Humans On The Loop 16 - Cory Allen (De-Anthromorphizing The Universe)
De-Anthropomorphizing The Universe / Science & The Filter Bubble
with Cory Allen, Audio Mastering Engineer & Mindfulness Trainer, Host of The Astral Hustle Podcast
http://cory-allen.comhttp://releaseintonow.com
“It’s just all what is. And I accept every state of being as glorious.”
Two dedicated truth-seekers and cosmos-abiders make a lot of dirty jokes and somehow manage to harmonize their angles on the practice of rigorous inquiry into the nature of reality and consciousness…
We have a totally tangential, irreverent, penetrating conversation. (Luckily for you it’s audio only.) Somehow it all hangs together…much like Cory and I would, if they ever found out about the unrecorded parts of this chat. (Kidding!)
• The paradox of having a podcast that emphasizes memory and continuity having SO. MANY. RECORDING. GLITCHES. Bizarre plumage that doesn’t fossilize and how truly precious little we know of the ancient world.
• Noticing what weirds you out: your surprise reveals your expectation.
• Cory Allen’s “creepy” super intense memory – and memory versus recordings – isn’t it kind of wrong to rely on recordings to justify or validate the way we feel right now?
• Feathered dinosaurs screwing up our whole perception of dinosaurs as monsters. Scales versus feathers and how humans are so quick to judge based on the surfaces…
“Got a face? We’ll give you the time of day. Worms? You’re going to be laboratory experiments. Snakes? We’re going to use you as a symbol for evil in the entire course of Western Religion because you have no arms and legs. You’ve got a face, but you’re the face of evil. Try again. But rabbits? Dogs? Cats? We take care of them because they’re furry.”
• Encountering the dragon on the edge of the map and realizing that it’s you…versus not being able to see the faces of the people you’re firing on as a drone pilot. The closer you get to “it” the more it is you.
• The value of noticing our projections and how we colonialism the world “out there” with our own ideas and imaginations. Everything we think about HUMAN consciousness is just CONSCIOUSNESS.
• Taking the human element out of consciousness.
• Vocabulary Word: Allopoeisis: the process of becoming the other.
• Talking with animals to explore the nature of consciousness from as far beyond our human filter as we can. (How much are we anthropomorphizing Koko the Gorilla’s command of language?)
• Watch out for clamping down on the word “is” when trying to relate your personal experience…as soon as you’re talking about “how it is” you’re not paying attention to your own subjectivity and recognizing its role in your experience.
• We never see beyond the virtual reality of our nervous system, but it’s also the case that there is no separation between self and other in the ecosystem that precipitates “them” “both.”
“On the one hand you can never really know the other. On the other hand, you never know anything BUT the other.”
“Because you ARE the other.”
“Right.”
• Seeing through the academic pretense of objectivity to the necessity of describing the full details of your instruments (including your own nervous system) used in your experiments. The impossibility of perfectly replicating an experiment. Data from studies of psi phenomena show self-verifying results dependent on the belief sets of the experimenter – both positive and negative – even in very tightly controlled and blinded studies.
• The politics, stress, absurdity, and pressure of the academic world and how it inhibits the very exploration to which it’s devoted. Cory’s friend who worked on the roundworm C. elegant and the nature of his research…and near-madness undergoing the completion of his PhD program.
• The social construction of knowledge: this is where “facts” come from, people!
• “School” and “Scholar” comes from a word that meant “leisure.”
• The more narrowly focused our attention, the more we have to compete for one another’s attention. The social ills of the filter bubble. The diminishment of chance encounters and surprise interactions because of our constricted and self-reinforcing “reality tunnels.”
• The Nutcracker is an awesome, very self-aware ballet…which Cory would have never seen if he hadn’t gotten outside of his own bubble.
• The documentary “Century of the Self” and how marketing has gone from advertising products to advertising lifestyles and appealing to the consumer’s ego.
• How diversity and redundancy are essential to the health and vitality of society (as with any ecosystem). How we NEED oppositional perspectives to enrich the whole – and what would happen if Trump and Clinton supporters could recognize this? When will this be common sense?
• Michael’s spiritual practice of listening to radio stations he wouldn’t ordinarily choose and finding out why millions of people tune in and enjoy those stations.
“You can appreciate it without liking it.”
“You have to look at it long enough until you see yourself in it.”
• Advertising fake products from the future.
• The intimacy of evolution and extinction, entropy and complexity.
• Astrosexuality and the CRISPR-induced end of identity politics. The future of identity: radically creative and diverse, or a mushy bowl of oatmeal?
“I think everyone will become so nuanced in their identity that it becomes a tapestry…everyone’s going to be SO individual that we’re all going to be exactly alike.”
• If your social media followers were actually following you around in the street, and you had to turn around and talk to however many of them, how would that change the way you think about your platform as a creator? (“How would it change what you’re saying and how absurd it is?”)
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