Crises

 There is much talk about crises these days, leading to the notion of a meta-crisis:

Meta-crisis (Daniel Schmactenberger)

• Rivalrous dynamics leading to multipolar traps. If I / we don't do the unecological thing, somebody else will. So, I might as well do it to stay in the game. This applies to weapons development, overfishing, over extraction of resources, ....
• Macro-economic framework based on infinite growth with a linear / finite substrate leading to planetary boundaries for materials, energy, all resources.
• Generator functions

Education is the metacrisis (Zak Stein):

• Sense making - understanding our context
• Identity / self  of humans / humanity no longer in tune with the new context

Left Brain imbalance (Iain McGilchrist):

• Our two hemispheres pay attention to the world in different ways. The right brain is the master and the left the emissary. The emissary has taken on the role of the master, creating havoc. This is reminiscent of the sorcerer's apprentice.
• Confusing the map with the territory - left makes maps, the right is more in tune with the territory. So we are acting in the world with "limited" / "flawed" maps.

This brings up another idea: our "normal" computers work the same way, a foreground process that is doing various tasks such as word process, playing videos, etc. There is a background process (operating system) that is paying attention to a larger context - keyboard input, mouse, disk activity, etc. We can think of these two ways of paying attention as still being in the present / now. It seems we need a third level of processing whose "landscape" includes time, i.e., the implications of our actions through time. So far in our evolution, we have mainly relied on a limited timescape on which to base our actions. The context we have created now seems to require a greater timescape perception capacity.

Energy Pulse Decay ( Nate Hagens ):

• Our current quality of life is due to a "once" only energy pulse - we are using up the energy battery that took millions of years to charge (fossil fuels) at an unsustainable rate. Once the battery gets low,  we are due for a "reset" / great simplification.
• Human "civilization" is like a super organism that is energy blind and using up earth's limited stored energy battery at a prodigious / unsustainable rate.

Game A vs Game B:

• We have been playing game A throughout our history. It has a limited orientation in time and space: actions for survival with little attention to the longer term temporal implication of those actions. Now those implications are leading to a termination scenario.
• Hence the need for a new game, called game B, to avoid the termination effects of game A.

Collapse of Complex Societies (Tainter):

• societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. 
• He recognizes collapse when a society involuntarily sheds a significant portion of its complexity.
• Primer on the theory

Collapse by Algorithmic Governance (Danaher)

Simple Rules, Complex Behavior:

• Consider human species / civilizations as a super organism
• What are some of the rules that create dysfunction, termination possibilities?
• Candidate:
• Functional genesis: there are selection rule(s) for the formation of different functional organs for a complex organism.
• One such rule has to do with what cells (individuals) end up being the neurology / system level decision makers/
• Through most of human history, the selection process has generally picked sociopaths / psychopaths to be the decision makers (leaders).
• The decision making criteria, strategies, and processes for these types of leaders tend to create a great deal of dysfunction.
• Over an extended period of time, this leads to a collapse of the super organism (civilization).
• With the addition of exponential tech, this dysfunction can lead to self (super organism) termination.

Evolution:

• Life changes its context / environment
• That environment can be self terminating to the life that is causing the change
• This happened first with the cyanobacteria that produced oxygen through photosynthesis.
• This poisoned the planet for their kind and caused a self termination.
• We humans may be the next iteration of this pattern. We are doing this in multiple ways:
• Pollution of the biosphere
• Pollution of the info sphere - how we make sense of the world. We no longer have a common understanding of "reality" that is congruent with the actual nature of existence.

Against Collapse