RendHeaven

I'm not so sure. Everything is so fiercely interconnected. Rot and corruption will ripple through the chain. The "good actors" lose on the game theory battlefield and get weeded out through survival of the fittest. The status quo being abuse and exploitation of the commons means that "islands of coherence and power" just means more for the taking from the especially greedy actors who will be thrilled to see their competition forfeit their slice of the pie. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we just give up. It's moreso just encouragement to keep your expectations in check. I suspect a Sisyphus rolling the boulder uphill esque future for people like you and I. Where we fight for the hell of it as opposed to some delusional sense of heroic duty. Let me know if I'm overlooking something. Save yaself, save ya family, spread the love. Not much else you can do really. Haha we're in for a ride. Time to retreat into my cave and contemplate! no better way to pass time while the plane crashes

Great, we all agree

I agree. I never said it would. There's a part 2 to my explanation above which is often better left unsaid since it's a personal speculation, and a grim one at that... But I predict a majority of us will eat shit down the line - by which I mean, serious loss and suffering and yes, death. Because likely nothing will change, and we have already established that the ship is headed directly towards an iceberg. But all that grim stuff is my own conjecture. Metacrisis framework is very solid as far as diagnosing the problem. I do share their opinion that our system will not change in time. The anti-rivalrous omni-considerate dynamics necessary to escape the metacrisis unscathed requires that the majority of the global population develops SD tier-2 cognition. And if even a handful of powerful actors lag behind in tier-1 cognition, the scheme fails. This simply will not happen. That being said, you're completely right - keeping current systems will end in collapse. So. Put 2 and 2 together and try not to lose your marbles

Yes. The rule of thumb I use for myself is: If it is patently & obviously INFINITY, then doubt is obliterated - drowned out in the suffocating Truth of Omnipresence. You physically cannot doubt something that is Eternally and Unconditionally HERE. Kind of like how you can't inhale air underwater. On the other hand, if we are dealing with anything less than INFINITY, then doubt is always active. Any finite object of contemplation is fallible and has alternate valid perspectives to consider. Refrain from drawing finalized conclusions regarding finite/relative matters.

A little too flippant for my liking. Metacrisis-awareness is not mindless doomerism, it's a nuanced observation of specific interdependent dynamics. This is not shit you can make up or merely pull out of your ass. Our rate of extincting species is undeniably increasing each year. This has unfathomable ripple effect consequences. Likewise, planetary boundaries are markedly and unambiguously worse each year. Microplastics are found in rainwater all over the globe, including the arctic where there are no humans. New studies strongly correlate microplastics to a plethora of disease risks. By 2050 it is projected that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. AI, which is touted as the deus ex machina for our energy crisis, has been promptly co-opted by big oil companies to accelerate extraction efficiency. Trump&Elon being in office only eggs them on, as regulations get gutted. Geopolitical tensions get worse each year while our growth-oriented monetary system drives up prices and keeps countries and individuals in debt which necessarily threatens social stability. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. You may consider this group-think, but you would be hard-pressed to falsify anything I've said. Are you really willing to argue that our biodiversity loss is a boogeyman myth? or godforbid that it is harmless? Are you really willing to argue that our planet is on a trajectory towards a thriving sustainable future when 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries have been breached (possibly irreversibly)? Are you really willing to argue that a plastic-infested planet with plastic-infested humans is harmless? Are you really willing to argue that AI will save us all when its current applications are doing the exact opposite? Are you really willing to act like Trump&Elon in power are harmless? Are you really willing to claim that our geopolitical landscape is peaceful and stable? Do you really think our monetary system is long term sustainable? None of these are separate issues. There are common drivers (i.e. "generator functions") behind every crisis/issue. The biggest one perhaps is personal survival maximization at the cost of one's surroundings. Every problem I've listed is directly borne of a short-term survival-maximization play by egos. When one player does this, it's not a big deal. When absolutely everyone is doing this, we have an uncontrollable snowball effect. The ship becomes too large to steer; the system devours itself eventually. We'll be fine for several years - yes. Nobody is saying we're gonna die tomorrow. But certainly within our lifetimes, there will be enormous systematic change - for better or for worse is yet to be seen. The point is that our current trajectory is literally unsustainable. This is quite easy to personally determine. Group think is rather unnecessary. We have finite resources on a finite planet but our system demands exponential growth. 1+1=2. Collapse of the current system is inevitable unless we reorient our values and steer the ship together in a new direction. Whether or not we have a livable planet in 100 years is seriously unclear. If anything, to take for granted that "everything will be fine" seems to be the group-think position to me.

A concrete example of this was when I first heard Jacob Collier's Moon River 5 years ago, I struggled to enjoy it. It felt like too much, especially at 3:48 and onwards. I wished he would've just kept it more unembellished because the unconventional musical decisions were just too difficult for me to follow. I remember my gf at the time straight up said she hated it, despite knowing that Jacob is a certified genius. That "genius" label didn't mean anything to her because her ears intuitively rejected what it heard. But in hindsight our judgement was like a child learning algebra deciding that Einstein must be full of shit because we "intuitively" didn't see any potential in the conclusions of his general relativity (of course, without having spent any time mulling over his equations) Now I recognize that this work is a blinding ray of genius that staggers my mind to even attempt to comprehend. The part at 3:48 to the end which I so disliked is now my favorite part. This change in opinion came from my own maturity in musical understanding coupled with a detailed study of the following logic breakdown video. This example is a watered-down microcosm of Human mind interacting with Alien/MIND. When a human finds something aesthetically distasteful, it can be genuine (from above) or ignorant (from below). The difference is tricky to tell apart, since the ignorant judge loves to see himself as genuine. The answer is in lots of study and experience + having the flexibility to pinpoint the beauty in absolutely anything. The latter bulletproofs you against ignorantly declaring something you don't understand as ugly.

Yes! Which goes to show the relativity of hearing "beautiful harmonies" and assuming they are superior, good, or true.

The celebrities/pr0nstars/hostess/bargirls in major cities are all plastic-engineered to look like flawless anime characters. It's super hot and annoying. However it hasn't overtaken the culture completely. Most normal girls are normal. Unlike S.Korea, where the average girl is getting plastic surgery from her parents as a graduation reward. Example above is a S.Korean girl

@Leo Gura Would they like this stuff if they were alone in a cave with nobody to share it with? It's hard to tell. A lot of modern music fanaticism has to do with branding, marketing, group-social-dynamics, loyalty to the artist that goes beyond the content of their actual work, concerts, social media, and a general mesmerization/mass hypnosis that worships "vibes" and "community" over direct experience of sound. Lots of parallels with politics. I also notice that people find great meaning in lyrics that resonate with their current life position. A lot of modern music emphasizes words primarily, with the beat or melody/harmony being more of an afterthought. Being able to sing along with a song is huge for proliferation into the culture, and it's easier to capture hearts as a creator if you can match your words to their mood. That is to say, that once again most people are not listening to music for the direct experience of sound. In this case they listen to solidify their sense of felt meaning (through interpreting the lyrics, or communing with their tribe). I think group-think dynamics explains a great deal of bad taste. I've realized that people don't even listen to music to listen to music. They get obsessed with the auxiliary perks of music rather than the music itself. But you're right, this is not a comprehensive picture. I leave this unanswered in my mind. This is actually a devastatingly complex question which simultaneously cuts to the root of Consciousness as Imagination, but also demands mastery over consensus reality dynamics, and both are infinitely deep. A few thoughts: I believe that all sounds can be interpreted as beautiful to some potential being. In the same way that a housefly will happily roll around in your feces no matter how repulsed you may be as a human, even the shittiest music has its respective appreciator. So objectively "bad" or "ugly" is an uphill battle. Just the fact that bad music is allowed to exist means that it has some redeeming beauty as a figment of Consciousness. But admittedly within the arena of consensus reality, ugly things simply appear ugly, and appealing to God-Consciousness is a cop-out in a way. The big question is: When an aesthetic displeases you as a human, is this merely your bias? Or is it actually an inferior aesthetic in the sense that it contradicts universal principles of beauty? The answer is that both can be true simultaneously. I don't think we will ever escape our biases, but having a bias does not mean our beauty radar is totally useless. I've been fascinated for a while by this idea of human consensus subjectivity. Fully well knowing that beauty is: Absolute: everything is equally beautiful in the eyes of God purely relative: what one considers beautiful hinges on their individual biases there is still a 3rd conception of beauty, a sort of half-relative half-absolute state of beauty. Some things in this realm are just so fucking beautiful that basically every human agrees that it is a work of art, despite their differences and biases. No need to invoke God-consciousness. A really hot woman is maybe the most in-your-face example. If she has unblemished, clear even skin, strong sexual dimorphism (relatively shorter stature, hourglass figure, higher cheekbones, larger eyes, etc) with absolute facial/body symmetry and golden ratio proportionality, positive canthal tilt, full healthy eyelashes and hair, etc... basically the entire human population will have no trouble agreeing that she is beautiful as fuck, and that is, in some sense, an instance of pseudo-objectivity, even though at best we only have a consensus subjectivity, it's as if her exact configuration hits the bullseye of our shared human preferences. And that shared human preference is not random either, in the sense that there is deep intelligence guiding us towards holding these particular biases. In the case of a woman, these preferences are apparently proxies for health and fertility. At least that is our modern scientific justification narrative. But it's still not truly objective or universal or even truthful since a fly on the wall wouldn't have the capacity to tell a hot woman apart from an ugly one. It's as if that distinction is unrendered in the eyes of another species. But at the same time it's unsettling to just announce that beauty is a total free-for-all. Everyone is equally beautiful! This is clearly not the case lol. To anyone that wants to contest this, go have sex with an obese saggy crusty grandma and report back to us. I mean, this is the whole premise of plastic surgery and makeup. All these alterations and enhancements, when done right, converge towards a certain abstract ideal. It's not an accident that all Instagram models end up looking the same and suffer from wild success. Yes, I am aware that many people overdo their cosmetic enhancements, and it gets ugly. And the oversaturation of a particular look can make it tiring. And standards change across time. And sacrificing everything for beauty is ugly in its own way. But it's worth contemplating why nobody has plastic surgery to make their face intentionally crooked. In all areas of life, there seems to be a similar tug-of-war between the objective and the subjective. So to the point - what is good music? In university, I read "The Sense of Music" by Victor Zuckerkandl. I remember that he defined musical melody by saying something to the effect of: "a cat walking across a keyboard cannot be considered music" This was essentially his starting axiom for music, in the same way that Euclid opens the Elements by defining the geometric point and line (which are necessary for him to begin constructing geometric shapes). I think most of us can intuitively agree to the cat anxiom. You can directly test this if you wish to be rigorous. Grab your animal of choice, and unleash it on your piano. The result is an incoherent mess of tones which does not please the human senses whatsoever. Yeah, this axiom is fallible. It's drenched in human bias from the get-go. But we can overlook this for now. From there, Zuckerkandl does a fantastic job at outlining the commonly-sought "design principles" behind what most humans consider "music." When you or I think of "music," we imagine a sort of phonology and syntax, much of it unconscious, but this can be spelled out to satisfaction. As much as I want to say that musical taste is relative, and that the pleasantness of sounds is also relative, we must admit that within the consensus reality of human life, all humans have a shared bias in the way we perceive tones and music. I have a buddy who is much younger than me, he's still in high school but he likes to make indie games as a hobby. He got the bright idea to make his own OST, and it was a total mess. The lack of structure, the aimless "harmony" /lack thereof, it often felt like gibberish or noise. Not to throw him under the bus, but here's a sample of his tunes: Contrast that with my other indie dev buddy. This guy clearly has a deep intuitive respect for musical phonology/syntax. This is the difference between a total novice with 0 guidance winging it, VS a talented intermediate. But it's still so tricky because the structural ideal towards which "good music" is converging is itself an amorphous, flexible thing. And following the textbook rigidly leads to uninspired music as well. This is the trap of most mainstream songs. They're not bad for failing to form coherent musical sentences; they're bad for spamming the same predictable unimaginative sentence-structures. Tricky tricky. And then there is the state of consciousness of the listener to consider. Often I prefer more contemplative music. But when I want to feel a certain frivolous way, I am happy to headbang to some playboi carti remixes: This could easily be interpreted as "untasteful noise" to someone who isn't willing to explore a frivolous headspace. tl;dr: there are intelligent distinctions to be made between "good" vs "bad" music. Despite the relativity of taste, it is demonstrably the case within the human sensemaking paradigm that not all songs are equally beautiful. That said, there are too many factors to consider, it's a herculean task to parse each factor in any definitive way.

This video is profound. I'm not in any position to draw conclusions.

To tie this into the rest of the conversation, I think the punchline would be that if a normal human managed to hear this "alien music" using his dualistic biases and biological ears, he would struggle to make any sense of it. It would feel like ugly gibberish since it directly threatens his preferred human musical sensemaking. That is, unless the human were clever enough to understand his own limits. If the human were able to question his own ideas of beauty, he may be open to levels of beauty/truth/resonance/cognition beyond his current grasp.

Enormous group-think. Ungodly amounts of group-think haha. I'm going to give this a sincere shot off the cuff But i'll need thousands more hours of solitude + 5meo to have a definitive answer (lol) --- An alien consciousness would not differentiate between sound and other sense perceptions. An alien consciousness would not arbitrarily find some tones more beautiful than others, unless it decreed so for the sake of more interesting holistic interplay. An alien consciousness would spawn and discover aesthetics of music beyond all recognition - novel aesthetics spun out of thin air - and yet this new aesthetic will not be random. It would have an immaculate meta-balance that only the alien can appreciate. It strikes balance outside of the box which cannot be appreciated from within the box. An alien consciousness does not need ears nor a body. Therefore an alien consciousness "listening to music" = MIND reconfiguring itself to please itself spontaneously using original, never-before-woven aesthetics born of sonic frequencies that bleed into the rest of MIND in an incestuous, ouroboros-like manner. Striking an intelligent balance too majestic for a mere human to comprehend, being totally alone in its appreciation, it marvels at its magnitude and whimsy. The whole thing is more beautiful than anything it has ever witnessed, and yet it's a joke. Just another day for MIND.

I see where you're coming from, you do have a point. The upshot of all of this is to not conflate that which pleases your human self with that which is true. Sometimes there is overlap, sometimes there is not. I once contemplated tonal harmony on psychedelics and I was completely baffled and floored when I realized that all combinations of sounds were equally beautiful. I directly tested this.

Correct, the general principle is: the smaller the whole number ratio, the more "pure" the interval. So an octave is 1:2 a fifth is 2:3 a fourth is 3:4 etc. These relationships are baked into every tone through the phenomenon of overtones. This "purity" is subjectively reflected in the perceived pleasantness of these intervals. Speaking strictly truthfully, we have sounds that we perceive as pleasant and pure, corresponding to clean mathematical ratios found in nature. The pleasant map corresponds to the pleasant territory, and everyone is happy. But you cannot extrapolate from there that the pleasantness is inherent, nor can you claim that you have discovered the causal origin of pleasantness, since it is perfectly conceivable that Consciousness can have different hardwiring with regards to preferential beauty. The human is hardwired to appreciate the harmonic series. Music is a very human thing. But it is bias. We humans are bias. Truth is lack of bias.

I began learning piano at age 3 and violin at age 4. As a teenager I was part of the most grueling program in the Chicago youth symphony orchestra, and performed in Chicago's famed Symphony Hall. I was an A-student in AP music theory in early highschool and was paid as a teaching assistant for music theory during university. I have spent close to a decade contemplating tonal harmony. I have watched all 13+ hours of Berstein's Norton Lectures 3-times over. My best friend is a jazz pianist with rare improv talent, and he is an Actualized.org enjoyer as am I. This topic is our bread and butter. Unless you are a professor or a freak, I guarantee I have a better understanding of this terrain than you. You say "there is science to it" as if I haven't spent the last 10 years crunching the numbers in-person. I can backwards engineer and mathematically justify every note of our equal temperament 12-tone scale system. I have memorized the wavelength ratios of all intervals. And even after all of that, harmonic beauty is a mystery to me. It is totally arbitrary that a perfect fifth should sound any more pleasing than a minor second. The science you point to rests on the assumption that certain tones sound better. The pleasing sound is taken for granted. It is pure bias.

A note being "off" amounts to our bias being denied. Has nothing to do with truth detection. Have you ever seriously contemplated why tones sound good or bad? Or is this taken for granted? Go find a piano, play a C major triad. And ponder for 1000 hours why this sound is pleasing (even though it's equal temperament lmao) --- Spoiler - you like it for the same reason sugar tastes good. Because Consciousness had a bias. Sugar is no more truthful than dogshit, and a gorgeous chord is no more truthful than a banshee screeching. This is precisely the kind of new-age "intuition" trap that Leo warns against. Your favorite example works against you...

Right. I'm surprised by how often intelligent people respond to alarm bells of the metacrisis with dismissal, as if it's mere "fearmongering" We're headed off a cliff as a species. In some sense it's as simple as 1+1=2. There's not much time left.

The only thing capable of grasping Infinity/God is Consciousness itself - i.e. You. Although AI can ostensibly string together language inputs to spit out predictive responses that sounds Awake as fuck. Benevolent superintelligent AI is highly likely to pop up, but the same can be said of selfish, Machiavellian AI.

We shall see : )

I have never heard anyone say "Oh him? Yeah, I own him" (in reference to helping an autistic kid) Yet we're happy to say "Oh yeah! I own a cat! "

I know exactly what you mean

Sounds like something a slave owner would say. Self-serving distinction. The position I have spelled out is full of nuance. I've spelled out how slavery is a meta-principle on a spectrum with degrees. All instances of what I call "slavery" have the commonality of restricting sovereignty and leeching personal gain, while differing in intensity and harm. This gives a fuller picture of our inter/intra-species relationships. Whereas the unnuanced position would be to label slavery as an exclusively bad thing and to pretend that we have nothing to do with it and that our practices must be justified and unquestionable. This is the stance of you and Dan. You draw a hard line in your mind which separates the notion of slavery from your daily unconscious practices, and you're prone to arguing fiercely that this line cannot be crossed and that anyone who dares to cross this line, like me or Leo, must be automatically wrong and deluded. I actually don't have a position to defend here. I don't care if I turn out to be a slave owner or not. I'm not mad either way. My sensemaking is unclouded. I'll say it again, but look: the bottom line is - golden handcuffs are still handcuffs they call it pet OWNERSHIP for a reason. It's baked into the language we use. "I own a dog" "I own a cat" Try to contemplate the ramifications of that without bias. The pet owner's benevolent nature is a deflection. Symbiosis is a deflection. Slavery is fundamentally about OWNING OTHER BEINGS. Contemplate ownership.

Domesticated animals are genetically bred to prefer their slave conditions. This issue of slavery goes far deeper than your individual actions, it's a collective human web. Acknowledging your "slaving ways" does not make you a nefarious progenitor of evil. It's more like being a willing participant in collective selfishness maximization. Or, you are close minded. How can we tell the difference? Really contemplate that. "I'm obviously right and you're obviously wrong" is begging the question. It looks like you're not really engaging with the step by step breakdowns I've written for you on the meta-abstract mechanism of "slavery" Your disagreement boils down to "I don't like how that word makes me feel so everything you say must be BS" Not mutually exclusive with psychedelic contemplation lol : ) Please spell out any "false assumptions" you spot.

I can't bring myself to demonize them because I kinda get it. They're just as ugly as me. Except I got lucky with my environment. It hurts twice as bad, empathizing with victim and victimizer simultaneously. Every time I contemplate our human condition I'm picking up shattered fragments of my heart

There it is