Life, dreams

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

My stubborn refusal to journal about anything cannot be defea--

Aw, darn it.

Life has been treating me well recently. In no particular order, there has been lots of quality time with Tess, meeting and getting along with a metamor I'd been nervous about, lunch with a friend, and Trice flying into the country. Further up the scale have been getting my first term back to school paid for, and making headway on getting student loans out of default.

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Last night I dreamed I was reading a guide to the lives of people in the future (which THEIR far-future descendents had sent back in time for us to read), and the tremendous lifespans they had (150 years was considered normal, most of them hale and well as the afflictions of senescence had eased). This was attributed to their clean, yet biotically-rich living conditions and the absence of harmful substances in air, water and soil. As I looked away from the screen I held in my hand (it could project its small images directly onto the retina) a woman sat next to me, looking ancient and very depressed. She was supposed to be an ancestor of mine, though not any living relative I have met in my lifetime, and though she was old enough to have skin bronzed by a lifetime of sun and long white hair peppered with streaks of clinging gray, she and I began to talk, at once relieved and miserable. Hugging her supportively, I whispered "It's good to know that there will be happy, healthy people after..." and paused, thinking about the world we live in "...after the end of all this madness." We both cried at living in a world ravaged by poison, where people's lives were valued less than numbers on paper. I cried for her, lost and unwanted in this world and all that she had known and loved gobbled up, killed or destroyed forever -- and she for me, her great-to-the-nth granddaughter growing up in such a world, and bound to die before this wistfully-glimpsed future could come to pass.

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Can't wait to see Trice. Am all nervous and apprehensive at the thought of this turning tangible. Excited also. Won't be long now.

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Have decided to stop casual-swearing. Not so much mortified or inhibited as just experimenting with shifts in speech and thought, and curious about the effects of this one.

We are not Borg. Resistance is eminently practical.

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/

A discussion that sorely needs having in the set of all subcultures and communities that value or practice rationality as a goal. 

One of the reasons I've grown increasingly alienated from such groups as I've grown older is that they seem to be predominantly oriented around individual thoughts and activities, with little community implied beyond "we're all here talking". More like a business meeting than a community proper, as it were. This is in addition to the very strongly-Libertarian* skew many of these circles have; they tend not to be very good spaces if you're conscious of (and negatively affected by) overt displays of privilege and/or denial of same. Basically it's all very atomized, much like the society it's taking place in, and that's something I've been trying to get away from in my life -- the mindset that this is "normal" (rather than just prevalent), and the overt valuation of such behavior.

Some of this differs from place to place -- I've observed that one of the key differences between, for example, transhumanist groups in Europe vs North America is that the European groups tend to be a lot more socially and politically diverse, whereas in North America the most visible and organized sections and big names are usually fiscal conservatives, anarcho-capitalists or Objectivists (in their backgrounds if not currently -- Jamais Cascio, who blogs at Open the Future, is a notable exception). However, this sort of thing is prevalent in all such subcultures I've been involved with, and it bothers me because it feels like it's leaving out a sizeable majority of humanity, when the issues at hand are ostensibly of significance (if only abstractly) to all of them. As I've said elsewhere, if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your Singularity, and if your social and technological ideals fail to make sense in the context of, say, Liberia or Uzbekistan, then I'm going to question how generally applicable your ideas (and by extension, the ethics behind those choices) really are.

 I always feel a bit self-conscious in writing about this because I actually place enormous value on individual rights and freedoms, but am unconvinced by the notion I've heard so often: "There is no society, only individuals (and families)." That hasn't been a meaningful statement for most of human history, it's still not meaningful for much of humanity *now*, the lifestyle that makes this attitude seem viable has only been possible thanks to seriously exploitative practices levied against much of the world, and I can't agree that it's a desireable goal either.