I can see the Βααλζεβούβ Cheshire grin
- some of us///////
honestly, like, give chimps or bonobos agriculture and get us out of here and that abundanceborne fusion modus just becomes Civilization until disaster or scarcity or something disrupts it, fission, smaller hunt/gather/scavenge group modus, until equilibrium or advancement returns abundance
the fact that there's a high-profile version of the odyssey out now and everyone is all horny for greeks forgetting that this shit is mycenae at best is a fun reminder of the long, winding runway of human civilization we are on
it's really really really funny and tragic that we basically all got together because there was enough food that we could sleep and relax a little and just let song and dance and art and faith and culture become a bridge fabric to throw over dunbar's number, and now we war over that stuff instead
the thing we needed to break the rules and establish permanent civilization beyond close-knit survival communities is also the thing that tears them apart because we're smart enough to do it in the first place but too stupid to remember that we made it all up to get along with our distant neighbours
human culture is basically the thing we invented to STOP repeating cycles of resource-based in/out group civil war in the local biome, and then immediately used it to justify even bigger, bloodier, existentially genocidal cross-biome wars instead
oops!
the idea that until recently people looked at ape war and i guess said "well that can't be a war there's no monkey god" but then we see chimps tearing testicles off of other chimps and go "wait a sec this seems unnecessary. hm. let us ponder this" is pretty anthropocentrically hilarious. we so dumb.
makes our current human fucked up situation amid all this technological subcommunity echo chamber atomization, combined with a year or two where we were all stuck inside and did most socializing in the parasocial space rather than the materiosocial one just self-selected out bridge individuals
like this all makes more sense when one remembers we're all just fancy apes
I think the key point here that keeps us different is maybe literally art? I'm no primatologist I have no idea how complicated chimp or bonobo communication is. we don't know the stories they tell eachother about the trees. but I don't see any monkey books and so chimp oral tradition seems IMPORTANT
this all seems inevitable in a community that grows very large and has no real way to pass down knowledge or experience apart from direct social interaction with community members with long memories, ie, elders and storytellers. those bridge individuals that predate in group/out group stratification
if you can't teach the kids that the other group is different but fine anymore because all the old apes who remember when they were all just one unified group back when there were only like 40 of them die and you can't write shit down, then yeah. you need cross-group empathy in early education.
the respiratory outbreak hastened it and maybe caused it, maybe they had a chimp The Giver situation percolating and the old dude just died too early or whatever, but I think this perfect storm just needed the right catalyst. it probably woulda happened regardless?
- ontology//////
the funny thing to remember when we talk about human and terran life at large relative to what we know about reality if what we already know about what infinity really means is relatively correct then if time and space are infinite you dont even need other dimensions to have paralives just wait
so, like, legitimately, on a cosmic scale, there is nothing less true about the nature of reality in the shared universe of the legend of zelda or the marvel cinematic universe in terms of humans ability to exist in radically divergent forms in similar aesthetic times, given INFINITY
and really you don't even need physical reality to be infinite, you LITERALLY just need time. atoms might take numbers we dont know long to hit right to spark a universe that learns its a universe before it dies but infinity means it happens like this as many times as it doesnt
you JUST need infinite 4d agency and everything is literally possible. 3d agency makes you omnipotent, 4d reality makes you omniscient, 5d reality makes you omnipresent across every particle in every reality at once
like do people not just realize that that faith group only represents the most developed and thus fully academically philosophized upon because it benefits hegemonic structure is just the one most easily bent to validate hegemonic structure by allowing for a paradise after suffering and toil yeah
like you'd think civilizations would figure out that their creator diety did not create all of every civilization the second they meet a another civilization that doesn't happen to venerate someone in your community's pretty cool 6xGreat grandpa so any second civilization and figure it out but cest la vie
oh god just think of that though. humans, as a thing, have only known roughly what fossils even are for about 400 years, despite our infinite ability to find them and look at them and think they are weird
are there any things you take seriously re: foundational reality that are 400y old or older?
just think about that. think deeply about the simple idea of religious talismans and artifacts and godgiven gifts in a world that won't know what an ammonite is for another 1200 years. try and explain it. fuckin, bug god did it I guess, fuck, why are you being weird about bug god
it really is important to recognize the role of Christianity in science development in the culture in which it was dominant at the times when it started, ie, like, the enlightenment. the science was relatively undeniable because it was done by Christians who wanted to be really really REALLY sure
has anyone ever thought to like, make a copy and diagrams and biology of a creature in forms we can make last as long as possible and then stick it next to a bunch of dead ones in a place that we think will promote fossilization at various stages so we can like, try to teach people in 3m years?
like in a way to try and help them correct for paleoart or whatever. tis is what it absolutely looked like with skin and stuff and what it used to do. you're standing on its remains. compare and contrast vis a vis how many geological ages younger than me you are
like if we can give them a head start then that just seems like a thing we should do if we can? idk. like maybe le them know what fire is or something idk I'm just a me
am I crazy or like, dont we need to ontologically consider the ontological limitations of the dominant ontological leaders ontological capacity ontologically understand ontology ontologically as a thing that can ontologically exist like that only seems fair
we only kinda even began to under fossils let alone the realities of geology like 300 years ago and a lot of foundational human shit is based on things that have the vested interest in propagating the idea that yes they didn't know what germs or the weather were really
buuuuut they were still basically right abooooout life. everything. big fuckin dude in the sky did it. until like maybe 200 years ago. Grandpa's Grandpa's dad times. we have very recently indeed gotten a fucking grasp on ANYTHING
because look, you get to a point where you can say "sure, I can conceive that there is a barrier called the big bang or something near it and beyond it physics gets so weird we can't even conceive of it let alone stand that and if you want to say it's one big man who never came back okay? sure?"
but you realize that if that's your suspension of disbelief you basically believe in galactus. in doctor manhattan. in some c-tier superman villain. any alien. fucking alf. which I don't say to mean that you're wrong, I'm saying that I love that you believe in something so fucking cute and sweet.
I, too, would love to live in Pokemon. in Zelda. in the MCU. I want to be a mutant. I want my special thing, if it doesn't get to matter, to at least be mine and be undeniable. maybe I'm just a chicken man, but I am the best goddamn chicken man on the planet and you can't say I'm not without lying
I want to be magneto but I'll settle for beak so long as the fucking rules are clear to everyone
for the majority of those who can on earth I don't think most actually understand how dope it is to have reliably fresh and affordable cabbage in your fridge basically whenever you want it
I guess technically we can say that we don't see any existence of intelligent life or civilization before the anthropocene or whatever but even dinosaurs had more earth than us all we know is they didn't invent capitalism but neither did dogs and we know dogs have social structure
like we're very very picky when we accept things as intelligent
I think it just ends in this sort of zen humanism. you take a belief system, gather every version of it anyone ever wrote down as far back as you can find before it doesn't look like itself
and every time honest curiosity and fact-checking shows a place reality diverges from your dominant assumes test you reread every version and just replace the canon with the part that makes the most sense, even if it's just metaphorical so long as it is illustrative
eventually you just solve for the lowest observable explainable and it basically just leaves you with we are smart apes who got really lucky
lucky we had brains that could take advantage of what our tongues and vocal chords and fingers could do to the world and people around us because we also had brains that were capable of narrativization and memorization so we learned and remembered and tried again when something didn't make sense