Theories of the conspiratorial kind

[mugz]

It's my duty, I'm a missionary

Sacred, holy

To put it in words, to write it down

That is walking, on hallowed ground

[astfgyl]

Now, it may be that this is all us against ourselves, but that only means we're sick in ourselves, rather having having sickness brought upon us.

"Sickness" in the sense you mean it is nothing more than an anthropocentric value judgement imposed on the world. What is "norm"? What is "pathological"? Is health an absence of sickness? Or is health a robust capacity to recover from sickness? If it's the latter, then the end does justify the means, since the end result is a more robust, resistant entity. But without accurate teleological revelation, which for argument's sake let's say doesn't exist, it is impossible to say at any point whether something designated as sickness is part of a steady and inexorable decline or rather a temporary sickness leading to a subsequent re-valuated strengthening. On a psychological level, these questions are hot topics with respect to "PC culture" - egos that are too easily bruised many worry will lead to a weakening of the human mind, etc. -, but they also have a much more fundamental evolutionary and physiological underpinning; in evolution, new functions of old machinery are often utterly feeble at first, but they only have to confer the smallest amount of evolutionary advantage in order to shift onto the adaptation ladder and then become stronger generation after generation. But in order to apprehend values at that level, you're talking about expanding your scope of things to scales of tens of thousands of years rather than a narrow envelope of a couple of hundred running backwards and a couple of decades running forward. At that grander scale, "sickness" is meaningless, since the present sickness of some life forms will be the future fertilizer of others. This has happened several times, on local and global scales, over the course of evolutionary history. In brief, this boils down to it ultimately being our choice whether we evaluate things as "sick" or not, a decision I'd recommend making based on which choice will confer the greatest vigor/capacity for assimilation of experience to the individual in the present. Choosing to see things as "sick" doesn't seem to do one much good, and since we're all just a short straw and a blink of the eye away from eternal self-loss...

So while autopoiesis is a fun word, it only talks about cybernetics, and by definition cybernetics can't be unitary, so universalism/solipsism both fall down, and autopoiesis can't be a thing.

I can think of several conceptual systems in which cybernetics either is or would be unitary, but in any case the premise is false: autopoiesis doesn't "only talk about cybernetics." But in any case, I was using it in its most general sense; we call our own reality into being and while away our existence propping that up. Or, to go back to the opposition inherent to conspiracy theory; if there is a "they", then every "we" gets the "they" it deserves.

Indeed, autopoiesis is almost always used in it's most general sense.

Last sentence was top notch though. I can get on board with that.

A good Depeche Mode lyric can be used to settle any semantic argument as well, thank god

[mugz]

...

[mugz]

...

[astfgyl]

I read up there on the rainbows and it seems logical enough. Didn't find anything too crazy about the Isle of Man at a glance, apart from the fact they seem to have had their own thing going on there for a long time.

[mugz]

...

[astfgyl]

I did a quick check there typing in "native american culture hoax". I mostly seem to be getting stuff about folks falsely claiming to be of Native American descent. Is there more to it than that? I can't try go too deep into the results as I have the dinner going as well

[John Kimble]

there are no Amish either.

Do go on...

[mugz]

 ...

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

"It just bums me out how much of my life I wasted reading history books or learning about different cultures around the world, and it turns out not to be the way it seems."

Certainly no better reason than that to switch to the furthest out narratives you can find! Hopefully they'll be entertaining enough in their own right that you won't also regret that use of time some day. But for the love of the gods, throw astfgyl the name of a book or blog or two; I think even poor Fyodor is starting to salivate for the number of unrewarded cues.

[Bigmac]

It just bums me out how much of my life I wasted reading history books or learning about different cultures around the world, and it turns out not to be the way it seems.

In relation to this, I found the below series to be a good watch, the delivery is excellent.

Clocks in at 5 or 6 hours so far I think, as it's not yet finished. But what has been put out so far, I found enjoyable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOM2fT6tBFE

[mugz]

...

[mugz]

...

[mugz]

...

[Bigmac]

having said that, I probably will watch all of that later tonight 

Yeah sound, I'd be interested to hear how it ties into your own ideas about history not being what it appears to be.