A Mind-Blowing Leap

Posted on 2024-12-03 by tmurphy

As I settle into and continue to explore the perspective that modernity is destined to fail, was never a long-term-viable idea, and therefore represents a giant blunder, I keep running into thoughtful writings about what exactly went wrong, at its foundations.

A recurrent culprit—and I tend to agree—involves human supremacism (anthropocentrism), connected to a perceived separateness from nature. This separateness relates to a dualism that began with agriculture, eventually finding full expression during the Enlightenment. Its Enlightenment framing, chiefly associated with Descartes, drives a wedge between mind and matter—as different “substances,” for instance. Thus, while not my main interest, I keep getting routed back to the question of “mind,” as it continues to be a sticking point in dismantling the dualism that is generally agreed to get in the way of appropriate ways of living on this planet.

So, this post is about mind and consciousness, offering my reactions. Now, I should be clear that it doesn’t really matter if we arrive at the Correct Truth on this issue, to the extent that the recommendations emerging from whatever framework result in better alignment to the living world. Any prescription that advocates humility, right-relationship, reciprocity, being part of a whole—fantastic! I may have suspicions and disagreements about the underlying metaphysics, but who cares, in the end? Surely multiple paths can lead to similar ends. Thus, I don’t want to die on that hill, or subvert migration to a better way of living in a crossed-arm philosophical sulk. Nor do I wish to see efforts that claim theirs is the only way, rooted in Truth. Who are we to demand knowing the ultimate truth, anyway? Why should we—or any creature of evolution—expect to? Humility, remember?

Indigenous cultures adopted a diverse universe of stories upon which their well-integrated practices rested, and that’s all for the good—even if the stories are not True in a modern sense. What matters is the practices and attitudes the stories motivate. I suspect that we can likewise tolerate a diversity of metaphysical underpinnings, to the extent that they allow compatibility with the community of life.

That said, I will now address what I see as an unfortunate tendency in the drive to abolish dualism. Maybe it can lead to similar, good outcomes, but I worry that it preserves a tinge of supremacy, while failing to destroy the chief horcrux of dualism. Be prepared to lose your mind, as I have done.

Continue reading →

Political Perfection

Posted on 2024-11-26 by tmurphy

No matter which candidate won the U.S. Presidential election, about half the citizens were set to fear the end of the country. Rather than argue about whether each side’s concern is similarly credible, I’ll address a broader question. What, exactly, does a voter/citizen imagine the goal to be, and—given modernity’s transient status—is the goal anything more than unfounded fantasy?

I have difficulty listening to political rhetoric of any stripe, carrying as I do the conviction that the entire modernity project is an incoherent amalgam of stunts that is inherently incompatible with ecological health, and thus fated to self-terminate. Besides offering promises of more houses, more jobs, more money, more material comfort—which only moves us closer toward ecological collapse—the dream being sold is such a self-deluded fantasy as to sound like Santa Claus and Easter Bunnies to my ear. It has a similarly infantilizing effect on the population.

Continue reading →

Interlude Entertainment

Posted on 2024-11-19 by tmurphy

My apologies for abandoning a regular posting cadence. I helped my mother move across the country and have been distracted by a number of other worthy activities, like building all manner of nest boxes from on-site materials. Several ideas for posts are brewing, so I am unlikely to remain silent for much longer.

In the meantime, some may be interested in checking out a few of my latest media appearances. The most recent is an interview by Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio.

The second plug is an appearance on Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification, in a joint discussion with DJ White—whose heterodox insights I have long appreciated.

I am doing another podcast interview later today, and will post it here (rather than making a new dedicated post) when it’s out. I’ll test the new subscribe feature to alert folks when it’s available. So, consider subscribing to get e-mail alerts about new Do the Math content (information absolutely not shared):

I would appreciate some feedback as to whether e-mails from the subscription service are working from this site (i.e., not blocked). Please use the comments to let me know if you did or did not receive an e-mail (by mid-day Tuesday). I will delete these housekeeping comments, once they serve their purpose. Thanks!

Life Expectations

Posted on 2024-10-15 by tmurphy

A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.

I wrote last year about the perceived perils of early human life in Desperate Odds, in the context that to us members of modernity, having never been weened from the teat of agricultural output, it seems like life without agriculture (and supermarkets) would be a virtual death sentence. Add to this a perceived vulnerability to predation from lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), and the mental image that emerges—as depicted by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael—is of a stressed and starving hunter following the tracks of elusive prey as twilight darkens, while a predator is close on his trail, audibly breathing. It feels like a knife edge of survival: everything has to go just right, but teeters on all going horribly wrong.

The core argument from the Desperate Odds post was that surviving to reproductive age was obviously common, or our species would wink out. This simple fact makes daily survival a near-guarantee—enough so that fear of death is not top-of-mind most of the time, allowing most brain cycles to go toward less-troubled, routine activities.

It was either in preparing that post or in connection with A Lifetime Ago that I ran across the aforementioned paper. In this post, I dig in to see what insights can be gained from survival models for various human cultures.

The Attention-Grabber

Let’s start with the plot that caught my eye and drew me in, which is Figure 3 in the paper.

Let’s see if it draws you in as well.

Continue reading →

Your Order, Please?

Posted on 2024-10-08 by tmurphy

This may come as a surprise, but people are capable of holding unsupported notions…unexamined beliefs and expectations. A common default assumption—often quite reasonable—is that conditions will continue in a fashion that is recognizably similar to the way they have been during one’s lifetime. Suggestions to the contrary tend to be met with suspicion—or even hostility in the case that the suggested outcome is less than rosy.

What if we presented possible options for future human developments—let’s say human population as a solid example—and pretend it’s a menu from which we get to choose. What outcome would most people see as the desired goal? What would make them happy, or satisfied? Which population curve below do you think most would select?

Continue reading →

Evidence, Please?

Posted on 2024-10-01 by tmurphy

I spend a fair bit of time asking myself the question: Am I crazy?

I mean, without really wanting to do so, I seem to have landed on a fringe view within our culture, which is not a comfortable place for me in a social sense. I don’t love it. The easiest—seemingly most likely—explanation for the glaring mismatch is that I’m the one off kilter.

My statement: Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.

Common response: That’s crazy. Just look around you! We’ve created a new normal. Humans have transcended the bounds of nature—no longer mere animals. Ingenuity has unlimited potential, and we’re really on our way now. This changes everything, and we will never lose our technological mastery, now that we have found it. Modernity is our destiny—and kind-of the whole point of it all. It’s what makes us truly human.

But let’s look at evidence: like evidence that modernity is a new normal that can go on at least as long as our species is around (relevant timescales are 10^6±1 years, or a million years plus-or-minus an order of magnitude).

What’s that? Zero evidence? Of course we can’t know. The future is not kind enough to present evidence to the present. Hmmm—maybe that’s because we’re so mean to the future, frantically robbing its lives of Earth’s bounty and biodiversity.

The basic observation that we can receive no evidence from the future cuts both ways, of course. I have no future evidence that modernity will begin shutting down within a century.

However, we are not completely in the dark, here. We know some things (see my previous post on things about which I can be relatively certain). As obvious illustrations, we can be super-confident that day will follow night in a consistent cycle throughout our lives, that we will each die someday, and that the sun will render Earth uninhabitable on its way to spending its fuel. In a similar fashion, we can lay claim to a host of other near-certainties even without evidence from the future.

Continue reading →

Certainty

Posted on 2024-09-24 by tmurphy

Image by Victoria from Pixabay

I struggle to strike a balance between certainty and circumspection. Our culture has a tendency to favor certainty, while one of my favorite and frequent fall-backs—seldom wrong—is: “we don’t know.” Certainty is often the hobgoblin of decontextualized, rigid, (only) logical thinking: an artificial by-product of incomplete mental models. That said, I feel that I can do more than throw up my hands on every issue. I can be fairly certain that I will never perform a standing jump to the moon or breathe underwater (without apparatus) like I often do in dreams.

Thus, I write this post in full appreciation of the red flag around certainty. Yet, in full consideration, I can indeed identify some elements of reality about which I can be fairly certain—to a reasonable degree. At the very least, these things would appear to be consistent with a robust account of how the world appears to work.

I’ll skip an exhaustive list of certainties, and stick with points that have some bearing on the meta-crisis of modernity. But for illustration that certainty is not misplaced, I think most would agree that we can function under certainty that in the next billion years, say, gravity won’t turn off; the sun will continue to shine; Earth will keep rotating to produce the familiar day/night pattern; if I pound my fist on the table my hand won’t sail through it, etc. We are justified in “taking these to the bank.” The items below are not all as completely iron-clad, but are helpful in forming a basis. I have asked myself for each one: “could I be convinced otherwise?” Generally the answer is “yes, I suppose,” to varying degrees, but some would be a tough pull, requiring solid evidence. Most of the content is a repackaging of points I have expressed before, but I hope in a useful, consolidated form.

So let’s get to it: here are things I am reasonably (functionally) certain about:

Continue reading →

The Big Question

Posted on 2024-09-17 by tmurphy

A short story of fiction by Tom Murphy

Almost any nerd worth their salt has read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, relishing its innovative and unpredictable humor.

So it was with Adam Lundquist and Alex Ford: top-level coworkers at the Institute for the Future of Artificial Intelligence Learning, who—besides being project leaders—were widely regarded as the principal talent behind an exciting new AI platform on the verge of becoming operational.

Because they were fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and because it was not hard to see a parallel between their creation and that of Deep Thought—the supercomputer from the book designed to answer, once and for all, The Big Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything—it was perhaps inevitable that they began playfully referring to each other as Lunkwill and Fook after their analogs in the story. The close alignment to their real names only reinforced for them a sense of destiny. Ford even toyed with legally changing her name to Fook, but dropped it in light of the headaches such a move would bring to her life. Plus, it would only be epic if Lundquist changed his name as well, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Nerds gotta nerd. But silliness aside, what these two and their team created was indeed extraordinary. Inspired by insights from neuroscience, and having acquired an industry-shattering awareness of the different configurations of left and right hemispheres in animal brains, they managed to break free of traditional architectures that strictly focused on algorithmic, exact, logical methods characteristic of all previous efforts in computing—which had only doubled-, tripled- and millioned-down on left-hemisphere cognitive habits. Such strategies were fine in narrow domains like chess and language construction, where a finite space of rules and limited contextual complexity allowed complete mastery and tidy solutions to problems. But these approaches were dead-ends in terms of tackling the really thorny, more open-ended problems pertinent to human life on Earth.

In this new effort, what was truly remarkable and inspired was the admission by the designers that they themselves had no real mastery over cognition and deep thinking. Therefore, they fashioned a machine that could design elements of its own architecture, engaging in a process similar to the one employed by evolution in building our own brain machines. It might seem rude or pejorative to slap the “machine” label on our amazing brains, but that’s only because the artificial, technological machines we have built tend to be pathetically simple compared to what evolution can produce after billions of years of proven functionality and honing. Yet, our brains and bodies—and microbes for that matter—are still physical machines in a strict sense, just far too complex for us to comprehend or design—putting our puny and fragile non-living machines to shame (not a one will last millions of years like a species can).

* * *

Continue reading →

MM #18: What Can I Do?

Posted on 2024-08-29 by tmurphy

This is the final installment in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the part where people say: “yeah, but what can I do?” I hope that I can offer solid suggestions that are more satisfying than frustrating. But I’m just winging it, here. Shutting down modernity is not something any of us have experience doing, so we’ll all have to wing it.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

Continue reading →

MM #17: Being Human

Posted on 2024-08-27 by tmurphy

This is the seventeenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Here, I attempt to paint a picture of how we might think of ourselves as humans on this planet, as integral members of the community of life. If we’re good, evolution might keep us for a while—along with lots of friends currently in deep trouble.

Continue reading →