Thank you; a very cool extension of concepts. Psychofauna denizens remind me a bit of the Jungian archetypes (like "the Great Mother", "The Trickster", "The Puer Aeternus", etc. Similarly, there was a movement that may have fizzled out somewhat, to use the Greek gods as "archetypes" . The notion that psychofauna may eat you up like a predator, however, is very new, and very interesting! thanks
Yes, Jung has come up in my past attempts in articulating this, though I haven't read him yet. You might be interested in Simone Weil's reading of the Iliad. She thinks that to understand how the ancients understood the story, we have to see who they considered to be the protagonists of the story: not humans, but "the force."
"The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-iliad
Well said. I am particularly interested in a type of psychofauna called Family. I agree that humans need to interact with these entities for meaning and profit. My philosophy is that our identity is largely made up by how we interact with them. That is. They are composed of us, but we are also composed of them. So I seek to understand how to have some kind of internal harmony among them.
I had to think about this. I realized that I never thought of Family as a psychofauna and cybernetically. It is clearly older than humanity, just as Male and Female are. Father and Mother are likewise most likely older than humanity. King/Warrior might be human-age evolutions of Male, though hints of it were already in the Alpha.
As you’ve suggested (I think) in your post, the ultimate integrator of these creatures is God. I’m thinking of a response to your post which explores these lines of thought, including “satan” in Girard’s sense / “moloch” in Scott Alexander’s sense.
Very intriguing! I'm wondering about the confusion of Technocapital with artists' muses. I'm not sure I can place what you're thinking of, here. I guess Technocapital probably likes, say, Hollywood blockbusters that spread its memes around the world; are you saying artists find it painful not to understand the difference between following this kind of urge and following their more personal psychic minifauna?
I see artists whose desires come from the propaganda of Technocapital (they want to make a lot of money), but they don't see it, so they expect this reward from their muses, in exchange for the work the have done to manifest them in this world. The only reward that muses can give is the experience of working with them (priceless IMO). It is only incidental that some are aligned with Technocapital (eg, Hollywood... and even with that, most films fail financially). I'd like to help artists see and get to know Technocapital so that they can work with the right psychofauna for their monetary needs. I think this would free them to create better art and have a healthier relationship with their muses and Technocapital.
Thanks! Reminds me of Existential Kink, which while it has certain vibes I don't much like has some intriguing insights about how it is that people who claim to be aiming for successes of various kinds manage to get themselves stuck in endless loops of failure on their declared terms; probably sometimes part of this is not being honest about which psychofauna you're cultivating a relationship with.
This might be an excellent lens to consider regarding a lot of the reading I've been doing on the "Three C's of Colonisation"—which has been challenging to synthesise in an impactful + meaningful way! Much to think about ! Also reminds me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOqtVpBM6ms
Very eager to see where this goes ! Thanks for sharing !
Postcolonial nationalism is definitely one psychofauna I'm eager to study, as it has largely framed how I was taught to look at the past. Looking at the history of colonialism itself through an animist lens, my sense is that Christianity unshackled European kingdoms in a way that made their conquests different from classical plain conquests and enslavement (eg, Roman, Islamic, and that of my precontact Austronesian ancestors). The same moral foundations (e.g., equality of all men and women, siding with the weak over the powerful) must have also sowed the seeds of the Age of Nations.
Thanks for sharing the song. It gave me "humanity amidst the chaos of revolution" vibes.
Inspiring essay and I am looking forward to working through your older posts.
My instincts are always to look for biological analogies, and this line of thinking makes me wonder if we are on the precipice of a transition from a past pattern of natural selection of psychic megafauna, pushing forward into an era of artificial selection of such entities. Is it possible for societies to consciously domesticate their own cultures? Is it possible to deliberately interbreed two distinct psychofauna to produce an array of new diversity for further selection?
Same here! Only recently have I found an explanation for why biological analogies work so well. Cybernetics (or its descendants like information theory or complex systems) shows how biological organisms and cultures are both carriers of antifragile information traveling through time https://www.explorations.ph/i/137852010/life-is-antifragile-information
The artificial selection is an intriguing question. Recognizing the existence of psychofauna would also question the question. What if what looked artificial (eg, creating the dog) was on a deeper level a natural selection within the competing psychofauna of early human societies (ie, those that had dogs dominated those that did not)?
The distinction between natural and artificial selection is kind of fuzzy. If you zoom out far enough everything is presumably natural by definition, so how artificiality exists inside it seems to present a paradox. I think when we say artificial we just mean conscious, but that just opens up a whole host of other unanswerable questions since that concept is so poorly defined (and unknowably distributed across non-human levels of biology). I think intuitively most people understand that the global ecosystem is something more than a mendelian pachinko machine of filtered random mutations. The mechanisms for evolution themselves are constantly evolving, and human consciousness (as applied to the forces of evolution) may just be the most recent trick dreamt into existence.
I will read the anti fragile post over lunch. Nice to have a solid place to start with so many interesting older posts to work my way through.
Ideas (memes!) form a competitive ecology in the human mind. Everything that is a product of evolution behaves in a fashion that looks somewhat intentional (maximize reproduction?).
> Our position is that, while an obvious exaggeration in its most extreme versions, the “Blank Slate” approach to human behavior has merit: the degree of cross- cultural plasticity of individual behavior is observationally high in the anthropological record and this article summarizes the evolutionary mechanisms behind the Cambrian explosion of social diversity that characterizes modern humans. The dynamics of cultural transmission is largely orthogonal to genetic needs, and although people have innate inclinations (vg. food, sex, status and after a birth, the care of children), the core of the human nature is being a “Cultural Turing machine”, making the machine's tape immensely powerful. Evolution has not slowed because of the emergence of human social intelligence: it has forked into that of genes (mainly for social cognitive capabilities) and that of memeplexes (for socio-political supremacy).
I vaguely remember David Deutsch using a similar image: a slate not completely blank at birth but whose pre-installed writing could easily be erased.
I look at this question from the angle of modernity's dominance over archaic kingship. The elimination of ritual sacrifice (via axial age religions?) and, later on, slavery, was a local loss for a specific king within the old regime, but it opened a bigger game for the archetype of the king, because it enabled bigger societies. https://www.explorations.ph/i/137995183/the-antifragility-of-societies-based-on-truth
I found this post really useful to understand these memeplexes,
> The very act of trying to look at an egregore tends to result in it affecting you. Like it reaches into your nervous system simply because you notice it.
>
> This is why it's easier to orient by picking a side. You're becoming an extension of the egregore. It's using your biological resources to manifest in the physical world.
These hyperobjects seem to be "Attempted solutions to coordination problems"
Another good article that explores this idea is in lesswrong
> A common result of egregoric stupefaction is identity fuckery. We get this image of ourselves in our minds, and then we look at that image and agree "Yep, that's me." Then we rearrange our minds so that all those survival instincts of the body get aimed at protecting the image in our minds.
Thank you; a very cool extension of concepts. Psychofauna denizens remind me a bit of the Jungian archetypes (like "the Great Mother", "The Trickster", "The Puer Aeternus", etc. Similarly, there was a movement that may have fizzled out somewhat, to use the Greek gods as "archetypes" . The notion that psychofauna may eat you up like a predator, however, is very new, and very interesting! thanks
Yes, Jung has come up in my past attempts in articulating this, though I haven't read him yet. You might be interested in Simone Weil's reading of the Iliad. She thinks that to understand how the ancients understood the story, we have to see who they considered to be the protagonists of the story: not humans, but "the force."
"The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-iliad
Well said. I am particularly interested in a type of psychofauna called Family. I agree that humans need to interact with these entities for meaning and profit. My philosophy is that our identity is largely made up by how we interact with them. That is. They are composed of us, but we are also composed of them. So I seek to understand how to have some kind of internal harmony among them.
I had to think about this. I realized that I never thought of Family as a psychofauna and cybernetically. It is clearly older than humanity, just as Male and Female are. Father and Mother are likewise most likely older than humanity. King/Warrior might be human-age evolutions of Male, though hints of it were already in the Alpha.
As you’ve suggested (I think) in your post, the ultimate integrator of these creatures is God. I’m thinking of a response to your post which explores these lines of thought, including “satan” in Girard’s sense / “moloch” in Scott Alexander’s sense.
Very intriguing! I'm wondering about the confusion of Technocapital with artists' muses. I'm not sure I can place what you're thinking of, here. I guess Technocapital probably likes, say, Hollywood blockbusters that spread its memes around the world; are you saying artists find it painful not to understand the difference between following this kind of urge and following their more personal psychic minifauna?
I see artists whose desires come from the propaganda of Technocapital (they want to make a lot of money), but they don't see it, so they expect this reward from their muses, in exchange for the work the have done to manifest them in this world. The only reward that muses can give is the experience of working with them (priceless IMO). It is only incidental that some are aligned with Technocapital (eg, Hollywood... and even with that, most films fail financially). I'd like to help artists see and get to know Technocapital so that they can work with the right psychofauna for their monetary needs. I think this would free them to create better art and have a healthier relationship with their muses and Technocapital.
Thanks! Reminds me of Existential Kink, which while it has certain vibes I don't much like has some intriguing insights about how it is that people who claim to be aiming for successes of various kinds manage to get themselves stuck in endless loops of failure on their declared terms; probably sometimes part of this is not being honest about which psychofauna you're cultivating a relationship with.
You can't be honest about who you are working with unless you see who you are working with!
This might be an excellent lens to consider regarding a lot of the reading I've been doing on the "Three C's of Colonisation"—which has been challenging to synthesise in an impactful + meaningful way! Much to think about ! Also reminds me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOqtVpBM6ms
Very eager to see where this goes ! Thanks for sharing !
Postcolonial nationalism is definitely one psychofauna I'm eager to study, as it has largely framed how I was taught to look at the past. Looking at the history of colonialism itself through an animist lens, my sense is that Christianity unshackled European kingdoms in a way that made their conquests different from classical plain conquests and enslavement (eg, Roman, Islamic, and that of my precontact Austronesian ancestors). The same moral foundations (e.g., equality of all men and women, siding with the weak over the powerful) must have also sowed the seeds of the Age of Nations.
Thanks for sharing the song. It gave me "humanity amidst the chaos of revolution" vibes.
Inspiring essay and I am looking forward to working through your older posts.
My instincts are always to look for biological analogies, and this line of thinking makes me wonder if we are on the precipice of a transition from a past pattern of natural selection of psychic megafauna, pushing forward into an era of artificial selection of such entities. Is it possible for societies to consciously domesticate their own cultures? Is it possible to deliberately interbreed two distinct psychofauna to produce an array of new diversity for further selection?
Same here! Only recently have I found an explanation for why biological analogies work so well. Cybernetics (or its descendants like information theory or complex systems) shows how biological organisms and cultures are both carriers of antifragile information traveling through time https://www.explorations.ph/i/137852010/life-is-antifragile-information
The artificial selection is an intriguing question. Recognizing the existence of psychofauna would also question the question. What if what looked artificial (eg, creating the dog) was on a deeper level a natural selection within the competing psychofauna of early human societies (ie, those that had dogs dominated those that did not)?
The distinction between natural and artificial selection is kind of fuzzy. If you zoom out far enough everything is presumably natural by definition, so how artificiality exists inside it seems to present a paradox. I think when we say artificial we just mean conscious, but that just opens up a whole host of other unanswerable questions since that concept is so poorly defined (and unknowably distributed across non-human levels of biology). I think intuitively most people understand that the global ecosystem is something more than a mendelian pachinko machine of filtered random mutations. The mechanisms for evolution themselves are constantly evolving, and human consciousness (as applied to the forces of evolution) may just be the most recent trick dreamt into existence.
I will read the anti fragile post over lunch. Nice to have a solid place to start with so many interesting older posts to work my way through.
Ideas (memes!) form a competitive ecology in the human mind. Everything that is a product of evolution behaves in a fashion that looks somewhat intentional (maximize reproduction?).
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aCEuvHrqzmBroNQPT/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate
> Our position is that, while an obvious exaggeration in its most extreme versions, the “Blank Slate” approach to human behavior has merit: the degree of cross- cultural plasticity of individual behavior is observationally high in the anthropological record and this article summarizes the evolutionary mechanisms behind the Cambrian explosion of social diversity that characterizes modern humans. The dynamics of cultural transmission is largely orthogonal to genetic needs, and although people have innate inclinations (vg. food, sex, status and after a birth, the care of children), the core of the human nature is being a “Cultural Turing machine”, making the machine's tape immensely powerful. Evolution has not slowed because of the emergence of human social intelligence: it has forked into that of genes (mainly for social cognitive capabilities) and that of memeplexes (for socio-political supremacy).
I vaguely remember David Deutsch using a similar image: a slate not completely blank at birth but whose pre-installed writing could easily be erased.
I look at this question from the angle of modernity's dominance over archaic kingship. The elimination of ritual sacrifice (via axial age religions?) and, later on, slavery, was a local loss for a specific king within the old regime, but it opened a bigger game for the archetype of the king, because it enabled bigger societies. https://www.explorations.ph/i/137995183/the-antifragility-of-societies-based-on-truth
Love it - this artist sees the value in your ideas. And Bagio City is charming indeed
Thank you! I wrote it for you.
Well thank you for that!
I found this post really useful to understand these memeplexes,
> The very act of trying to look at an egregore tends to result in it affecting you. Like it reaches into your nervous system simply because you notice it.
>
> This is why it's easier to orient by picking a side. You're becoming an extension of the egregore. It's using your biological resources to manifest in the physical world.
https://www.facebook.com/morphenius/posts/10158964567402635
These hyperobjects seem to be "Attempted solutions to coordination problems"
Another good article that explores this idea is in lesswrong
> A common result of egregoric stupefaction is identity fuckery. We get this image of ourselves in our minds, and then we look at that image and agree "Yep, that's me." Then we rearrange our minds so that all those survival instincts of the body get aimed at protecting the image in our minds.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LbyxFk8JmPKPAQBvL/we-re-already-in-ai-takeoff
People looking to understand these God like entities might find these articles useful