Nilsi

I'm worried about the rivalrous games myself, I just don't think this problem is solved on the level of narrative. Narrative is way too relative and unstable. Just look at me. I used to be very marxist-egalitarian and was fully bought into the story and now I'm a ruthless sales guy working in advertising. What went wrong? Did I get corrupted by some evil postmodern ideology, or is it that things are too complex and dynamic to contain them in some linear narrative/ethical system?

What is this? Speak up or shut up - no one will listen to you, if you can't even be bothered to speak with the minimally required level of loudness and clarity, to still sound like a human.

Dont push it Well see how post-post anything you are...

My God, youre speaking some sense for once. Youre absolutely correct: antagonism is right at the core of reality - its what drives evolution and all narrative for that matter. The idea of one grand narrative at the end of history, or whatever, is the grandest of fantasies.

He wants to create/take some grand narrative and shove it down everyone's throats - in the name of the "Good." That's what European missionaries did, when they colonized the rest of the world and tried to convert all the "savages" to the "one true religion" of Christianity - of course, all in the name of the "Good."

In what world is dialectics a zero sum game? When I challenge your views and by extension subvert your grand narrative, we both grow - so what I'm talking about is already antirivalrous in nature. I'm not advocating kinetic warfare. I precisely want to battle this out in the realm of ideas, instead of the trenches. "Our ideas die, so we don't have to" - Alfred North Whitehead

I WISH I COULD SHOW YOU WHEN YOU ARE FOOLISH OR IN DENIAL THE ASTONISHING DEPTH OF YOUR OWN IGNORANCE

Conflict aka dialectic is right at the core of life and evolution - getting rid of conflict is literally death. "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony." - Heraclitus

I'm not saying all narratives are made equal and I'm also not saying that solving complex systemic issues, the way Schmachtenberger does, is necessarily a fruitful activity. I'm just trying to rid you of your neo-colonialist fantasies.

By accepting that different people have different narratives. What you call unity is uniformity. True unity is not contingent on whether I'm a fascist or a Christian.

Not sure at what point this communication failed, but we're definitely talking past each other lol.

Please don't make me argue my ironic atheist perspective any further.

Why do you think Schmachtenberger always avoids direct questions about his values and principles and instead rambles on about externalities and interconnectedness? He understands that any linear narrative will inevitably turn into ideology and create injustice.

No. There is actually a good talk by Bret Weinstein and Jim Rutt (two members of the original Game B team), where they mention that the major reason why the Game B project got abandoned was, because one half of the group was demanding a "grand cosmic narrative" and the other half wanted to create a rational framework to tackle complex systemic issues. The latter of which is what people like Schmachtenberger and Hall work on. Nothing intrinsically wrong with grand narratives, of course. In fact, I'm all for them - but I wouldn't pretend that they are anything more than utopian fantasies, that privilege some part of reality over another.

The concept of God may have been useful in archaic times to give people a sense of purpose and to create social order - but think about all the wars that have been waged in the name of God... Also, why speculate about God, when there are so many immediate problems in this world, that we can actually come to understand and fix - using the power of technology. I'm agnostic as to whether God exists or not - but if you claim God exists, you have to prove it somehow; otherwise that's just fundamentalism -- and think about all the wars...

What do you mean?

Sweet, which one are you going to? I could probably catch the one in Cologne. It's literally one day after my buddy's birthday, who lives in Cologne (so I'll be there anyways) - talk about perfect timing.

Who is "we?" Take Judaism for example: it emerged in ancient Israel as a reaction to their enslavement and devastation - a "grand narrative" to give the "chosen people" a justification for their suffering. Same with Christianity in ancient Rome. If your story doesn't address all sentient beings (and by extension all of Reality), it's nothing more than an ideology (in the Marxist sense of justifying the power of the ruling class; - e.g. of the "good" slaves ruling over the "evil" masters, in the case of Christianity; of the "superior" capitalists ruling over the "inferior" working class etc.) The whole notion of a "grand narrative" is absolutely preposterous. If anything, there has to be a conglomerate of grand narratives to draw from - which is more akin to a postmodern individualism, than it is to some fundamentalist one size fits all ruling ideology. What we get when we take this issue seriously is something akin to Ken Wilber's or Daniel Schmachtenberger's work - which is more a framework for thinking through complex social issues, than it is a "grand narrative."

Zizek embodies everything that's great about post-structuralism - no one plays with cultural relativity more masterfully than him -- and no intellectual is even remotely as funny as him

This guy reduced his age by 5 years in 7 months leveraging cutting edge science and technology. Considering that life was able to bootstrap itself from virtually nothing, it is not so hard to imagine an organism staying alive forever with the right medical interventions.

More empathy = more ways to psychologically exploit and manipulate others = profit. In all seriousness - I'm actually a very nice and empathetic person behind all the madness.

The 21st century will be one hell of a trip

This will be my final form. U mad?

That's fair. So, I have the bodily sovereignty to leverage synthetic biology to biohack myself into the Übermensch and mogg all you pathetic mortals, yes?

Where do you draw the line? Do you allow parents to abort a pregnancy, if it's clear that the child is going to be severely disabled? What about wearing a condom or being on birth control, when you don't want to have a baby? "Firmly disagreeing with eugenics" is a big nothing burger.