Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Let me tie two threads together that I've made recently regarding cognitive diversity and hypermedia.

I want to introduce an idea to you from the semiotic theory of CS Peirce: the "finious" cause.

I think the best way to introduce this is to ask you to think about convergence and divergence. The Big Bang suggests that we live in a (at least partially) astronomical reality. Natural suggestion seems to have a mix of divergent and convergent evolution (see wings for example)...

We are wandering into a wilderness of mirrors erected by a blind LLM and funded by an advertising algorithm.

Both Qan*n and AI porn are the type of hypermedia that will increasingly define public and private lives in the developed world.
As sarsaparilla and pool halls compare to crack and heroin, so too do these hypermedia compare to the hypermedia of the future.
More and more hours of our conscious attention will be consumed by spectacular visions that give us both our reasons to live as well as the secret shames that haunt the subconscious.

(And now we wait for me to get nerdsniped by the millions of people more knowledgeable than me about Egypt, Athens, Plato, archaeology...)

Per my understanding, the Phoenicians kept pataikos lashed to the front of their triremes.

So, and I'm just spitballing here, what if Plato heard about "Patai" from Herodotus (or people informed by H), he heard about "Pataikos" as associated with the Phoenicians and their legendary expeditions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and what if Plato just decided to make an association between the two?

To be plain, I'm suggesting that Plato made Atlantis by remixing Memphis and Phoenicians.

The thing I really want to highlight here is Ptah, a creator-god and craftsman-god worshipped at Memphis. I think this strongly parallels the emphasis on industry and metallurgy that Plato describes in Atlantis.

Now a funny little thing about Ptah is that the workers at Memphis apparently wore lil' eggs as protective totems, & Herodotus names these "pataikos" after the statue of Ptah at Memphis.

You know who else used these??? THE PHONECIANS.

With Herodotus, we have an orator who was in the right place at the right time (the Olympics), talking about such things as the history of Memphis.

It is at Memphis, in Herodotus' Histories, that we get to a lot of the characterizations of Atlantis that a lot of us know: that it was ancient; it was a city of monuments built in devotion to a god of craft (Ptah in H; Hephaestus in Plato), it was destroyed by flooding (or nearly... the dams of Memphis are part of H's account).

So with that out of the way, I want to say that one of the things that really cooks my noodle is the Egyptian frame narrative in Timaeus. Without much justification, this frame narrative is really intrusive and distracting. There's a lot of layers of re-narration and a lot of text that expresses the Egyptians lording over the Athenians, both of which are uncharacteristic for Plato's dialogues.

To cut to the chase, I think that this is obfuscation about Plato's real source, Herodotus.

OK here's some pointless ramblings about Plato's sources for the Atlantis myth.

To be clear from the outset, I think Atlantis is very obviously a myth that is very obviously supposed to suggest something like a critique of Athens' political economy in the period after the Battle of Marathon.

With that aside, I think it's also obvious that Plato didn't invent the idea from whole-cloth, but acted much like a SF author and remixed and hyperbolized characteristics of his surrounding world.

8. Other ethical and social imperatives are basically a boring-ass defense of pluralist Deweyite Creative Democracy and related projects that orbit that overall goal.

6. The gatekeeping of who/what has conscious experience is not terribly interesting or generative.

7. The "infinite game" instead suggests that we should focus on forms of play that are going to help us integrate and benefit from the novelty and surprise generated from atypical symbol-users (including AI). Let's see what they have to offer to others, meaning in this case what others can integrate and develop further.

4. There are lots of atypical brains that have managed to put experience together in ways that are very much unlike Daniel Dennett's or my own.

5. Even if there were a strong qualitative basis for asserting neurotypical norms (IE if we could strongly say that some brain-types are "better"), it still would probably be bad in policy. Instead, we should probably treat neurodiversity as one of the basic protected types in ethical and epistemic pluralism, if not more basic than EG race or religion.

3a. A lot of introspective techniques and spiritual technologies (relaxation, trance, etc.) have the function of downregulating the "triune brain" from PFC domination to one of the other areas. This is really useful for meaning if one can integrate some of the "memories" outside of the PFC. I think this is basically Gendlin.
3b. A handful of other techniques upregulate things back up to the PFC. This can be useful for all the cerebral, intellectual tasks that define modernity.

I don't know enough about what's going on in cogsci to evaluate the novelty of this claim, but my current thinking about un/conscious dynamics is something like this:

1. Dennett's basic premise of the "multiple drafts" model of conscious is correct, but the PFC is really privileged.

2.a. There are lots of phenomenal events that don't get integrated into the narrative stream of consciousness
2b. A lot of these phenomenal events are "remembered" (or cached?) in faculties outside of the PFC.

My literal advice to anyone is to find the biggest, densest, most scholarly book that interests you and read it cover-to-cover. Take as much time as you could possibly need. Get to know it intimately, so much that you can explain the logic of its internal structure, terminological choices, etc. Then try to identify the book that that book's author read, or argued against, and repeat. Take as much time as you need. Your quality of intellectual life will skyrocket.

Put me down as tremendously cynical about "smart drugs." Whatever chemical cycles you might overclock have little to do with intelligence, and for that matter intelligence itself is a poorly defined abstraction. All the phenomenon has shown is that a lot of people understand their own minds as things that draw their power from outside.

What you want is critical thinking and technically flawless symbol-use. What you need is to spend 10 years reading really smart books by yourself.

The thing about networks of exchange is that they're financially based on trader-logic, and trader-logic is always pretty instrumental. The trader is allowed to move out of the home culture and between other cultures not because home culture has realized the universal decency of all people and cultures (these are the kinds of pronouncements of a priestly discourse), BUT because the trader comes home with shiny novelties.

There's something I'd describe as a widespread tech-poptimist belief that if we just make all the right rules for the right exchanges, then we will cause all wrongthink to evaporate and the wrongthinkers will simply collapse out of a combination of isolation & embarrassment about their terminal wrongness.

This is a very strange use for networks of exchange, in my judgement. & while I do believe that discourse communities promote norms, I'm becoming skeptical about using networks to inject norms

I dumped Sheldon Kopp's "Laundry List" of existential slogans into a counselor chat. Would highly recommend.

Link to list: <https://thetcj.org/in-residence-articles/eschatological-laundry-list>