2150 AD (Thea Alexander)

[LoneBear]

Many years ago, I encountered Thea Alexander's book, 2150 AD--one of the very few books that I read cover-to-cover in one sitting. The book is about a future society where ethical behavior has won out against the NWO fear mongering and the bulk of society now lives in a state of Macrophilosophy. When it comes to Sci-Fi, we seldom see positive views of the future, most being along the apocalypse line.

I've recommended this book to a few people and am curious as to their "take" on it. Particularly, if they were able to "read between the lines" past the New Age foundation the book was written on.

[Djchrismac]

I haven't read it yet but will try and track down a copy and let you know once i'm finished with it. I could do with reading a positive fictional story about the future for some escapism.

[Billy]

I haven't read it, either, but like Chris, it is on my rather extensive list of books to purchase

[LoneBear]

Available in the Antiquatis library: 2150 AD (Alexander, Thea) for members of the Virtual Monastery.

[pgolde]

I can't access it with your link, asks me to login when I am already logged in

[Ilkka]

I can't access it with your link, asks me to login when I am already logged in

I think you need to be invited to the actual virtual monastery or what was it called even. There is that sort of thats by invitation only, that LB or maybe Chris can take you in there.

[LoneBear]

Follow the instructions here: Antiquatis PDF library

[Gopi]

I would really second this as well, her book is excellent. To be sure, there are a few threads of Hippy Era thought, but the overall concept is well worth going through.

[DSKlausler]

Good day all,

I just finished reading 2150 AD.

I agree with the macrophilosophy of the 2150 age; I also agree with the microphilosophy of 1976. Maybe more importantly, I reject the supposition that "we are one" whilst dwelling here in 2016 (micro). I believe that, by design, I am indeed an individual here... perhaps learning and preparing for some future time/location where I might be as one with Source. I would like to clarify that this does not mean that I am unethical and anti-One... I simply have had enough of this society, and no longer wish to interact, at all.

Sincerely,

Dave

[Ilkka]

I agree with the macrophilosophy of the 2150 age; I also agree with the microphilosophy of 1976. Maybe more importantly, I reject the supposition that "we are one" whilst dwelling here in 2016 (micro). I believe that, by design, I am indeed an individual here... perhaps learning and preparing for some future time/location where I might be as one with Source. I would like to clarify that this does not mean that I am unethical and anti-One... I simply have had enough of this society, and no longer wish to interact, at all.

What is this Source? What you think it is?
Just curious. I used to believe in that also, got that David Wilcock book about the source field even.

I am also more of an introvert than out going interacting with strangers out there, since the other people seem to be just ordinary. Mostly I see those types that drink alcohol every night or every weekend, my parents are those types and my bigger brother also, they like alcohol.

If you think that source is lets say in the unit-speed-boundary or even the cosmic sector itself, then most likely we are a part of it already as a big universal "one". If source would be beoynd this realm then I still think they (immortals or what have you) have a sort of a "window" to look through about this lower plane of existence. Still part of a grand scale of creation, and beyond that and so on. Although we are "one" we are also individuals, like single rain drops in an ocean, or single atoms in a block of some matter you name it.

[joeyv23]

I agree with the macrophilosophy of the 2150 age; I also agree with the microphilosophy of 1976. Maybe more importantly, I reject the supposition that "we are one" whilst dwelling here in 2016 (micro). I believe that, by design, I am indeed an individual here... perhaps learning and preparing for some future time/location where I might be as one with Source. I would like to clarify that this does not mean that I am unethical and anti-One... I simply have had enough of this society, and no longer wish to interact, at all.

What is this Source? What you think it is?
Just curious. I used to believe in that also, got that David Wilcock book about the source field even.

I am also more of an introvert than out going interacting with strangers out there, since the other people seem to be just ordinary. Mostly I see those types that drink alcohol every night or every weekend, my parents are those types and my bigger brother also, they like alcohol.

If you think that source is lets say in the unit-speed-boundary or even the cosmic sector itself, then most likely we are a part of it already as a big universal "one". If source would be beoynd this realm then I still think they (immortals or what have you) have a sort of a "window" to look through about this lower plane of existence. Still part of a grand scale of creation, and beyond that and so on. Although we are "one" we are also individuals, like single rain drops in an ocean, or single atoms in a block of some matter you name it.

I, too, had similar inclinations at one point in time about Source and "Oneness", however, my mind has changed a bit since then. Immediately after I read 2150 AD, I began reading Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, and Religion which dismantled the rest of the "Wholeness" indoctrination that I had in my mind. To be fair, a part of it still remains as valid, but the terminology surrounding it has changed. The epiphany that Ken had, when trying to find a way to correlate all of the hierarchical structures that we know in these modern times, was that all things are whole parts of something else, each containing parts within it. He uses the word 'holon' for this and moves to dissassociate his concept from hierarchy with the term holarchy. With this, he essentially poked a hole in my wholeness mentality.

Combining this new way of looking at things with the spirit of "Wholeness/Oneness/Unity" inherent in the recently divorced aspect of my worldview leaves me with this: We are not all One, 1, or 1/1, but, rather, are all part of and connected by and to the same existence by way of being a part of said existence. We are whole parts in a larger whole that continues on beyond the scope of my current level of apprehension/comprehension as a whole part of something else, itself. As to the idea of us being single rain drops that fall and add to the body of an ocean. I think that image might be remnant of the "larger than life" status given to the collective consciousness/unconsciousness of mankind. For each drop can be seen as an ocean itself. All that matters in regards to seeing the validity of this is a factor of scale

[Ilkka]

As to the idea of us being single rain drops that fall and add to the body of an ocean. I think that image might be remnant of the "larger than life" status given to the collective consciousness/unconsciousness of mankind. For each drop can be seen as an ocean itself.

Lets try again then.
"One tree in a whole forest of trees every single one is unique". I think this is much better, could be put another more better sounding way though. Just came up to me when I looked to my left outside the terrace window there is a pine forest, with few other species but mainly pines. I see that simplest material objects can be perfectly (atoms, molecules etc.) identical, but more complex objects and then living ones totally unique, with exeption for microbial lifeforms. They tend to be identical but they are also among the simplest lifeforms, just like minerals and alike. It is quite intriguing that we are made out of these simplest materials, only to form most complex ones, there is a sort of leap from one to another much/exactly like the unit speed boundary between material and cosmic sectors, which I imagine is just that what separates us from inanimate objects/matter.

I was thinking about that "larger than life" what it is. I think it must be evolution, since "smaller than life" would be kind of death and life in its wholeness is just staying as it is procreation, survival of the species, at least the common concept of it, a norm of sorts. Truely though I know life is in itself evolution or trying to do so.
Not sure if evolution is now going the same pace as Earths evolving process, as in more subtle rise and not jumping suddenly, like a child thats just hit the puberty, but more like an adult growing old and wise (some of us at least).

[LoneBear]

What you folks are talking about is the difference between an inanimate aggregate (a drop of water returning to the ocean) and a biological ecosystem (trees in forest). Wilber's holons are ecosystems, which is why they do not fit into a hierarchy.

The New Age "all is one" stuff is a hierarchy, where "one" is subdivided into smaller parts. But if you look at the RS, unity is everywhere... unit speed, unit space, unit time, unit motion, discrete units... unity is a datum--a reference of measurement--not a "thing" to be chopped up into pieces. For example, can you ship me a box of 45 miles-per-hour?

The single, biggest problem people have with the RS is not being able to think in terms of speed, because we are used to "actors on a stage." People try to convert a "unit of motion" into a "box of motion" and it just doesn't work. When you look at numbers in the RS, you have to think in terms of the speedometer in a car... when it says 45 mph, you don't end up with 45 "miles" in a box in the trunk in one hour. It is just a measurement of the rate of change.

I find it convenient to think of "motion" as the numbers on a contour map (like elevations in a mountain range). Sea level is your "unity," where positive numbers indicate land and negative numbers indicate ocean. That sea-level unity is all over the planet--not in one place--and cannot be broken into bits. But it can be used as a reference to find out which way is "up" and "down" relative to it.

When you understand unity in that fashion, then the hierarchy is only one side--either the up or down (material or cosmic), a cascade of speeds either slowing down or speeding up.

The holon is the ecosystem of all those hierarchies working together--the side-to-side relationship like brothers and sisters, versus the hierarchy of ancestry.

At least that is how I understand it.

[Tulan]

We are whole parts in a larger whole that continues on beyond the scope of my current level of apprehension/comprehension as a whole part of something else, itself

It's very easy to get caught in recursion, I know I did - and still do sometimes - on a lot of topics, reducing a complex thing to its constituent components in order to understand it is completely valid but also over-used because it was so effective (every problem looks like a nail); interesting to note that there's a certain kind of comedy to reductionism too.



So how do you begin to understand something that is infinitely recursive? You use a combination of reductionist thinking and systems thinking: reduce to the essential principles or properties (instead of components - note that principles and properties are temporal in nature while components are spatial) and then using those principles or properties you can lift whatever emergent phenomena you're trying to understand, into a useful context.

Reduction to components and then folding into a whole requires a lot of working memory which means you can run out of it, hence you need to "tail-call optimize" the recursive step (to borrow from computer science a ltitle) which is basically just "cleaning up after yourself" on each step down the recursion you take hence. Though it is interesting to note that you can run out of working memory, even when cleaning up after yourself, if each step is non-immediate (in Software it is known as non-strict) - i.e you "generate" a thing to be evaluated for each step in the recursion and then fold them all together when you're ready for the answer, this doesn't work well with infinite sequences; note that you never see Mandelbrot sequences starting from the leafs!

However, interestingly, reduction to principles or properties and lifting into another context requires comparatively little working memory and you can even map objects in one category to other categories very easily without "blowing the stack" (or, running out of memory) - this is what's so exciting about the Reciprocal System because the postulates provide a set of principles that form a category with "mappings" to the cardinal categories space and time (as well as many other categories but I'll leave it there) and you can analyze the similarities between the different mappings and categories to derive mappings to other categories and to also discover new categories.

I hope that is helpful to someone, this is an interesting topic so it's fun that it came up

[joeyv23]

It's very easy to get caught in recursion, I know I did - and still do sometimes - on a lot of topics, reducing a complex thing to its constituent components in order to understand it is completely valid but also over-used because it was so effective (every problem looks like a nail); interesting to note that there's a certain kind of comedy to reductionism too.

[...]

However, interestingly, reduction to principles or properties and lifting into another context requires comparatively little working memory and you can even map objects in one category to other categories very easily without "blowing the stack" (or, running out of memory) - this is what's so exciting about the Reciprocal System because the postulates provide a set of principles that form a category with "mappings" to the cardinal categories space and time (as well as many other categories but I'll leave it there) and you can analyze the similarities between the different mappings and categories to derive mappings to other categories and to also discover new categories.

I expect Ken Wilber might very well have had the problem that you're referring to with running out of memory. I haven't done the work as he did to reduce everything to fit into his structure. For the workings of my mind and current worldview, I've taken the structure as presented and mapped it to the RS's discrete unit postulate. In the context as described by Ken, the idea of Whole-parts fits into how I currently see things. As far as reducing everything to recursion, I can't deny having spent a great deal of my time in this life looking at things this way. It happens less frequently now that I've developed some understanding of the RS, but there are some topics that I find the technique to be useful still, specifically in one of my fields of interest, psychology and the analysis thereof. Analysis itself begs for reduction to constituent parts. The trick that I've found is helpful for me is to remember at the end of it all that regardless of the configuration of temporal-spatial structures that constitute a person's psyche, at the end of it, I have to zoom back out and see the person's net motion. Seeing the parts / discrete units within the discrete unit whole are fine, so long as it is understood that those parts, together, do constitute a whole - and that whole could recursively be seen as a part of something greater, but to let the recursion end at, again, the person's net motion.

[LoneBear]

So how do you begin to understand something that is infinitely recursive?

By first understanding that recursion is only infinite in artificial realities, like mathematics and computer programming. In Nature, everything is finite--including finite recursion.

The problem arises when one tries to project a scalar speed--a constantly changing "scale"--into a coordinate system. By analogy, if you project angular velocity into a linear reference system, in one dimension you get simple harmonic motion (cos, sliding back and forth on one axis) and in two dimensions, you get rotation (cos, sin). If you notice both appear to "loop," either back-and-forth or spinning, over the same path--but that's the shadow of the motion, not the motion, itself.

The projection of scalar motion results in "infinite" recursion because the coordinate system is incapable of representing that kind of motion, directly. But once you realize that recursion is nothing more than a "scalar speed," you can view the concept as speed--rather than shrinking/expanding coordinates.

This is also applicable in psychology, where people try to analyze a problem by breaking it down into smaller chunks, ad infinitum, or assembling pieces into bigger pictures, also ad infinitum. What is important is the change between the recursive steps (the "delta"), not the steps, themselves, because that change will be the concept behind the recursive projection.

In programming, you create that "change" as a recursive function. The function is constant between all depths of recursion, as it is creating it. So you need to reverse-engineer the function to understand why it is creating the recursion.

As Larson stated in the Q&A section of his lecture, after 30 years of study on the RS, he concluded that the Universe was "nothing more than abstract change, in three dimensions."

[Tulan]

But once you realize that recursion is nothing more than a "scalar speed," ...

Is it accurate to say that the time-complexity cases (worst, average, best) of an algorithm is defining the upper, middle, and lower bounds of its scalar speeds?

What is important is the change between the recursive steps (the "delta"), not the steps, themselves, because that change will be the concept behind the recursive projection.

This is very interesting and coincides with the timing of some reading I've been doing of research into conflict-free, delta-merged, replicated data types in distributed systems theory. The idea being that while conflict-free replicated data types solve the majority of the conflicts you can experience in an eventually consistent distributed system it does not address the problem of scale because each node, in order to merge the set of persisted state-based operations, the entire state needs to be collated from the participating peers.

Their solution is to instead use deltas of the state change (instead of passing "the whole state" around) which is interesting because it eliminates the need to synchronously merge the state (which at the scale of millions of peers, falls apart) by any one node to provide an answer which means the "background gossip / anti-entropy repair" can carry all of the information needed to produce the final merged answer - so you are theoretically limited by the speed of the asynchronous gossip protocol which is significantly better in time-complexity than a synchronous merge performed by each peer with the whole peer-set.

The application of this to psychology and traversal of the tiers (in Spiral Dynamics) is interesting too, instead of looking at it [traversal] as a personal linear advancement (a vector - also reminding me of the chief hilarity of the Wanderers "one-upping" each other) it is instead a "personal scalar speed" and this highlights the importance of internal and external relationships over internal and external things (I'm using the word relationship in its generalized sense and not in the romantic one); you only have a reference to someone or something if you have a relationship.

I want to expand on my thoughts further but have to get some work done...

[tallpaul]

Anyone want to send me a link to read this? Evidently I'm not authorized to access the library.

[Ilkka]

Anyone want to send me a link to read this? Evidently I'm not authorized to access the library.

Follow the instructions here: Antiquatis PDF library

I belive that link will get you there.

[aaron]

I read this last week per Lonebear´s recommendation.

It is indeed a great read. It certainly is wrought with NEW AGE narratives, but nonetheless the evolved "Macro Society" for the future vs. the current state of humanity´s self destruction is a nice change.

2 core phrases throughout the book I thought valuable were:

"Desire and Belief", and "Every Failure is a Success"

Would be nice to ask C.I. about those megalithic silicon trees of the ancient past:)

[Billy]

Hey Aaron,

So nice to see you on here. Hope that all is going well with you in your life.

[aaron]

Thanks Billy,

Yeah I have been out of the loop for a while but have been trying to read up a bit these last 2 weeks. I also sent you an email.

Regards,

Aaron

[DSKlausler]

Follow the instructions here: Antiquatis PDF library

Anyone know of a GERMAN version of this book?

[animus]

Anyone know of a GERMAN version of this book?

So far, this book has not been translated into German.