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The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

aeon.co

191–200 of 250 posts

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an odd reply. Mark 4, Jesus basically says he doesn't want everyone to be saved so he's confusing on purpose. Matthew 15, he scolds Pharisees for not killing children like god commanded Matthew 21, he goes on an anger induced rampage in the temple Mark 11, Jesus killed a tree because he was mad that it didn't have fruit when it was out of season Do you think these things don't count?

Wow the level of dishonesty and misuse of any context is horrific here. Mark 4: Jesus is quoting Isaiah who is speaking of a people who have the Scriptures and yet have continually ignored God and will eventually murder Him. God is under no compulsion to be clear with them. It is the sobering truth of Matthew 13:12. Matthew 15 : I have no idea what you are talking about here. Matthew 21: The house of God is being use…

not the GP, but the greater symbolism of the fruit tree is very interesting.

If you believe the stories, god created everything, including the tree, and the tree is 'behaving' exactly how it was created. For this, god cursed it.

I suppose this is something programmers can really identify with, but I think the greater symbolism is applying the same thing to humans.

When god created adam and eve, he created them with them with curiosity, and it was that curiosity that led them to eat the apple. For that, they were cursed.

IMO, the greater symbolism is just demonstrating the story of Eden all over again.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#192

I read Lang's bird of paradise when I was a kid and was thoroughly wowed by the fact it was so deep I couldn't understand it. When I grew up I realised long obscure words used to conceal self-indulgent ramblings wasn't a sign of anything good. I can't find an extract of meat of the book, can anyone else? As someone who also has had, and likely always will have mental health problems, anyone who glorifies that which i…

I believe that for some philosophical insight to be truly profound, you need to be able to state it in a manner that is completely unambiguous. It is easy to make yourself sound smart by allowing the listener to "fill in the gaps" with their own interpretation, but it doesn't really contribute anything meaningful.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to think that a hyper-rational would opt out of society in general. Not relying on the conventional ways of sustenance that we are accustomed to. One example of this is the survivalist, that lives in nature. One could start incrementally moving towards minimalism, acquiring the training and skills to farm and hurt animals and finally step outside of organized society. This is something I have been thinki…

> To what extent is technological progress and economic growth truly useful? To me it is very useful and I truly believe that we live in the best possible time, even if you consider the people that have poorest lifestyle (and especially the number of people that are forced to live that lifestyle, which has decreased a lot). Maybe you will think otherwise? Possibly, but before you decide, please go and actually do it…

I've actually attempted small slices of this.

The work isn't necessarily the difficult part, but the baggage to continue to exist and be recognized by the rest of the system is where things go awry.

Seeing as there is astonishingly low pressure to actually keep prices low, you have a maximization function in place that ends up ensuring that you're either having to maximize for capital influx to equip yourself for maximal time efficiency, or you end up having to condition yourself to be able to physically do the work, which tends to cost a great deal of time and regular personal upkeep.

Mind, this has just been forays into agriculture and basic manufacturing (blacksmithing/rudimentary fabrication).

All of this dive has also been done in an environment where most are content to live and let live. So the random interloper deciding to flex muscle to subduct your aspirations to self-sustainability are not a factor; and raw material processing has not hit the top of my research pile yet.

While everything is in reach, efficiency while doing it is always the most hard won fight to win.

On the other hand, you also learn a few warts of the system by doing this type of work as well. Our current society has become incredibly transaction-centric instead of people-community centric. When trivial transportation costs have effectively globalised the world, your ability to forge effective self-sustaining in groups outside the fiscal sense suffers.

I believe this may be a contributing factor to the recent resurgence of nationalistic tendencies. As every member of the market has begun to realize how tightly coupled everything has become, there is a desire to cut out the additional complexity and figure out a way to keep the in-group/culture sustainable regardless of fiscal outcomes.

Furthermore, technological advancement inevitably introduces higher severity and complexity problems, as well as extending the physical implications of addressing those very problems. Take the increasing prevalence of ant-biotic/fungal resistant bacteria/fungi as an example, or the consequences of climate change fueled by shifts in our atmospheric composition and biosphere depletion.

It's not at all a trivial matter, and when your technological carrying capacity is mated with a positive feedback loop, (drive to procreate/attain more wealth) you have a recipe for change that won't be denied.

The only thing people seem to be selectively blind to is The bits and pieces they are willing to accept as being caused by technological progress, and whether or not they can/should be remedied.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#194
post #52

Seems like myth dressed up as pop science. But we basically live in an insane world, and navigate it only by denialism, tunnel vision, ignorance, or distraction. If we were to actualize knowledge of the massive destruction of the natural world and the insanity of the path of capitalism, it would make someone crazy by the definition of the masses. Imagine someone screaming at the top of their lungs about the forthcomi…

We cannot destroy natural world. We can only change it. Just like cyanobacteria did. Was that event any less natural? I take an extreme(?) view that humans are a product and a part of nature, so whatever we do is still natural. It may affect other parts of the nature by a different degree, it may make out living more or less comfortable, but it is still natural.

Right, so there is no such thing as complex form, and you'd be juuuust fine with living in a small bubble on an airless earth.

Your reductionism ad absurdum is not useful on any level of practical discussion.

Why, by your nihilistic logic I can murder you and burn the body, and that's absolutely fine by your line of thinking. I'm not destroying any atoms, dear judge, all the atoms he was composed of are still there. There is no such thing as a complex form. There is no he. He was atoms, and those atoms still exist.

"Disruptors" I'm sure love these arguments, because it absolves them of any latent subconscious guilt that they may have destroyed something better than what they disrupted it into.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#195
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it refers only to ethics, I'm saying that you are conflating ethics and epistemology when you say that sanity==beneficial. Sanity refers to a combination of rationality and accurate enough perceptions of the factual state of the world. Rationality means able to make logical inferences, and when you talk about perceptions of the factual state of the world that is epistemology. A soldier who jumps on a g…

Sanity does not mean necessarily "holding only true beliefs". I believe the issue here is we do not define sanity in the same way. Given your example of the soldier jumping on a grenade - clearly they value the life of their friend more than their own. Therefore, it is beneficial to them.

'true belief' is a philosophical term used in epistemology.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/

The question is 'what does it mean for something to be true', since Hume and Kant largely demolished any possibility that we can access 'objective truth'.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/panova1.html "On these grounds, David Hume posits two systems of reality: the first—the reality of perceptions and memory, and the second—the reality of the mind. The mind is able, on the basis of its judgments, to compose a picture of the Universe in spite of the fact that it never perceives all its parts. But as the "first" and also the "second" system of reality exist only in our sense experience, they do not say anything certain about the nature of the external world, the existence of which even remains problematic."

Regarding "true beliefs", you would probably agree with William James who held that "truth be defined in terms of utility", in other words, a belief is 'true' in so far as it is useful in accomplishing things, and another belief would be more true if it is more useful to accomplish that thing.

As for the soldier, you are missing the point. Different people can disagree on what 'beneficial' means without either being wrong. What is 'beneficial for a person' basically means the same thing as 'good for a person', and there is no objective way to decide what is 'good'. Any time you say something is 'good' or something is 'better' than something else, you are assuming some kind of ethical framework.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#196

For all that, the author does not provide a definition of hypersanity by which an individual may be judged to be or not be hypersane. His examples of hypersane individuals are questionable. Nelson Mandela ordered the torture and murder of political enemies and their families, including teenage children. Tenzin Gyatso is a deposed theocratic dictator whose subjects toiled under abject serfdom before his exile. Jane Go…

I stopped reading at Nelson Mandela. A white-washed caricature, a media construct of certain Western power structures, that entirely collapses the moment one pays even a little bit of attention at his deeds and the people he freely associated with (such as his notorious wife Winnie).

Aeon having been on my shitlist for similar drivel in the past, I think I'll go ahead and completely excise it from my life.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#197
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanity does not mean necessarily "holding only true beliefs". I believe the issue here is we do not define sanity in the same way. Given your example of the soldier jumping on a grenade - clearly they value the life of their friend more than their own. Therefore, it is beneficial to them.

'true belief' is a philosophical term used in epistemology. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/ The question is 'what does it mean for something to be true', since Hume and Kant largely demolished any possibility that we can access 'objective truth'. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/panova1.html "On these grounds, David Hume posits two systems of reality: the first—the reality of perceptions and…

I never said that 'good' was an objective measure. Quite the opposite, in fact. I quite explicitly said that rationality is about acting toward achieving what is 'good' for oneself.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just run-of-the-mill stoicism?

Sounds more like Buddhism to me ("all existence is suffering" and so on). Stoicism has you recognize that (to simplify dramatically) you cannot change other people, only yourself. Stoicism consequently places a large emphasis on getting your mind and body in order, so it probably would not argue for allowing yourself to starve.

Yeah, I suppose... The post I was replying to just sounded to me a lot like something Epictetus could've said. As in, you shouldn't mind starving if you can't help it.

Now that I think about it, my memory of Epictetus seems to be really hazy, so I probably shouldn't try to discuss stoicism without doing some re-reading and thinking first.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally a whole ecosystems to learn to be interdependent with. Farming is still a thing, too. The deer are simply a single example of a way to eat. Hunting is also a thing. Don't buy into the myths of scarcity and learned helplessness society uses to get people to play along. Everyone's capable of learning how to reconnect with and be an active contributor to nature. We simply have a society that operates…

Sorry, hunter-gatherer never supported a civilization. It took big Ag to feed a city full of people. The back-to-nature theme is fine for privileged landowning educated people. But the vast majority of everybody everywhere is dependent on the local grocery.

That's a choice everyone's making. There are other ways, and big Ag isn't the only one. Sitting in the current solutions instead of looking to evolve them and learning from the past isn't how hypersanity works.

And yes, hypersanity is probably the most extreme form of privilege. Also, the back-to-nature theme is great, not merely fine, and something indigenous cultures are trying to reclaim as a human birthright. They're arguably way less privileged by your standards. Privilege isn't a reason to dismiss a good idea.

Treating nature as something to live with collaboratively rather than avoid or treat as subservient/separate from us isn't privilege. It's science. Mutualism > competition.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that many people realize the emptiness of the things most of us strive for. Far fewer of us stop chasing the emptiness very much. As Steve Taylor said, "Off like lemmings at the gun/I know better, still I run." Me, I can see that this stuff is empty, at least some of the time. I can even stop chasing it, for a few hours or days at a time. I can't seem to do it for long, though.

I think this is the dividing line - the willingness to actually completely stop chasing the void, and to instead build your own nexus of meaning. It’s a leap - we have very deeply woven memetic patterns that seem absolutely real to us. As others say, plenty, “including Disney movies”, “see” this world-beyond-the-world - but they see it askance, through a glass darkly, with the chattels and symbols of the artifice wor…

For a lot of people, psychedelics are the only path. The black iron prison is not just you and your worldview but the environment you choose (or not) to place yourself in and everyone you choose (or not) to interact with.

A consensual hallucination is kept alive and reinforced by the consensus. Take away psychedelics and few if any stand any chance of maintaining a conducive way of looking at things long enough for the mental shift / cascade / holy spirit descending on / knowledge and conversation with the HGA / initiatory state (different descriptions for the same underlying experience) to trigger. Something as simple and common as a 9-5 job is enough of a barrier, by forcing on you daily interactions / hallucinations to keep you away from the path. The black iron prison is the ultimate brainwashing agent.

Now also take into account that most don't even know there is a path, nevermind what it looks like. For these reasons and more yet unwritten, I am a strong advocate for psychedelics. They take away all the excuses and blast the gate to the mysteries to smithereens.

As it is said: "To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silent"

It is "knowing" that is so important or in other words direct experiential knowledge [1]

Once you know, you can dare and you can will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism

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