annie aronburg » Tue May 26, 2020 7:46 am wrote:
What if ... the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray? And what if the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’? What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?
What if...we change that 6 to a 7, then an 8 and then a 9, and so on until all music eventually is owned by one corporation, down-loaded onto a single circuit and lost in a black hole?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Univ ... udios_fire
This has been my thesis for some time. The difference is that I don't ascribe it, necessarily, to conscious human planning and ingenuity. Much of the blank space in many conspiracy theories can easily be filled by the 'organising principle' as conscious/unconscious designer.
By way of example, take a random insect, an organism desperately trying to survive. Due to it's size it's easy for predators to locate and pick it off. Somehow, as a group, this insect formulates a coherent and conscious desire, "I would love to look like a dried up leaf so that things which would normally eat me just pass on by." Somehow over time this organism experiences useful birth defects which lead to an insect that looks like a leaf. How were the precise genetic changes made, including all of the intermediate changes which were neither useful nor survivable, to allow this insect to look like a leaf? The present scientific explanation is that these changes take place over unimaginable times scales wherein all possible random genetic changes occurred while only the useful ones were preserved through their usefulness, their ability to confer a reproductive advantage. But this description doesn't really fit the scale of the bill.
If we imagine that all life conveys bio-feedback to some level of a conscious thinking self, perhaps even the same self existing throughout all life but with many different faces, a vast but compartmentalised self, which has the capability to shuffle genes around, and there are indeed such examples in nature at the lowest levels of being, to create complex results through fairly minor changes. It can do this through knowing the effects beforehand, it can anticipate future effects of small changes here and now (independent of time in some specific but not impossible way). All this speculative entity would need to effect is the first strike of the billiard ball while physics + life do the rest.
Imagine an animal in a life or death situation, it has an appreciation of it's predicament, it feels anguish because it knows this predicament could have been avoided or mitigated, it has specific goals as yet undone, things it wished to do, things this independent consciousness, let's call it Consciousness X, is alerted to by the level of anguish. Perhaps Consciousness X zooms in, attracted by this anguish, to see what happened and what else needs to be done in future. It does this for all lifeforms from bacteria to human beings. The data from each animal is useful. The animal in it's moment of extremis, in it's death throes, in it's pain and suffering records those final moments or the information is somehow recorded for it, and something exists which can help future generations navigate the same peril but better. And so on. Sheldrakes Morphic field fulfils this role.
Imagine all of this going on for countless millennia. Imagine a life form develops which can hack these and other natural mechanisms. Imagine it can alter it's future forms with a higher degree of precision. Imagine it becomes fully self aware. Imagine it believes that everything it does is due to it's own cleverness, rather than to billions of years of trial and error plus this mysterious Consciousness X, as already speculated. As countless self improving iterations of self become available for analysis, self itself evolves.
This is something akin to where we are now in my view. We have godlike powers we've inherited and we have godlike powers we've created, but we don't know who, what or why we are, yet we create explanations of all of these things and pass those on to Consciousness X and to ourselves via culture, even as Consciousness X attempts to pass its view on to us. Perhaps some people exist who can create complex organisations of other organisms through asking this central intelligence, Consciousness X, to provide them. Everything from a rain dance to a complex chain of espionage have such effects. These things aren't necessarily designed by us, as much as the desire is registered by a higher consciousness and acted upon to create survival opportunities. Imagine these processes are 'bio-hacked,' and produced on demand by motivated players. God as slave to man.
The net realisation should be that we can change it all, today, by believing different things to those we currently believe, by having different goals, values, knowledge and understanding. The horror is that those who have hi-jacked these complex interactions which are comprised of all life, do not really understand that they are in fact alive. Their best scientific model was, for a time, that we and they were an illusion of conscious life, not really conscious and only apparently alive, the corollary of which is that all other life be treated accordingly, as lifeless and unconscious.
All magic, all unexplained phenomena, all experience of the spirit occurs from within these natural life systems in my view, barely understood, hardly recognised except mostly, unconsciously, and affecting us profoundly at all times in all places. The fact of consciousness is amazing enough, the fact of existence is doubly so. Consciousness + existence should spur us to better things but regularly ends up being realised as some alpha male wet dream, for obvious enough biological and social reasons, but without realising we could make those reasons less obvious and thus escape the fate we've seemingly designed for ourselves and which appears to be coming toward us in an onrushing conclusion.
When Anders Behring Breivik was blowing up his country's government and shooting the children of it's brightest and best on Utoya island, he was obeying some organising instinct none of us, nor even him could see directly. He made a stab at it in his manifesto, but his manifesto was also the clearest argument against him acting alone, it contained too many complex moving parts outside his conscious horizon, it was visionary in some senses which contradict his narrow racial narrative and his limited political perspective. He was created and in turn he created an imperative and in turn this imperative created for him the possibility of a seemingly improbable series of events becoming possible. What he was not doing was acting alone. Indeed, even if he believed he was, an organising principle was listening to or driving him on, to the degree that it's effects were not within his control or even within his conscious horizon, but they were well within the conscious horizon of Consciousness X. Likewise Manson. Likewise all the rest of them.
Human desire can warp natural systems in all sorts of ways. It should be used sparingly and with considerable maturity. Yet we live in a culture which is dedicated to eliciting desires. This is not accidental. It is the machinery of life and evolution co-opted to unnatural ends. As I have speculated before, we might well, through life and evolution, be the way nature has created for moving the seeds of life to distant pastures, farther afield than anywhere on earth. Our dreams of space may not even be ours. This does not necessitate that we shall ever consciously realise that the source of our inventiveness is entirely outside ourselves, even if it were. I do believe it is, but the majority view is fairly parochial and arranged against such a realisation. There are the glimmerings of the beginning of a dialogue with our nature, with nature herself, with Consciousness X, but perhaps it is far too late and perhaps far too little can be done. The signs are there to be followed, to be misunderstood, mocked, derided, ignored or acted upon unwisely.
Hope some of that makes sense to someone.