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A Sketch
2017-11-13 19:28
I joined SolSeed just over 5 years ago. They do a service every Saturday over Skype and I love that. Practice every week, every day if possible, is crucial to good religion. By practicing every day, you can train your subconscious (or elephant to use Jonathan Haidt's analogy) to make moral choices in accordance with your values. It is how you become a person you want to be.
One of the practices of SolSeed is that we take turns leading service. The service leader has to choose a reading and lead the opening ceremony and invite people to share. It isn't a complicated job. The reading can be from anywhere. It can be from science fiction, non-fiction, a sacred text, poetry, or something that the service leader wrote themselves. I usually take that last option.
It began shortly after I joined SolSeed. I went to see the film SkyFall. I hated it. It made me (without my even noticing it) cheer for violence, celebrate revenge and encouraged me to be cavalier about the lives of people. I explain it in more detail on the SolSeed wiki (wiki.solseed.org/Suspension_of_Skyfall) I would have posted this there too but the site is currently down for maintenance.
Anyway, in that piece, I decided that if Hollywood could get me to suspend disbelief in order to internalize stories which taught cynicism and violence, then I could fight back by writing stories that taught love for Life, care for the biological, and respect for science. I could write powerful stories even if their power required me to suspend disbelief. So I began to write stories about Gaia and you and your elephant. Writing in the second person, the protagonist always described as you, gives the reader the feeling that Gaia is speaking to them. Gaia is the personification of all Life on Earth or of the Living Aspect of the Earth. She is you and me and the trees and the corals and nematodes and lions and mushrooms all taken together as one superorganism. She represents metaphorically the whole biosphere. She isn't a person but, in the sense that she is a name for all existing Life and given that all existing Life exists, she exists. Still she is only a personification.
Since then, I have written dozens of readings which begin with the words, "Imagine with me..." because it is important to me that it be clear that I am asking you to imagine not to believe. Only to suspend disbelief. Just recently, I decided to try my hand at illustrating my stories. Maybe I will try to publish a book. I just finished my first sketch. It isn't good enough yet. I will try again (and maybe again and again) but learning is an upward spiral and we will see how far I can get in terms of becoming an adequate artist.
So here is my first sketch (for the two first words of 'Gaia Calls Us to Parlay (wiki.solseed.org/Gaia_Calls_Us_To_Parlay):
What Lies Between
2012-06-17 22:10
An upward spiral is a feedback loop by which life is given ever more possibilities. A downward spiral is also a feedback loop but in this case life is given ever fewer possibilities. How do we tell them apart? In most real systems each event has more than one effect and there are many events happing at the same time.
Recently I visited the fourth chute on the Bonnechere River. I sat on a rock near the top of the chute in the shade of an overhanging tree and watched the river with my dog. The river was cutting a sharp gorge through the limestone back toward calm waters above the chute. Just above the top of the gorge a gentle ridge of limestone crossed the river and controlled the river level up stream.
If the river succeeded in cutting the gorge back to the ridge it would breach the ridge. All of the river’s water would be concentrated in the gorge as the water level above the gorge fell. Large areas above the ridge would be suddenly dry, cattail marshes would dry up, the river would become narrower, with less room for waterfowl and playing children; waterfront owners would lose land value.
I pointed this out to my son but he countered that succession would begin. Cattail marshes would form where now there are shallows. Forests would grow where now there are marshes. Life finds more possibilities in marshes than shallow water and more possibilities in forests than marshes. Perhaps this was an upward spiral not a downward one.
Still I considered the situation and thought that perhaps a wall of stone curving from the right bank round the gorge might preserve the calm pond upstream.
Then we walked down the chute and came upon a place where tiny but deep gullies were cut into the stone. Above the gullies there were shallow depressions in the stone, stone wet with algae growing in them, some dry with mats of dead algae.
Looking at this situation I was reminded of why we had come here, to tour the Bonnechere caves, caves cut deep underground by acidic ground water passing through limestone. It occurred to me that rotting organic matter, such as dead algae mats that were rewetted, release acid. It seemed likely that the shallow depressions were intermittently wet causing algae to grow, die and rot. The small amount of water in the depression with a huge amount of rotting algae became significantly more acid than the river water. IN a light rain, the acid water would begin to flow out and down the gullies before it was much diluted and etch them deeply.
What if the stone wall I had imagined at the top of the chute were built? Behind it, above the gorge would intermittent shallow pools form? Would they grow algae which would die and rot acidifying the pools? Could those pools then run down the gorge etching it more quickly than the torrent of neutral water had?
It seems that gaging upward and downward spirals and how to shape them is not so easy. The problem is that life creates possibilities. In an upward spiral some of the possibilities for life that we create may be themselves, downward spirals. As we cultivate empathy and embrace passion for gorge healing, we must also seek wisdom. WE will make mistakes. We will be wise if we learn from our mistakes. The first upward spiral we must work on is the upward spiral of wisdom in our own minds.
Religious Method
2012-04-27 20:53
A bit of philosophy inserted into a religious site
What if we look at religion like someone in the 17th or 18th century looked at science. From the perspective of 1700 AD, imagine the perception of science. In 1637, Descartes published Discourse on the Method which described something like modern scientific method. Advances in technology and in understanding the universe have been made. In astronomy, Copernicus' heliocentrism has been established. In physics, Newton’s laws of motions have been written. In chemistry, Boyle's law has been proposed. In biology, microscopes had opened up to science the description of cells. In Palaeontology, Steno had published a theory of fossilization. Compared to the science of just a few centuries before science, was racing ahead with new ideas, testing them and establishing factual truth like never before. A few centuries before, geocentricism was accepted based on authority, Ancient philosophers pronouncements on physics were accepted without question, alchemists had wasted thousands of person years trying to turn lead into gold, geese were believed to have arisen from barnacles largely so that priests could eat goose on Fridays without braking the prohibition on eating meat on Friday, religious texts were accepted as authoritative descriptions of prehistory. Science had been done badly for millennia but a method that worked had been found and was producing results.
What could religion look like, if we accept that it has been done badly for millennia and if we tried to find a method that works? Why has this not been done? It has not been done because religion more than science was hierarchical, supported by the elites and meme based. Fearing that allowing science to contradict scripture could reduce their power over their flocks, priests have long supressed science. They have been vulnerable because of the memetic nature of religions. Memes are ideas that reproduce and transmit through minds and cultures. They act like genes, selected not based on their truth but on their capability of replicating by copying themselves from mind to mind. They copy themselves by convincing the minds into which they are inserted to work to insert them into other minds. Some of the best traits for memetic success have been attached claims that failure to believe will be punished, or failure to convert others will result in punishment. If science contradicts scripture and scripture says that it must be believed or the non-believer will be punished, then doubt about the whole of scripture is introduced. So the memetic nature of scripture encourages believers to ignore science and the elite priesthood is motivated to encourage believers to ignore science. But imagine the reaction of the priesthood and believers to a religious method.
Any religious method designed to improve the way we do religion, will necessarily involve a questioning of existing religions. But could the future of religion be as much of an improvement over its past as 18th century science was over 14th century science? I believe it could be. We are at a point in history when the questioning of existing religions has been made possible by cosmopolitanism, separation of church and state, democracy and religious freedom. In order to create a religious method we must first understand the point of religion as a human endeavour. Science is about the determination of truth. Philosophy is about the analysis of human endeavour in order to understand and create universal or very general rules about how endeavours such as science, art and religion are done. Philosophy established the scientific method for science. Can philosophy establish a religious method for religion? Cynthia Tolman defines religion as an attempt to find meaning in the world, and to explain humanity's place in it and relationship to it and to any posited divine entity or entities. The problem with this definition is the word 'explain'. To explain is to 'make something comprehensible' and to comprehend is to 'understand' and to understand is to 'know' and to 'know' is to 'be certain of the truth of'. But truth is the business of science. Science and religion should not overlap. In a free society, everyone should be able to do both science and religion so what is the point of having two methods for determining the truth to which everyone has access. The scientific method is already established as an exceptionally good method for determining the truth. Let science explain humanity's place in the world and its relationship with the world and any deities that science establishes as existing. Instead let us focus religious method on finding meaning and purpose for humanity. There are six meanings of the word meaning according to The Collins English Dictionary but let us restrict religion to finding the meaning in the world in only part of the 3rd of Collins' meanings of meaning: 'the symbolic value.' So to restate, let us limit religious method to finding the symbolic value of life and the purpose of humanity.
But purpose and symbolic value are things that are chosen, not discovered. If everyone chose the same value for things, there would be no trade. I am willing to pay five dollars for a bag of milk because I value a bag of milk more than 5 dollars but a shop keep is only willing to sell me a bag of milk for five dollars because he values five dollars more than a bag of milk. We each choose to value the five dollar bill and the bag of milk differently. Likewise, purpose is something that is chosen. You may decide on the goal of completing a marathon this year while I may decide on the goal to meditate every day. Again we each choose these purposes for our time and effort. This makes religion very distinct from science. Religion is about making choices while science is about discovering truth. When we do science we cannot choose the outcome. The universe doesn't care if Einstein wishes that there be no random elements in laws of physics; quantum happens anyway. When we do religion, once we have freed ourselves from elite priesthoods, we are free to choose the outcome; that is the point of religion. It is about choosing our values and our purpose and trying to build them into a whole which is, itself, symbolically valuable.
But religion isn't about price fixing. How much we value a bag of milk is not a religious question. Religion is about the big value questions. Even choosing which value questions a religion answers should be a step in the method; the method can't set the questions because to set the questions is to make a value choice as to which questions are important. Religious method must not belong to a particular religion but must instead be a way of developing a religion that fits a person or a culture, or of testing a religion to see if it fits a person or if it is a valid religion. By valid I don't mean acceptable to a priesthood but instead a valid religion is a religion which fits the definition of religion rather than a mishmash of science, philosophy and art. Just as science may not ask unfalsifiable questions or place values on the outcomes of its experiments, religion must have restrictions placed on it. The restrictions placed on science are what have made scientific method successful as much as the proscribed steps that the method imposes. Likewise religion needs to be restricted from trying to do things that are not valid under a formal religious method.
A valid religion will be one that restricts itself to choosing values and purposes and does not make statements of fact unsupported by science. A valid religion must be adaptable so that when science changes its mind about facts that are important to the religion's purposes and values, it must be ready to adapt those purposes and values. If a religion says that traveling to Quasars is a purpose that humanity could choose, and science determines that quasars are not places that can be travelled to then that religion must be ready to choose a new purpose for humanity. Art is an attempt to evoke emotional responses to ideas, concepts, images and objects. A valid religion will not in its core statements try to evoke emotional responses to its values and purposes although its practitioners will in a free society also be free to practice art just as they may practice science. Outside its core statements, a religion may use art (for instance, poetry) to help its practitioners use their emotions to focus on their purpose and values but its core statements must clearly state its purposes and values in everyday language so that its prospective practitioners can make clear judgements about its validity and attractiveness. Philosophy organizes the other major fields of human endeavour and develops logical, consistent and useful methods for them. Religion must not try to tell us how to do philosophy, art or science. It is the job of philosophy to tell us how to do religion, art and science, and religions must not try to do the job of philosophy.
Note that the example quasar-based religion in the previous paragraph did not try to state that traveling to quasars is the purpose of humanity. It stated that traveling to Quasars is a purpose that humanity could choose. Because religion is about making choices, a valid religion will not state that it has discovered the purpose of humanity but instead will offer a choice of a consistent package of purpose and values to humanity. Because valid religions will not be based on the authority of an unquestionable priesthood-hierarchy, valid religions will not state that humanity must choose its package of purpose and values, but instead will simply offer it to humanity. If a religion has a priesthood, the purpose of the priesthood is to try to develop the package of values and purpose in such a way that it is attractive to humanity and is consistent and valid in terms of religious method.
The purpose of this essay is not to fully develop the religious method. I think that the above statements about what a valid religion cannot do are probably the most important parts of the religious method. As religious method is accepted and practitioners work with it, I hope they will develop it as much as they develop their religions. After all in a free society, a practitioner of a religion must be free to practice philosophy as much as religion, science or art. All that is important, is that they are clear about when they are practicing religion and when they are practicing philosophy. When they describe their religion they must not include, as part of the religion, philosophical statements just as when they describe their philosophical thinking they must not include, as part of the philosophical treatise, religious statements.
The basic steps of the religious method will be to 1) determine important values, 2) determine purposes that fit those values, 3) invent rituals that help practitioners focus on the values and purposes of the religion. As with science, the steps will often be done out of order and then practitioners will have to go back and redo the steps in order. The important thing will be to build a logical argument for the importance of a set of values, the fitness of a set of purposes to those values and the usefulness of a set of rituals to believers in the values and purposes.
While few, if any, of the religions of the world are valid, it is my hope that practitioners of those religions will apply religious method to their religions, extracting the important values, choosing purposes that fit those values and selecting and adapting rituals to help them focus of the values they extract and the purposes they choose. Much of most of the major religions will have to be thrown out to achieve this. Much of what is left will be turned into art that supports the practitioners in ritual. There are those who are already doing it; Greta Vosper and Michael Dowd are examples. On the other hand, those who continue to say that their religion is the only possible valid one, such as new atheists, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic militants, are not by that very fact, practicing valid religion. We must teach every child in school, to practice religious method at least to the degree that they can critically analyse religious claims for validity.
The Parable of the Talents and Freeman Dyson's Three Levels of Mind
2012-04-08 15:34 EDST
I just read the Parables of the Sower and the Talents by Octavia Butler and before that I read four of Freeman Dyson's books, Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions, Imagined Worlds and From Eros to Gaia. In one of Freeman Dyson's books (I can't recall which one) he describes his idea that there are three levels of mind in the universe: the individual, the planetary and the universal. We each carry individual minds and we understand those reasonably well from personal experience. Gaia, if it exists, would be an example of a planetary mind and big 'G' God, creator of the universe would be the example of the universal mind. To me these are the three places God has left to hide from science.
God used to be able to hide at the bottom of the sea, at the tops of mountains, above the clouds, and in the wind. But once science built submarines for exploring the bottom of the sea, oxygen bottles for climbing to the tops of mountains, airliners for flying over clouds and wind tunnels for experimenting on wind these places were exposed to the 'Candle in the Dark' that is Science (I recently read The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan) and God was evicted from these places.
Although we understand the individual mind reasonably well because of our personal experience, there is still a mystery about how the functioning of our brain leads to the personal experience of mind. This mystery creates a gap in scientific knowledge into which some have inserted God in the form of the immortal soul. At the planetary or, perhaps I should say, biospheric level, there is the sheer quantity of interactions between individual organisms; the complexity of these interactions leads to mysteries such as the mystery of the 100 monkeys or the mystery of ocean salinity. Are there hidden mechanisms in the interactions of ecosystems that pass more information around the system than we can understand? Again a gap is created and again God is inserted and this time her name is Gaia. Finally there are limits to how far our senses can reach, even enhanced by the most advanced scientific gadgetry such as space telescopes, electron microscopes, and hadron colliders. Beyond the sensory limits of the very large, the very small and the very highly energetic there must exist that which we cannot see. A third gap is created and God is once again inserted and the name this time is Creator.
Hawking has postulated that the universe might have no beginning; he says that, essentially, if you were to try to travel backwards in time through the big bang, time and space would become one at the moment of the big bang, your momentum backwards in time, if such a concept is even sensible, would become momentum across space and then forward in time again; he says that time itself came into being at the big bang and there is no such thing as 'before the big bang'. If that was the case, then there is no room for a Creator in the far past or the very distant. He may be right. Past experience has shown that each gap we have filled with god, once it has had the light of science shone into it, has been found to be empty. This has been the case, whether the light came in the form a submarine spotlight, an airliner's radar or mountaineer's head lamp.
Shaper Olamina was raised a Baptist and Baptists believe in the Creator. She created EarthSeed as a religion and for her, to be a religion, it had to talk about God, the Creator. So she hid God in the laws of physics; God is change. Change is governed by the laws of physics and change is the way the laws of physics affect our lives. There is little point in worshipping or praying to the laws of physics. This is the point of view of a great number of deists and therefore, this seems to make EarthSeed a form of Deism.
But there is another side to EarthSeed; EarthSeed verse is peppered with lines about 'serving life', and fulfilling the purpose of the body of all life. The Destiny of EarthSeed is take root among the stars. Shaper Olamina's upbringing taught her that religious life is about serving God and God's higher purpose. She continues that but has turned from the third God, Creator to the second god, Gaia. But in a world dominated by Christianity where the persecution of non-Christians was rife, murderous and without mercy, it was dangerous to talk about worshipping Gaia or anything like her. So she kept God as the third God and only talked about serving the body of all life, never giving the body of all life a god-name, other than EarthSeed which also conveniently was the name of the religion. She didn't worship EarthSeed, her people were EarthSeed and EarthSeed's members were expected to serve EarthSeed. This would make sense to any corporation, especially during the Pox when hierarchy was becoming stronger within organizations and was greatly desired by those unprotected by organizations. Perhaps the third concept of God, the Creator, was so ingrained in her that she couldn't define the word, God, in any other way.
As a Biospheric Communionist, I embrace Gaia. I have the privilege of living in a world where diversity of religion is accepted so I can do so without fear. Do I believe Gaia has hidden mechanisms that do things we don't understand? Given her complexity, I think this is almost inevitable. Does this make Gaia a personal God? No. At least it does not make her personal in the sense that she is someone I can pray to and ever hope for an answer. If she exists as a mind in any sense akin to my mind then she will think thoughts on a time scale that will make it impossible for me to hold a conversation with her. If she speaks, it will not be in any human language. But she feeds me every day and I can try to guess her purpose and serve it. If she does not exist as a mind, she will continue to feed me and provide me with air to breath. If she does not exist as a mind, she can still have a purpose and I can still try to guess it and serve it. Do I worship her? If worship means seek out her presence and feel awe at the experience of her, then yes. It is what every hiker does when they stop and look at wonder at a mountain lake or a majestic mammal.
So Biospheric Communionism says, either God, the Creator, does not exist, or is irrelevant to us, and it also says that Gaia exists, as a mind or not, and we can choose to serve her in order to find purpose in our lives. EarthSeed says, God is Change, don't waste your time worshiping it, and, instead, serve the grand purpose of the Body of all life. They are the same thing even though the language seems to be opposite. This is why I can be a member of SolSeed and Biospheric Communion at the same time. These two nascent religions each have much to offer. SolSeed contributes its beautiful verses adapted from Butler and its established community of practice, however small. Biospheric Communion contributes language that is more in line with my instinctive understandings of the words, God and worship, as a born and bred atheist. Each nascent religion offers different emphasis; SolSeed emphasizes humans bringing life to exoplanets, creating beautiful green worlds in which Earth life can live without much change. Biospheric Communion emphasizes humans sending life to live and spread itself among the trillions of minor planets in the solar system and to let it learn to spread among the stars itself with the ultimate goal of meeting other biospheres coming the other way and so increasing their diversity together. The two are not mutually exclusive and as we grow we will discuss and learn and fuse and make a single religion greater than the sum of its parts just as two alien biospheres may someday form a single super-biosphere that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Feeling Less Alone
2012-03-25 15:46 EDST
I was listening to tapestry today and they were interviewing a woman who is both a comedian and a minister. She said that the two professions have a common goal: to make people feel less alone. I thought that was interesting in that for the last two weeks I have been participating services via Skype with Brandon CS Sanders of Solseed.org and I am certainly feeling 'less alone' than I was before I found SolSeed. On the SolSeed site there are several mentions of 'a Religion-Shaped hole' in peoples lives. I think that is where the feeling of being 'less alone' comes from. Lets suppose that everyone has a religion-shaped hole in their minds. Lets suppose that these holes evolved over millions of years. Lets suppose that over millions of years our tribes had religions because religions held each tribe together. Anything that creates solidarity at the tribe level is adaptive at the tribe level. Tribes do better when their members are loyal to them. Once a tribe uses a religion to create that loyalty, then it also will use coertion to keep everyone within the tribe believing the religion. It will punish those that question dogma by punishing them as heretics. So, from the member's of the tribe's perspective, it was adaptive to accept the religious teachings of the tribe and thus avoid the coertion and punishment. This would create the religion-shaped hole in our minds: a hole waiting to be filled by what ever religion our tribe teaches. It seems only logical that filling that hole will make us feel less alone. Afterall, for millions of years, the goal of filling the hole would have been maintaining membership in our tribe.
I have met people who criticize religion as being maladaptive now. When we lived in world when travelling across the region controlled by your tribe would be an extravagance beyond imagining, religion's tendencies to create intollerance of other tribes was not a problem. But in a world when people freely mix and travel all the way around the world and when we have weapons capable of killing the biosphere itself, intollerance of other tribes is unacceptable and anything that creates such intollerance must be discouraged. But is denying our nature adaptive? Living with an empty hole in our minds can't be good for us. I believe that religion can be adapted; ecumenicalism is the begining of that adaptation. We can fill the hole with better versions of our religions and better religions which do not create intollerance but instead build bridges between peoples.
As to comedy making people feel less alone. This makes sense also. Watching a comedy alone on television does not induce laughter as easily as watching it with friends. Going to a comedy club alone is ineffective. Laughter is something that is shared. It undoubtedly fulfills the same adaptive need to keep the band together that relgion fulfills at the tribe level. It was interesting that the comedian found that mentioning that she was a minister was an instead downer for her comedy club audiences. She attributed it to the seriousness of organized religion but perhaps it was a threat to the bands who had gathered to listen to her. The bands that come to a comedy club are not coming together as a tribe the way that a parish is when it goes to church. There is no sharing of a common history or future by the various bands each sitting at their own table around the club. In fact there is no commonality between the bands at all. Each will leave at the end of the night with barely a word spoken between their members and those of other bands. To have a minister at the front of the club, is to have the leader of another tribe leading the group. Instantly the bands will mentally pull back for fear of being coopted into the wrong tribe. If the audience was there as individuals, it might not be such a drastic downer. But they are there as individual bands of differing tribes. For each individual audience member, the presence of other members of their tribe makes it all the more important that they show no alligience to this alien tribal leader who has presented herself at the front of the club. The seriousness of religion comes from the coertion that religion uses on its members to accept dogma. The coertion doesn't just come from the priesthood but also your peers within the religion. Will the spread of ecumenicalism change this? I hope so. Not because I am concerned for ministers who want to also be comedians but because I hope that ecumenicalism will lead to a change in human attitudes and an Earth that is safer for the biosphere to live on.
Kayaking on the First Day of Spring Part II
2012/03/21 20:01
Yesterday while kayaking I had an interesting experience. I was paddling up stream and I stopped paddling and just let myself glide. Eventually, of course, the kayak's velocity relative to the water slowed until while I was still heading up stream relative to the water, I was actually moving downstream relative to the shore. Looking toward the shore and seeing the parallax of the branches change, my brain interpreted the moment when my direction reversed as the beginning of a free-fall and I felt a brief moment of vertigo. Looking down at the nose of the kayak so that my vision was filled with water and my bow wake, at first my brain tried to tell me I was moving backward and that I was dropping back out of my bow wake. But my brain knows that wakes don't work that way and so suddenly it corrected my mental frame of reference and told me I was moving forward; again I got the moment of vertigo. I was able to repeat this several times, each time the effect got weaker as my velocity diminished. Then I raised my paddle off the gunnels and gave myself a burst of speed and repeated the whole experience again.
It was interesting because it felt like I was experiencing relativity spiritually. Of course, it was just simple Newtonian relativity and the vertigo was totally explicable based on associations between reversing direction without effort and falling and between sudden changes in velocity and falling. Still spirituality is all about metaphor and psychological experience so to call the experience spiritual I think is totally reasonable. I am definitely going to repeat the experience.
Kayaking on the First Day of Spring
2012/03/20 15:03
I just went kayaking on the Rideau River on March 20th! That shouldn't be possible, especially in a T-shirt and shorts. The record high for March in Ottawa as per the Weather Network is 25.6 C set in 1945 and the average high is 2.1 C. But don't bother looking that up on the Weather Network, unless you do it today, because the high for the next two days is predicted to be 27 C so the record is about to be erased. I know that individual weather events don't have that great an effect on global climate but still, don't tell me there is any doubt that global warming is occurant.
The Noble Parasites
2009/09/22 22:03
In ‘What is Biospheric Communion’ I mention parasites while lauding the opportunities created by interbiospheric collisions as if parasites are a good thing. I explain why parasites are gospel in my new article: 'The Nobel Parasites’
Open Letter to Alex Bunker
2009-09-18 20:32
Hello Alex,
You posted to the Biospheric Communion Group on Facebook that you thought that Dialectical Materialism is a superset Biospheric Communion.
I did some quick reading on dialectical materialism before reponding to you this morning and found that every discussion I found on the net about it quickly began using class strugle as examples. I read for a good 10 minutes before coming to the conclusion that in most people's minds dialectical materialism is what you are calling historical materialism.
This evening I have done extensive reading on the subject (almost half an hour) and I am still getting the same conclusion. Dictionary.com says, "The Marxian interpretation of reality that views matter as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements." I also read that Lenin defined matter broadly as 'that which has objective reality'. So you could evolve the above into the "Leninistic interpretation of reality that views that which has an objective reality as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements"
It begins to sound a lot like Arthur Dent's interpretation of the Captain's poetry. Still forging on; I would say that the whole definition breaks down into a series of assumptions, "Change doesn't come from the metaphysical." (Where metaphysical is defined as that which does not have an objective reality) and "All events, ideas and movements have inherent contradictions or at least (given what I have read on Marxist interpretations of the word contradictions) internal tentions."
I can live with both of those assumptions more or less but I hardly see them as a superset of my thought. A superset, in mathematics, contains all of the elements of its subsets. I don't think that Dialectical Materialism contains all of the elements of Biospheric Communion. Did Marx, Engels or Lenin ever say, "Lets release our biosphere into space by using genetic engineering and nanotechnology to develop space-borne life forms."? I don't think so. That sentence or the concept it embodies is an element of Biospheric Communion not contained in Dialectic Materialism and therefore Dialectic Materialism is not a superset of Biospheric Communion.
I could live with the statement, "the assumptions of Dialectic Materialism are likely roots to the concepts of Biospheric Communion". What do you think?
Collaborative Video Project
2009/09/10 21:33
I've started a collaborative video project on the facebook group, Biospheric Communion. Join up and you can contribute clips which I will combine to make a promotional video for this site!
Biospheres Combining
2009/09/09 21:16
In ‘What is Biospheric Communion’ I ask you to imagine a biospheres combining. Does your imagination need some help with that? Read my new article: 'Biospheres Combining’
Biospheric Imperialists
2009/09/08 21:29
In ‘What is Biospheric Communion’ I denegrate the Biospheric Imperialists, explaining the difference between the superior vision of the Biospheric Communionists and the lesser vision of the Biospheric Imperilists. Never heard of Biospheric Imperialists? Find out who these despicable people are in my new article, Biospheric Imperialists.
Biospheres trying to expand
2009/09/07 21:08
In ‘What is Biospheric Communion’ I ask you to imagine biospheres trying to expand. You might respond that biospheres don't try to do anything because they do not have a single mind but instead are made up of innumerable creatures many of which have minds and many of which do not. Read my new article about net thought: Biospheres Trying to Expand
A Billion Other Biospheres
2009/09/05 22:52
In ‘What is Biospheric Communion’, I ask you to imagine a billion biospheres. This may seem extravagant but read my new article about the extravagance of worlds in the universe: A Billion Other Biospheres
Storyboarding the Home Page
2009/09/01 08:06
I've decided to create a video from my home page. The imagery in the text on my home page is all wildlife and astronomy and those are two image themes with which terms like breath taking and awe-inspiring and deeply beautiful are associated. The problem I face is getting around intellectual property rights. The answer I came up with is co-operative video making. Basically, I will storyboard the video over the next few days and then I will solicit video clip contributions via the web. I live hundreds of kilometres from the sea. I can't just run out and shoot a few-second clip of otters playing in a kelp bed. But somewhere out there, there is someone who can, and who then might be willing to donate it to the cause.
I can then fit the video together, add a voice over and maybe some graphics and, presto, we will have a perfect promotional video for Biospheric Communionism!
What we need.
2009/08/31 20:56
Biospheric Communionism as a movement needs 2 things:
A life form capable of surviving on the surface of a small trans-Neptunian object, and
The means to transport such a life form to the surface of a trans-Neptunian object.
In order to achieve these two goals we need a lot more:
Laboratories, with biochemists and nano-technologists using cutting edge technology to develop the life form,
Money with which to hire a launch vehicle, and
Popular support, so that the launch is not stopped by a public with a different understanding of our place in the universe.
The laboratory can be created with money, the scientists can be hired with money, the launch vehicle can be bought with money but the Popular Support requires people. People who support an idea will give money to see it to fruition and lobby their government to give more but money will not buy people. To be certain, an advertising campaign could attract attention using only money, but before you can attract people to an idea you need a clear enunciation of it. A presentation of the idea that is attractive, awe-inspiring, emotionally engaging and rational.
So my job is to create such a presentation...
Thinking Won't Get Us There
2009/08/28 22:46
I have been doing a log of thinking about Biospheric Communion. I have re-edited the concept in my mind many times. I have conceived of many ways forward and many philosophical foundations for the movement. Refined the ideas and tightened the logic. But I haven't acted.
Thought won't give the Biosphere the rocket engines it needs to move into space. It won't develop a species that can live on an Trans Neptunian Object no matter how hard I concentrate my mind. I need to turn thought into action. I need to map a way forward to a first lab or funding body or fund raiser. What is the first step? That is the question that needs to be answered. This will require some thought...