the idea of Flux (Ching in Chinese), negentropy... the book is dense and the bibliography is a treasure trove of further reading.

However, throughout all of this, I often thought that Lent got things wrong. Misunderstanding what people ideas he attacks, in subtle ways. And it is weird because overall his thoughts seem so coherent, so well read, yet sometimes they drift off, connecting things that we know aren't connected, making logical errors, and arguing mutually exclusive ideas and saying that both are true, while discrediting opinions that people don't even have, presenting quotes out of context and straw manning left and right.

Furthermore, he understands the emergent nature of complex systems, yet thinks that somehow, change within complex systems is easy. That if we only were to cooperate we could change the dynamic system of our society for the better. This to me seems to be naively underestimating the real problem, namely that all of the systems we know have evolved into their current states, dynamically, reinforcing themselves over time, adapting and re-adjusting to better survive. Capitalism is an attractor state in its own right, even if it is leading to a tragedy of the commons that Lent describes, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to change. Lastly, what humans do or don't do is just as natural as bacteria accidentally wiping off almost all other species by enriching the atmosphere with oxygen. That doesn't make it morally good though.

The detailed notes for this one are long, but there is a lot to take away from the book.

Detailed Notes

Introduction

The "speech": capitalism is good and improving the world, changing the world is pointless, because humans are selfish, because of evolution. Technology will solve our problems.

We tend to assume that our worldview simply describes the world the way it is, rather than recognizing it's a constructed lens that shapes our thoughts and ideas into certain preconditioned patterns.

This worldview is flawed. It gives us climate change and the sixth extinction event. We need a new worldview to improve our actions.

Worldviews are powerful because they shape actions.

Book Recommendation: The Patterning Instinct - Jeremy Lent

The book proposes a new worldview by combining scientific insight with ancient wisdom.

One's personal search for meaning cannot be isolated from all that is going on in the world around us.

Part I - Who Am I?

Chapter One - The Nameless Uncarved Wood

The Tao Te Ching teaches a different way of life, from the try harder, competitive results focused approach of modern society.

Living with the flow of the Tao, is an effortless state of being. It's called wu-wei—or effortless action.

The world, according to the Tao shouldn't be acted upon, if you do, you are already lost. Our modern conception of technology and knowledge fly in the face of these ideas. But that's exactly why they lead to the problems we now see in our society. Planned action, mediated by the PFC is the opposite of wu-wei. It's goal directed. Objective focused.

The PFC is also connected to the rest of the brain, and it can make high level executive decisions. It can also abstract general patterns from specific experiences.

Humans are blocking the natural flow, redirecting it, via the PFC. We can decide not to act out our urges, we have such a thing as free will.

Book Recommendation: My Stroke of Insight - Jill Bolted Taylor

The brain is divided into two hemispheres that perceive the world differently. The left hemisphere is where language processing is situated, it creates a constant narration and categorization of what is happening. It rationalizes everything, constantly, dissecting it into it's parts and details. The right hemisphere on the other hand looks at the complete picture and the sensual experience of each moment. They are called the interpreter and the mystic in the book.

Book Recommendation: The Master and His Emissary - Iain McGilchrist

Greeks are on the opposite side of Taoism when it comes to value judgement of what is more important: Rationality or Feeling

Rationality separates us from something important but enables the comforts of modern society.

Chapter Two - The Original AI: Animate Intelligence

Book Recommendation: Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman

Webers First Law of Desire: Life wants more life.

This is a direct consequence of the principle of evolution.

All life forms are intelligent to some degree because even the simplest cells solve very difficult problems in interesting and novel ways all the time. The amount of computation and decision making going on in a single bacterium at the level of proteins and molecules is staggering. We too often forget about this sort of intelligence inherent in everything living, when we focus on what makes human intelligence special.

Something every cell on Earth has in common is that it is a living entity, acting purposefully to maintain and propagate its life.

Plant biomass is way bigger than human biomass. It's like 80% of all living things.

Plants also have intelligence. They have electrical networks and sensors and they react to the surrounding, measuring all sorts of things and growing differently depending on what they sense. Roots in particular have massive densities of receptors and can compute a lot of things, chemical gradients, vibrations, soil density, presence of other roots, etc.

Plants even exhibit cue based learning. And some plants learn different from others. Monica Gagliano is mentioned for experiments on this.

Book Recommendation: The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben

Plants live on a different time scale, but they are still intelligent. This begs the question: how many other intelligent things do we miss because of time scale differences?

Because all life wants more life, all life has feelings. Animals do suffer and desire things, in very much the same way that we suffer and desire. Organisms are not mere machines, they have goals and valence states. They prefer existence over non-existence.

Consciousness is a spectrum. This reminds me a lot of the work of Michael Levin.

Many animals have non-human intelligence too, often even surpassing humans in the realms that the animals care about and adapted to. Many even have intelligence that we as humans can recognize. There's something going on in the minds of these organisms, they have an inner life, much like we do.

Every morning when we turn on the lights, read the news and commute to work, we're relying unwittingly on the cumulative efforts and insights of untold generations of ancestors who, over eons, laid the foundations for all the technologies we enjoy today.

Our animate intelligence, not our rational intelligence is the biggest part of what we are. We share that with other animals, but we think we are special because of our rationality. The problem with this is that we often forget that other underlying side of us.

In reality, none of us knows exactly how anyone else really feels inside.

Why should it be different for animals?

The deepest structures of earliest life-forms are still within us today.

Weber's Second Law: The desire to live is palpable and visible, always present in living bodies.

We can recognize other organisms will to live, because it looks like our own. It probably even feels similar.

Our minds are only an extension, and deeply part of our bodies. Without body there would be no mind.

Our complicated feelings, that come from Weber's first and second law, often outside conscious grasp can't be expressed in words really. The true Tao, (Being?) can't be spoken of.

Thought: Poetry is trying to express these feelings, somehow, anyways. What hurt feels like when we lose a loved one, or hope when falling in love. But what does it feel like to catch a basketball? When our body moves without conscious thought?

Book Recommendation: Beyond Words - Carl Salina

Weber's Third Law: Only in the mirror of other life can we understand our own lives. Only in the eyes of the other can we become ourselves.

Integrative intelligence => combining our animate intelligence, cellular and subconscious systems, feelings and other such things, with our rational minds, our tendencies to abstract, to see patterns and plan

Rather than being machines, every animal with a nervous system likely has subjective experiences driven by feelings that, at the deepest level, are shared by all of us.

Chapter Three - The Most Important Relationship in You're Life

Human cognition is split, we have an I interacting with a self. This means we can care for ourselves, lose ourselves, hate ourselves, can be beside ourselves etc.

But who is this self and who is doing things to it? Where is your head? Who is the observer?.

Book Recommendation: Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff

There is no relationship more important than the one you have with yourself.

The split between I and self is a defining human characteristic.

Qualia make up the sense of self. We share that with other animals, it's part of our day to day moment to moment existence.

Humans needed to cooperate to survive better. This lead to theory of mind emerging. We think and treat others as if they had minds just like ours. We can employ the same cognitive machinery to predict ourselves. We get an emerging sense of self as well as a sense of how others think of us as a result.

The I is an emergent property of conscious awareness, continually observing the self, categorizing it, judging it and explaining it to others.

The I is telling the story of the self, both it's past but also it's future. Constantly internally, sometimes externally narrating everything the self does and will do and has done. It can be associated to the left hemisphere.

The self is immediate urges, usually primal, always changing. The I is more enduring, often cultural, has higher level goals.

Book Recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Claim that the self is System I thinking and that the I is System II thinking. One fast and automatic but sometimes flawed, and the other one careful, planned, deliberate, but also often wrong.

Book Recommendation: Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Descartes split the world in half, into mind stuff and physical stuff.

Book Recommendation: The Mechanistic Conception of Life - Jacques Loeb

Our sense of what to do and what not to do is grounded in feelings. If you don't have that, you can't decide. Normally your brain projects you into the hypothetical situation to find out how it would feel to be in that future and then uses that data to decide. No feelings => no valence => no good decision making. This is very much what Jonathan Haidt describes in his book The Righteous Mind.

Our guts learn their intuitions.

• Robert Sapolsky

In Chinese there is no difference between feelings and reasons. They have a word for "knowing something with the whole body" though: tiren.

Wu-wei is the same idea as flow in western thought.

For a person in wu-wei, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful.

• Edward Slingerland

Zen is Buddhism mixed with Taoism that then spread to Japan. It is about untying our conceptual grasp of nature, our rational, word based approach to it, in order to unlock "true" understanding.

Mindfulness meditation involves observing your inner experience from moment to moment, without reacting or making judgements on what you observe.

There's an underlying torrent of ongoing conscious experience that meditation brings to light. If you get more adept in meditation, this torrent eventually ceases to exist. It simply stops.

Dukkha is the state of disconnect between I and self. It's the constant narration and evaluating that goes on when the I is observing and judging the self. It is the opposite of wu-wei. It is the source of suffering, identifying I with the sensation.

There's a moment of pure experience before the I gets tied up to the self, where there is no valence state, no story attached to the raw stimulus itself.

Thought: I think this is flat out wrong. Namely the experience itself for evolutionary reasons has valence built in. Certain things hurt, even when the I is not evolved. Hunger feels bad, no matter how enlightened. On the contrary, people who meditate a lot have stronger prefrontal cortexes, not weaker ones. What diminishes is their amygdala and lower level brain regions, their animal/urge/animateness parts. This flies directly in the face of the thesis Lent tries to build here.

Your relationship with yourself is of utmost importance because you can't end it. The I and self can be like good dancers, different, yet together creating something that neither could do on their own. But I'm the beginning dancers often trip over each other's feet.

Part Two - Where Am I?

Chapter 4 - The Patterns of the Universe

How can everything be in flux, everything decay, change, has it's parts replaced and yet we have persistent entities everywhere?

This constant flux and change, the turmoil of the world is called Ching in Chinese.

Book Recommendation: I Ching

Matter and energy flow into one another, this flow is called qi. It is constant impermanence at the root of everything. Qi is manifesting as light and darkness, as male and female, as yin and yang, polar opposites that yet carry within themselves a little bit of the other and need it for their existence. All the changes and everything needs everything else to define it's existence, in a neverending circle. Yin and Yang. For Chinese sages, it was important to compile and understand this flux all the changes and interdependencies of everything.

The idea of the dharma, the underlying principle of the working of the universe is the Buddhist equivalent to the Tao.

Qi needs li.

Matter or energy simply can't exist without being organized in some fundamental way.

Thought: the important and permanent thing is this organization, even if each piece of matter changes, the organization, the relations between these new pieces of matter, stays functionally the same. Hence the whole stays the same. This reminds me so much of the Vsauce video of whether or not chairs exist.

We can think of li, then, as the ever-movong, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything in nature.

The collection of atoms peoples. In the words of Vsauce.

Knowledge can be gained not just by understanding the constitutent parts of something but also by its interconnectedness with other things, how the parts fit together, what functions they serve in relation to the whole. This idea is about emergence. On the contrary, scientific inquiry is often going the opposite direction, focusing only on the workings of the parts, it's reductive.

People who believe that everything can be explained by scientific reductionism are missing a crucial part of the universe. Complexity, emergence, things that only exist because not everything can be accurately measured with infinite precision.

We also know that because of Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory, reductionist approaches miss a fundamental part of the picture. Ontological reductionism is therefore deeply flawed.

Things act according to other arts of principles that make them 'more than'—rather than nothing but—meaningless colliding particles.

The universe is more than just physics. Emergence is a real phenomenon and can't be bridged by reductionist science. Chaos theory gives wiggle room for living things to create their own causality and meaning. Because they can create systems that break out of a determinism because of their want to be alive. This is the core idea behind [Free Agents by Kevin J. Mitchell].

The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism. – Ilya Prigogine

Thought: I strongly dislike that he pushes all the work of systems theory and modern neuroscience always quickly aside and just proclaims, well, the Taoists already knew this. Because they really didn't. Not to the extent that our understanding and models go to these days, not even close. His grasp of systems thinking and neuroscience are good, but not good enough to see how simplifying it is to say that the "Ancients knew it". It feels deeply unfair to the accomplishments of the modern science that he otherwise agrees with. Furthermore he always picks straw manned arguments showing that scientists just like reductionism, even though many of the people he mentions know perfectly well about emergence, and complexity theory because they had to study Lorentz attractors and Non-linear Dynamics a lot. Turns out, science is not only reductionist anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.

One of the fascinating attributes of self-organized systems is how simplicity appears to emerge from underlying complexity. A person walking down the street, a bird flying in the sky,

When systems are self-organized, they tend to fluctuate within relatively stable parameters.

Strange attractors can be found almost everywhere in nature. They are chaotic systems, that still remain in a pre-defined set of conditions. They don't quite break out of their bounds, yet they are not predictable.

Strange attractors can undergo phase transitions. Because systems can have multiple strange attractors and sometimes the random chaotic fluctuations bring a state close enough to the other attractor state that the system switches how it behaves.

Reciprocal causality. Emergent systems can have causal relationships going in two ways. From the parts to the whole but also from the whole to the parts. This is what enables free will.

Life isn't a thing at all—its an ongoing process of integrated self-regeneration and self-maintenance. .

Fractals (more exact would be self referential patterns) are everywhere. In Music, in art, in mathematics, in nature, in brains etc. That's also what Gödel, Escher, Bach is about.

Hills are stone waves instead of water waves?

The distributions of random walks and fractals as described by Mandelbrot can model the stock market. Which means that the stock market is essentially fractally random. This is also one of the big grudges of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Outsized, orders of magnitude strong events, can exist in chaotic fractal systems. He calls them Black Swan events.

Natural systems are usually well connected. 6 degrees of separation. Small world hypothesis.

Holarchy: each part is a coherent entity while also an integral component of something larger.

The biosphere is the Tao.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. – Norbert Wiener

There is a cloud in this paper. Sun, minerals too. Because everything is interwoven and interlinked in complex ways. It also contains suffering of all sorts. The pollution of the paper mill, the slave wages paid to the tree harvesters, the loss of indigenous forest.

In a complex system, the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves.

Chapter Five - The Harmonic Dance of Life

Book Recommendation: The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Instead of attacking the merit of the book directly, he poisons the well, by saying, bad person from Enron liked this book, and look where that lead.

Any apparently altruistic behavior is merely a convenient tactic for a concealed selfish goal.

I'm not sure but it seems like Jeremy Lent didn't read the book because Dawkins is arguing against this himself. The examples are that sometimes cooperation is an attractor state of a system and hence what evolution favors. The genes are still selfish, because they only "care" about making more of themselves. And if competition is better in a certain environment than that's what's evolving. And in others it's cooperation. He specifically states also that evolutionary thought should never be used as a way to ground moral value. Because this selfishness leads to some pretty fucked up shit. And Dawkins talks about the fuckedupness at length!

Harmonizing rather than competing was seen as the key to a successful life.

In ultra social species like humans, that is true. And Dawkins would be the first to admit this.

Genes don't exactly determine how organisms will look like. The story of the blueprint is wrong, because cells are dynamic systems interacting with other cells and their environment. The genes provides the functionality, and the possibilities, but the development of cells into bodies is under determined by only the genes. This makes embryogenesis really complicated, because it's an intricate dance of cells developing. Michael Levins work comes to mind. Genes have feedback loops and can create Non-linear dynamics.

The relationship between genes and the organism is not one way but circular.

Proteins formed by the information within DNA change which information on the DNA is accessible, and therefore which proteins get produced and even in how much quantity. This is called gene expression and it's ridiculously complicated.

Genes are expressed within the cell as a result of what is going on around them.

Book Recommendation: The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin

Epigenetic inheritance is a thing.

Animals can direct their own evolution by building their own niches. Spiders who make webs, will adapt to better live with those webs.

Description of how life arose and how eukaryotes came to be by endosymbiosis. This reminds me of the Vital Question.

The rise of multicellular life is weird from an evolutionary point of view. Cells that give up their means of reproduction, because they cooperate with clones of themselves is an extraordinary facet of life. So is the specialization of different cell types in multicellular organisms.

Life is built on symbiosis. It's everywhere.

Thought: I think he misses one point because it doesn't fit his narrative. That point is that life is also built on competition, because that's everywhere too.

Trees and fungi form collaborative root mycelium networks under the forest floor.

Metaphors are important because they shape the way we think. Some metaphors can be dangerous, outright destructive.

He asserts that the information in our bodies and brains is intimately linked to their substrate, their implementation. This shows he has no idea about information theory and experiments of rebuilding pieces of cortex in simulations running on silicon and hooking them up to real rat brains with the rats working the same, before and after.

All information is substrate independent. That's a fundamental property of the universe. Also all information needs a substrate, some form of representation within physical stuff, else it doesn't exist.

Book Recommendation: Life 3.0 - Max Remark

Life is like a self organizing jazz ensemble.

Book Recommendation: The Music of Life - Denis Noble

Part Three - What am I?

Chapter Six - The Deep Purpose of Life

Life has purpose built into it. Evolution imbues meaning and teleology—reasons and affordances—into life at every step. Because evolution makes life want to survive.

Book Recommendation: What is Life? - Erwin Schrödinger

Life exists by constructing local pockets of negentropy but increasing overall entropy around it tremendously. Core to this is metabolism, which has two parts: catabolism that provides energy and components to from high energy food / sunlight + CO2 by break down processes. And then anabolism, using this energy and components to build negentropy within living things, building and maintaining their internal structures.

Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.

From the earliest times on Earth to the present day, virtually all the energy that life consumed derives ultimately from the sun.

Thought: This is again, simply not true, because especially early life forms were running off of the energy of geothermal vents. Which is decidedly not energy of the sun, but rather reactions of minerals with water as well as heat produced by the gravitational pressure of the earth.

Cells are crazy self organizing hubs of complexity. Filled with proteins interacting, sensing the environment, reacting to it, expressing genetics, turning on and off. A whole microcosm of unimaginable numbers. Millions upon millions of enzymes, proteins, amino acids, organelles, Ribosomes etc. in each and every cell. Constantly stumbling around fast binding and unbinding, catalyzing reactions, breaking apart, building anew.

Simple rules over a large collection of agents can produce highly complex results. Bodies, brains, ant colonies are all examples. The best idea to really drive this point home is the boid algorithm.

Once nature hits on a routine that works, it sticks to it.

Qualities of life:

• redundancy
• conservatism
• modularity
• innovation
• coordination
• evolvability

Evolvability itself evolves.

Evolution learns. This is not just a metaphor, but a deep reality of the living world.

Neurons that fire together wire together. Hebbian Learning. This is how the brain works.

Shared gene sequences are the collective intelligence of nature, earned over billions of years if experience.

While each species behaves in its unique way, the ecosystem as a whole exhibits organized collective behavior, like a vast amorphous organism.

Gaia hypothesis.

It was life that made the land habitable for life.

Life was continually repurposed its environment in its never ending quest to resist entropy, and Gaia is the emergent result.

Larger animals utilize energy more efficiently than smaller ones.

Thought: I don't think this is true generally. Looking at mammals vs. say spiders.

Technological advanced allowed humans to exploit the energy of the natural world ever more efficiently.

Cooperation is our secret weapon to achieve this.

Book Recommendation: The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil.

Someday, once life has spread out into the entire universe, it might be through advanced technology beyond our comprehension, be able to counteract the second law of thermodynamics itself.

Our civilization has built its relationship with the rest of nature not on integration but on dis-integration. It is based on dominating the natural world with no consideration for its well-being.

Life's deep purpose is to maintain and regenerate itself to make more life in an ongoing rebellion against the law of entropy.

Chapter Seven - The Tao in My Own Nature

Ants beat us to the invention of agriculture by 20 million years.

The hard problem of consciousness: why does neural activity feel like anything?

A good account trying to explain this is the book Being You by Anil Seth.

Feelings exist to regulate organisms. Consciousness is useful, hence it evolved.

There is no unbridgeable gulf between subjective experience and bodily functions.

reliability => flexibility makes for resilient and adaptable systems

This idea is also talked about a lot by Nicolas Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile.

Integrated information theory might make consciousness measurable. Even if it is measurable, than doesn't subtract from it's mystery, it's sacredness.

It's the miraculous ways in which the material world self-organizes that create the conditions for all that is sacred and meaningful in the universe.

The brain has strange attractors built into the complex dynamic behavior of its network. Those states correspond to conscious states.

Conscious states have a fractal nature through time. Thoughts, moods, ideas, beliefs.

The default mode network is engaged in mind wandering.

Through intention, we can literally sculpt the shape of our own attractors of consciousness.

Culture is built reinforcingly. It's like Hebbian Learning.

The idea of cultural strange attractors, ideas that are semi stable states of a lot of people's minds, instead of memes.

Thought: That's exactly what memes are though. Patterns of thought that semi stably exist in the minds of a lot of people. Different states are differently well adapted to the minds of people, to their environments and are therefore less stable attractors than others.

Archetypes are patterns shared between humans everywhere, since forever.

Archetypes may be understood as shared patterns of human behavior that are deeply meaningful and universal to the human experience.

We share some archetypes even with non-human organisms because we have similar hardware.

Adaptive Cycles Model: Growth => Conservation => Release => Reorganization

Grow, Slow Down, Catastrophe, Begin Again

This model is sort of like the Upward Spiral of Learning and Failure from Ray Dalios Principles

What will our civilization's phase transition look like?

Part Four - How Should I Live?

Chapter Eight - Flourishing as an Integrated Organism

What cultural tendencies bring out the best in us? Which don't?

Harmony is not the same as uniformity. You need different ingredients to make a harmonious soup.

Placebo is ridiculously effective. And they show that our mindset can affect our bodies. Quite drastically even.

But the body also affects the mind. It's a recursive feedback loop.

Exercise, dance, Quigong - all regulate the nervous system beneficially.

When you have eudaimonia, [striving for the good life, for a purpose, you can endure a lot of things](book notes/mans-search-for-meaning). Buddhists call the same idea sukha.

Eudaimonia is contrasted to hedonia, simply seeking things that are pleasurable. Hedonic states are transitory. This leads to the hedonic treadmill and the idea of perpetual suffering from Buddhism. Escaping this is possible though (say Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Hinduism, Stoicism, and a bunch of other philosophies).

One of our deeply evolved needs is to do work that is meaningful and challenging.

Having a positive attitude to life is one of the most important attributes for sustained well-being.

Awe, gratitude and a positive attitude are good for mental health. (Who would have thought haha). Basically, be the opposite of the Underground Man.

Meditating a lot, makes the brain better at meditation. Just like with any other skill, practice leads to learning.

Book Recommendation: Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

As we experience our own inner music of life, we become aware that there is no composer, that the players and audience are one and the same, as everything ceaselessly streams through the field if consciousness in a state of effortless flux.

The positive effects of meditation are overwhelming, physical and long lasting if one meditated a lot. Meditation is literally rewiring the brain to better handle stress and be more calm.

Book Recommendation: McMindfulness - Ron Purser

The way society is structured makes it more difficult to pursue eudaimonia. We are reward hacking our brains constantly.

Modern consumerism is a product of clever businessman finding out how to make people buy their products more, even if the products harm the people.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of... who pull the wires which control the public mind. – Edward Bernays

Marketing works too good in producing desires and then providing the product as the solution, the fix to the desire we didn't have before.

Flourishing is not just a personal affair. It's something that is about the connections to our world around us as much as it is about us. While they systems we are in are bad, we can't be good. Interconnectedness is important.

Our well-being is related to the well-being of the world.

Chapter Nine - Cultivating Integrated Values

Book Recommendation: The Life You Can Save - Peter Singer

Book Recommendation: Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes

Book Recommendation: The Better Angels of Our Nature

Thought: It's weird, he discredits the idea of life as being nasty brutish and short that was core to Hobbes thinking but then endorses The Better Angels of Our Nature which proves that this was the case with lots and lots of data.

Every living thing has valence states. Organisms prefer certain things over others because living things want to stay that way, they want to keep living.

Morality evolved in humans.

We don't just act morally because we think we should—we do so because it feels right.

He constructs a picture that is even weirder and super counter to what Steven Pinker wrote. Basically pre-agricultural societies were peace loving, cooperative and somehow "pure", whereas the rise of agriculture was what started all the wars and unmoral behavior. This is flat out wrong. Humans had in-group out-group biases and tribal warfare long before that, and if Lent understood Dawkins and evolutionary theory, he would know this. What evolved was cooperation within tribes, not grand scale cooperation as we have it today.

Book Recommendation: Odyssey - Homer

Book Recommendation: Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

Book Recommendation: Animal Liberation - Peter Singer

Corporations that are solely focused on shareholder value are analogous to psychopaths. Pursuing a single value despite everything else and the suffering it causes. Business executive positions also attract real psychopaths. Ruthlessness helps to outcompete in the business world and that is a fundamental problem, it leads to the sort of maladaptations that we can see today, i.e. McDonalds and climate change.

The four R's as an antidote: relationships, responsibility, reciprocity and redistribution

Ubuntu - I am because you are, you are because I am.

Guanyin - the one who listens and hears the cries of the world in order to come and help

Everything is worthy of our love and protection. Even the stones are sacred. This extension of loving kindness towards everything is known as metta in Buddhism.

Once somebody is enlightened and pursues metta for all things, they are known as a Bodhisattva.

For as long as space endures and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the mystery in the world.

Thought: If one accepts the ideas of Jeremy Lent, what does one do to all the predators and parasites in this world? One has a big moral conundrum at their hands, because even in the natural world, even without human involvement, there are a lot of things going horribly wrong. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

Our current civilization is currently using its prodigious powers in a converted entropic onslaught to undo much of the bounty that life has generated.

Thought: This is simply wrong in the sense that the negentropy destroyed by humans when they loot ecosystems is put into negentropy in different places. Namely more humans and such things as smartphones.

What does it mean to be an integrated, ethical human being in an age when humanity has the power to obliterate life's plentitude—and is actively doing so?

Chapter Ten - Human Nature

We are in the Anthropocene - everything on the Earth is shaped by us, and usually not in good ways.

More plastic than fish, no more true ancient untouched forests, everything converted to farmlands, all the Megafauna gone.

Book Recommendation: The End of Nature - Bill McKibben

The human orgy of destruction is natural, because humans are still part of nature, even while we replace and slaughter it.

We view Earth as a resource, nature as a machine to be manipulated to our benefit, cut into pieces and sold.

What kind of ludicrous folly is it to debase our living Earth, the only source of life that we know of in the universe, to a financial market instrument.

Consider someone you love dearly, such as a parent or a child. If a billionaire walked up to you offering any amount of money to buy her, abuse her and then kill her, would you consider it, even for one instance? Of course not. There are some things that are sacred—that have value beyond any price that could be paid.

We have lost around 90% of nature as it once was pre-humanity.

Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same. – J.B. MacKinnon

We are not in the sixth extinction, but the first extermination event. We are waging genocide on everything not human or useful to us.

We can do all of this without recoiling away in horror because we have dehumanized and desecrated nature. We believe, firmly, that humans are superior to all else.

I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live. – Albert Schweitzer

Biophilia - the idea that we feel a deep love towards all Nature

Book Recommendation: The Art of War - Sun Tzu

People are starting to give rights to natural ecosystems. Putting into legislature, that they should not be harmed. Humans are establishing universal declarations of rights for Earth itself, adding ecocide to the International Criminal court.

We must move, ultimately, from a civilization that is wealth-based to one that is life-based.

Part Five - Why am I?

Chapter Eleven - Everything is Connected

Book Recommendation: Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

The individual as the basis of societal importance is a European invention with vast bad consequences. In a world where everybody is only ever selfish, trust and cooperation don't have a real place anymore. Doing good becomes impossible because you'll be punished by the system for it unless you have an ulterior motive.

The boundaries separating the self from others are all mere constructions of a conditioned mind.

The very notion of a separate self is a falsehood.

How to help people who see the point that the system is bad, but still think, well, everybody is selfish, so I also have to be else I fall behind?

Thought: This is like asking how to resolve the Prisoners Dilemma in a population where we know everybody is cheating and make people not cheat.

Mystical experiences (often triggered by psychedelics) show the same, just like Indras Net, an infinite set of connected reflections. Everything as one, an all encompassing wholeness, the loss of self, or ego.

Book Recommendation: How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan

Book Recommendation: Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

Book Recommendation: Perennial Philosophy - Aldous Huxley

The idea that there is something beyond normal reality that mystical experiences hints at. Something super real. There is Truth, beyond reality. Many religions share this concept, too.

The idea of transcendence is inherent in many philosophies. The mystical, permanent, oneness is something found, over and over again, even if just as an idea, separate from the mystical experience itself. Some criticize that all experience is premediated and therefore in mystical experiences people see what they expect to see, it's a self perpetuating myth, however often that might not be the case. Now people are looking into brains of people under the influence of LSD to figure out what is really going on.

Under the influence of psychedelics the normal workings of consciousness breaks down, long range diverse brain connections become active that usually aren't, the brain is more activated overall, the habitual mode of assigning meaning to things and acting on them stops to exist.

Synchronization and wave like patterns appear mathematically in a lot of descriptions of nature. A lot of things have periodicity to them, they repeat in time.

Music can move us, both emotionally and physically, like no other force.

Music is conceived not as an aesthetic performance but as an ever-present force weaving meaning into the daily social fabric of life.

Music dissolves the ego.

Rainbows don't really exist. They are a pattern of interaction between our nervous system and light reflecting from droplets of water. From different viewpoints we can see or not see them, did the rainbow disappear when we moved somewhere else?

Connectedness expands meaning beyond ourselves. Our brains crave meaning, just like our bodies crave food. Meaning feels good, and interconnectedness feels good because it enhances meaning. Love is a form of feeling deep interconnectedness, of blending.

We can shut ourselves off from all of this but if we do we lose something important, we lose to a large degree, meaning. Becoming ego focused and centered is meaningless, we need relationships to our surroundings to have any meaning at all.

Mind, life, consciousness and meaning are all emergent phenomena, existing only, as the result of complex, dynamic interactions between different entities.

We enact meaning.

Chapter Twelve - From Fixed Self to Infinite Li: The Fractal Nature of Identity

If we accept scientific reductionism we accept that the world is inherently meaningless because it is just a bunch of particles colliding. By denying emergence we lose meaning because it is an emergent property (of living things).

Pantheism - everything is sacred because it contains a piece, or even the whole of God.

Book Recommendation: I am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstaedter

He starts using the word spirit to describe the pattern of information that is inherent in things. The pattern and it's ability to persist within matter through time is the spirit.

The dissolution of the self's boundaries is the path to wu-wei.

We derive our sense of purpose in what we do from the assumption that humanity will continue its existence into the future.

Everything we do creates rippled that we can't predict, some small act of kindness might be the cause of a world war, chaos theory says, why not?

We play a role, and we need to add our unique contribution to everything, we need to weave our strand into the web of meaning.

Part Six - Where are We Going?

Chapter Thirteen - Weaving a New Story of Meaning

The biggest threat to humanity is the LLC. Corporations are like an AI paperclip Maximizer, but instead of paperclips they maximize shareholder value.

Corporations use media and advertising to manufacture wants and needs. An addicted consumer is the perfect customer, loyal, going to extreme lengths to get their fix. Corporations therefore have an incentive to invent new things to buy and then getting us hooked on them. They perpetuate the hedonic treadmill, with all their power, because again, number go up, shareholders need that. This is the problem at the heart of capitalism at its finest.

He calls the aggregate of this money focused companies exploiting human nature for profit - Windigo Inc. after the myth of the Windigo monster turning living things into dead husks that wander the planes, trying to fill their hunger.

The depiction of humans as selfish individuals, the view of nature as a resource to be exploited, and the idea that technology alone can fix our biggest problems are all profound misconceptions that have collectively led our civilization down an accelerating path to disaster.

We need a new worldview, one where life is more important than money. This reminds me of Jacob Collier and Aurora singing the Seed + On A Rock Somewhere together. "You cannot eat money or not?"

A new worldview has to incorporate themes like harmony, symbiosis and balance. It would optimize eudaimonia instead of hedonia.

Financial markets are dangerous like fire, if kept unchecked, they start to devour everything in order to turn a bigger profit, faster.

Have international laws against ecocide.

Like all self-organized, adaptive systems—society changes in non-linear ways.

We live in a world designed to keep us numb—a culture spiked with innumerable doses of spiritual anesthesia concocted to bind us to the hedonic treadmill, to shuttle along with everyone else in a consensus 'trance'.

Weaving the web of meaning ultimately means integrating all the different parts of ourselves, including those that feel egotistical, fearful and selfish.

Because actions resonate like a wave throughout the social fabric, each of our actions matters. Random acts of kindness can have profound ripple effects down the road.

What is the sacred and precious strand that you will weave?