'Humanity's Phase Shift', Daniel Schmachtenberger

[kfm27917]

watch the following youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQRz...ature=youtu.be

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nQRzxEobWco

Rebel Wisdom

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a futurist, evolutionary philosopher and strategist, and social engineer.

This conversation with David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom looks at the growing civilisation-level crisis that we are beginning to see around us, and looks at what a genuine 'phase shift' for human progress might look like.

Rebel Wisdom is a platform for the biggest ideas around. http://www.rebelwisdom.co.uk/

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by kfm27917 (here)
watch the following youtube

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nQRzxEobWco

Thank you! I really appreciated listening to this. I'm going to look up some more of Schmachtenberger's interviews and writing.

* The YouTube text:

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a futurist, evolutionary philosopher and strategist, and social engineer. This conversation with David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom looks at the growing civilisation-level crisis that we are beginning to see around us, and looks at what a genuine 'phase shift' for human progress might look like.

[Bill Ryan]

More about Daniel Schmachtenberger, from his own website. (He hasn't got a Wikipedia page. Why not?! This guy deserves to be very influential. He's very very smart.)

• https://civilizationemerging.com/about

~~~



This website is my personal blog, focused on exploring topics that I find meaningful and relevant to being human well, individually and collectively. Specifically, thoughts on the future of civilization, the sensitivity and potential of our current situation, and how we might navigate the path ahead.

Where it serves the purposes above, I might also investigate philosophical, scientific, and technological topics that critically inform our thinking about the future.

Biography:

Growing up home-schooled, Daniel had early exposure to design science (Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Fresco, Permaculture, etc.), systems science and complexity (Fritjof Capra, Stuart Kauffman, etc.), philosophy and psychology (eastern and western approaches), and activism (animal rights, environmental issues, social justice, etc.)

His passion has always been at the intersection of these topics – specifically, facilitating the emergence into a mature civilization – that can prevent otherwise impending catastrophes, remediate existing damage, make possible a radically higher quality of life for all sustainably, and support greater realization of our individual and collective potential.

Daniel works on a number of projects related to these goals.

He is also the director or Research and Development at Neurohacker Collective, working on complexity informed solutions for the future of well-being science, medicine, and evolving human capacity. He hosts a podcast there exploring those topics.

He also posts on more personal topics on FB @danielschmachtenberger

Regarding the topics on this site, Daniel’s thoughts are inspired and informed by the great work of many people, beyond what can be obviously accredited. His thoughts are particularly influenced by his collaborators, most notably (for the topics on this blog) Forrest Landry, Jordan Hall, and Zachary Stein. (Meaningful influence came from his collaborations with Bret Weinstein, Michael Vassar, Dave Snowden, Bryce Hiddysmith, Nelson Del Rio, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and many others.)

Intellectual Inspirations:

Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Fresco, Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, David Bohm, Krishnamurti, Bill Mollison, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ilya Prigogine, Stuart Kauffman, Ervin Laszlo, James Carse, Arthur Koestler, Vedanta, Lao Tzu, Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, Mahatma Gandhi, Victor Frankl, Buddha, Anthony De Mello, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Stanslov Grof, Hafiz

Topics addressed on this site:

Macroeconomics, governance, sense-making, collective intelligence, biomimicry, complexity, systems theory, forecasting, existential and catastrophic risks, infrastructure, philosophy, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, resilience, anti-fragility, evolutionary theory, science, memetics, information theory, cybernetics, game theory, whole system design, emergence, synergetics, jurisprudence, technology, existential risk, choice, coherence, meaning, self-organization, autopoiesis, psychology, psychopathology, conditioning, ontological design, language, culture, semiotics, hermeneutics, coordination, intelligence, sentience, sovereignty, well-being, medicine, education, therapy, relationships, communication.

[DeDukshyn]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
This guy deserves to be very influential. He's very very smart.)
.

Indeed.


Edit: ... but why the members only section?

[Sue (Ayt)]

That was truly great. I so admire such intelligent people like him!
An amazing synch for me, too, was to see the name "Forrest Landry" and the link on Daniel's blog that Bill posted above, as I was once heavily involved in an internet mail-list (before forums) where Forrest Landry would share his early (and very heavy) metaphysical theories. I loved seeing his name pop up here, as this was a very tight group where we shared our early musings and experiences.

This led me to find this long interview where Daniel interviews Forrest which I am looking forward to listening to:
WHAT IS ETHICS? AN EXPLORATION OF CHOICE AND LOVE

Love is that which enables choice. Love is always stronger than Fear. Always choose on the basis of Love.”
– Forrest Landry

[kfm27917]

DeDukshyn:
I am a fairly new member learning the ropes of this blog ! The members only section was the only place
where it said "new Thread"

[Franny]

Posted by kfm27917 (here)
DeDukshyn:
I am a fairly new member learning the ropes of this blog ! The members only section was the only place
where it said "new Thread"

Hey kfm29712, welcome to Avalon, good to have you here I really appreciate the video you posted, thanks so much for that.

You can post a new thread in any of the sub forums, see the screen grab below. The button is at the top left.



It's also helpful to the forum members if you can add a description of the video you are posting. The title may not be as descriptive as you would like so it's a good idea to edit it if needed.

If you have questions about any of these things, just ask, we will be happy to help.

Happy posting!

[kfm27917]

to those who have Facebook account I would recommend following Daniel Schmachtenberger there at
https://www.facebook.com/geosol114?epa=SEARCH_BOX

[Hervé]

Hello kfm27917, welcome to Avalon!


I moved your thread to the "Human Condition" subforum where such an impressive quality of expressed "thinking" will have more visibility and exposure.

[DeDukshyn]

I have to say ... this guy succinctly presents the absolute closest representation of what is actually required for humanity to get back on track to where we should be in the grand scheme of things and how we need to interact with our environment to stop being a self destructive parasite.

Its amazing how in a few words he is able to extremely accurately articulate exactly the few base problems that are the root cause of all of humanities issues, and then provide the base root solutions to those problems equally as well.

If anyone might be wondering what is meant by this "phase shift" without having seen the video, it just means we need completely throw away the current ways of thinking and develop a whole new perspective on how things actually work best, with the new system having no relationship whatsoever with the old.

I cannot express enough the accuracy of his views.

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by DeDukshyn (here)
If anyone might be wondering what is meant by this "phase shift" without having seen the video, it just means we need completely throw away the current ways of thinking and develop a whole new perspective on how things actually work best, with the new system having no relationship whatsoever with the old.

I cannot express enough the accuracy of his views.

We used to discuss this "shift" as a morph into a "new paradigm". (in that old mail-list/discussion group) It could even happen incredibly fast, as we saw it, once the ignition point, zero point, resonance (or however we choose to label it) is reached. We sometimes thought of it happening as an alchemical, transmutational, process, as in the sudden growth of crystals. Forrest Landry plunged deeply into metaphysical concept... truly a genius, in my eyes. So encouraging to see these types are still influencing perspectives. Gives me hope.
(found this short video of Forrest)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iAmLRLc4ffk

[Bill Ryan]

More from this extremely high quality thinker, in August 2019. Highly recommended.

The War on Sensemaking

What can we trust? Why is the 'information ecology' so damaged, and what would it take to make it healthy?

This is a fundamental question, because without good sensemaking, we cannot even begin to act in the world. It is also a central concern in what many are calling the "meaning crisis", because what is meaningful is connected to what is real.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ

Part 2:

"How information is weaponised by all sides, and how to survive in an environment where nothing can be trusted."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9QGrffjOFko

[onawah]

I shared it here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1330544
Really helpful discussion for getting a much broader, more objective perspective on what is going on, on so many levels in how we learn and communicate, from the controversies about "Q" to "climate change", to elections and so much more...
In part 2 starting around 41 minutes in, he describes what must be taken into account when considering the question as to whether or not something like the Q threads should be public on the Avalon forum or not.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
More from this extremely high quality thinker, in August 2019. Highly recommended.
]

[onawah]

Making Sense of Sensemaking
Sep 4, 2019
Rebel Wisdom

"This three-way emergent conversation is unlike anything we've released before. It features three of the world's foremost systems thinkers and futurists - Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jamie Wheal - and has been by far our most popular members-only film. We're now releasing it on the main channel as part of our Collective Intelligence Series.

What is decentralised collective intelligence and how do we create it? Why does 'sensemaking' matter so much right now? What is coherence and how can we develop it? Take a deep dive with Hall, Wheal and Schmachtenberger into these questions and many more.

You can find the first film in the Collective Intelligence series here: https://youtu.be/6PldNSp3tpU

Listen to this as an audio podcast: https://rebelwisdom.podbean.com/e/mak... "

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Es_WTEgZHE

(I've just started listening to this myself, so I can't review it, but I thought it would be good to bring it to the attention of others who might want to test the waters.)

[araucaria]

Daniel Schmachtenberger and his friends are indeed a very refreshing experience - nearly all message (signal) and very little messenger (noise). But they are re-freshing as opposed to brand new, which I submit is a very good thing. Standing on the shoulders of giants is how one gets somewhere. However, we must not be put off by where they are coming from. Marx and Hegel have become dirty words – Marxists, communists etc on a par with Islamists and all the other nasty terms we use to dismiss whole swathes of the population. The major problem is precisely to keep everyone on board. Daniel says his system has not been tried before; this is because it has always fallen at the first hurdle degenerating into class and other warfare. Nowadays you have Hegel demonized/caricatured as the supposed initiator of “problem reaction solution”. He was much more than that.

We are talking about Marx’s philosophy/epistemology, which is a method, i.e. no more than a mental tool or idea, before you get to flesh it out with things like economics. Hegelian dialectics is a part of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and the beauty of it is that it APPLIES TO ITSELF. In other words, idealism and materialism actually work hand in hand, being themselves one everyday instance of how this works. When you flesh out an idea and then go into reverse, “think through a concrete instance”, and back again, you understand what Marx means by “process”. It is a self-sharpening tool that actually gets sharper with use. Just a little practice with higher order thinking of this kind takes you into realms that are a far cry from our everyday understanding. Which means that if we fail to keep everyone on board, we soon end up talking amongst ourselves, forming, yes, a breakaway society. The people theorizing about a breakaway society are actually in danger of creating one of their own which they call the alternative community. The challenge is to keep everyone on board so that the alternative becomes mainstream. This will not be done by any form of antagonism but by Hegelian synthesis drawn from confronting thesis and antithesis (both or all sides of any “argument”).

One thing to understand is how the label materialism itself is a mistake; “materialism” is an idealistic term for the process, which is actually idealism and materialism moving back and forth like a piston producing perpendicular linear motion.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...iston3_ANI.gif


The emphasis is on materialism (the “fleshing out”) because the bias to date has been too much on the idealism (the “idea”). Again, we have not even got to politics, but this is seen as leftist when in fact it is fundamentally balanced and basically neutral. World politics has always leaned so far to the right that any progress towards neutrality will appear to be a far leftist (“progressive”) revolution. True, Marxists themselves historically have not always grasped this either, so it is not a matter of blaming one side or the other: it is a matter of no longer seeing things in terms of sides. If our common humanity is to mean anything at all, it is that we are all on the same side. Hence the very notion of collective earnest endeavour is neither of the left nor right. The “collective”, “solidarity” and such are notions that we also find in religious circles: the “church”, “communion” “love thy neighbour as thyself”... We have been weaponizing synonyms as if they were antonyms – duality. Let’s get on the same page: tolerance is an idealistic word; it is also a technical term describing the limits within which cogs will run smoothly together.

Let me flesh out the above ideas with two examples. One is taken from art and is intended to illustrate and back up the other, taken from Marx.

First, Impressionism (another confusing label) is notably based on the idea that a degree of vagueness is more exact than precision. A snowscape by Monet actually comes closer to the real perception of fresh-driven snow when very little pure white is used.
https://image.posterlounge.fr/img/pr...6_poster_l.jpg

Snow is white in laboratory conditions and in children’s paintings, but otherwise it can be anything but. So whiteness is an idealistic concept contradicted by the “reality” of our perceptions. Likewise, Manet’s famous black, when enlarged to show individual pixels, sometimes contains very little black at all, mostly deep violets perhaps. Here “black” is low resolution terminology attempting to describe a high res image. The bottom line is that nothing is entirely black or white.

So Manet and Monet, who were close in more than name only, both operate by increasing the resolution, which amount s to adding new information without removing the existing data. A low res image of e.g. 360 pixels per square inch is basically full of gaps making space for many more pixels that might tell an altogether different story. This is not mere colour theory but real art on display in museums. Notice how a present day analogy helps understand the efforts of the past: the same process is at work.

Now take these insights to Marx’s philosophy, applied to the economic theories of Adam Smith but also making a broader theoretical point about itself – Marxian theory as process – and our own endeavours too. To quote an example examined by Louis Althusser, when Smith addresses ”the question of the value of labour”, Marx identifies something missing from this notion of “labour”. I would say it is an idealistic term that needs fleshing out with substantive content. We are missing the actual thing referred to by the concept of “labour” – hence Marx says it is mere playing with words. Labour is a force exerted upon a raw material to produce a finished article; hence we are really enquiring into the value of the “labour force”, which of course includes real people as its source. The same can be said of the word “value”: the concept of value can cover several things, one being the thing that turns hardnosed capitalists into out-and-out materialists: money. But once you see that the “labour force” includes the human component, other human values come into play as well. The labour that can be bought is only one small part of the humans providing the labour force, who therefore are not reducible to the label “workers”. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. “Play” being a synonym for “tolerance”, the human work force is worth vastly more than its purely monetary value: it is actually what makes the cogs work together. This is where we see that capitalism is not intrinsically wrong in the sense that we should fight it: it is just hopelessly crude and inefficient in mining the vast potential that is out there.

I would add that the word “value” is being… devalued here, since the value of a human being is being reduced to the “cost” of their labour at the expense of all the rest, which amounts to their commoditization. Of course, once this novel insight has been reached, it remains an idealistic concept until the next step is taken to do something about it. But we must not forget that huge strides have been taken in this direction since the time of Marx. The process is already very much in train; we are not talking about a standing start revolution. Most humane managers are instinctively applying Marxist thinking even though the very idea would shock them.

In other words, the “process” is already becoming mainstream; not visibly so: let’s say a heavy undertow. This is happening, but will not be broadcast as an event, simply because it is much bigger than any single “event”. Just as sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power, problem individuals also tend to monopolize our family conversations; this is where the talk is happening, not where the real action is taking place. Dregs will usually fall to the bottom, but sometimes they rise to the top, where they can readily be skimmed off! The dirtier things look on the surface the cleaner they are becoming out of sight underneath.

But while things are already happening, they need to be helped along, because idealism starved of materialism falls woefully short of genuine spirituality, and materialism starved of idealism falls woefully short of full physicality. (This is basically what Daniel means by saying that neither side of the duality is really pulling its weight.) The two need to be oscillating together. We are at once animals striving upwards and spiritual beings adjusting to physicality: the success of either endeavor is dependent upon the other. You see how a dialectical approach can be a self-sharpening tool. A chisel gets blunt on softer wood and is sharpened on something hard like stone; it is as if both these operations are occurring together in rapid alternation. The tool actually gets further honed as it moves on to higher order issues and leaves behind the blunting material. Alternatively, it doesn’t and it doesn’t. Process means there is no standing still, and therefore there is a choice to be made.

This means that while greater spirituality is of course needed, the opposite is also true: the same holds for physicality. This is where the idea of cosmic consciousness comes in. If the Earth is to be seen a living conscious being – and everything else too – then it is literally putting its huge weight behind this effort. The process, and the survive-or-evolve stakes, extend way beyond our little human race. Some may feel that we are so messed up we may as well just pull the plug on the whole human experiment. It is not as simple as that. But since the problem extends way beyond ourselves, it is not a problem for us to solve on our own: we have vast amounts of help… but we have to do our bit.

[Pam]

Daniel is a shining example of holistic thinking. When you listen to him it becomes very clear that the isolated way we have learned to look at and approach problems and systems is deeply inadequate. I find it very telling that this brilliant and thoughtful man was home schooled. I don't see that he has any "higher education" credentials either.

I have been noticing lately that the only children I run into that seem really alive and curious are home school kids. That may be a vast over generalization and I'm sure there are exceptions on both sides but there is truth there.

[Ernie Nemeth]

A degree of vagueness is more accurate than precision, to me, sounds like the model is incorrect and the expected precision was never there.

This same process reminded me of the trouble encountered when first digitizing music, that is, converting music from an analogue signal that itself is the signal (but again only to the degree of precision allowed by the recording medium) to a code that represents the signal. It took them almost a decade to work it out. But it turned out that the dynamic portion of the code could be approximated by taking random sample snippets of the signal and only encoding those. This process of picking random data points, called dithering, is a fine example of this process.

If the process tried to encode the entire signal directly the result was noise, but by parsing the signal and selecting random bits the noise fell off and the signal was recovered.

Spirituality and physicality, how about consciousness and energy? These are the things that comprise the true experience of life that we can be sure of. We have our awareness of self and the awareness of feelings expressed as emotions and we can know these to be true because they are primary experiences, intrinsic to the human condition. That's all we can say with certainty.

Is consciousness and energy material? And if they are not, then the acceptance of materiality requires yet another component. It seems that belief comes into play - the assignment of meaning. Meaning comes from belief because meaning is personal - subjective.

It is only once meaning is sought that the questing begins. Questions beget answers. And some answers lie far afield, not because they are far in a physical sense but because the question is so far from the truth. Questing requires a space to wander through. The space represents the quandary in the mind between the question posed and its possible answer, given the beliefs of the individual.

The only way to have the answer is to either ask the right question or if beliefs are strong and conviction steeled, move to another location where the answer may be.

Movement requires creative energy to imagine a solidity that doesn't exist in reality but serves the purpose of illustrating the process in symbolic terms. In this imagined scenario, a condition of temporary delusion facilitates an accumulation of disparate understandings, often contradictory (which causes confusion and conflict), until the level of complication reaches a critical threshold.

At that threshold, the end of the journey is attained and the answer lies in the distance traveled and the course took.


A belief is considered, its signal mostly drowned out by noise: the thesis.

The noise in that signal is the anti-thesis.

The process of synthesis is the experience of experiment and rationalization (the imagined movement) and the arrival at the answer to the question the thesis poses by the existence of its anti-thesis.

That is the synthesis: the assimilation or adaptation of a particular belief, which then becomes the new thesis...


I like this guy too. I don't know why but I have an instant affinity to people who use the word earnest in any of its forms...and he uses it a lot.

Haven't seen you around lately Araucaria. You were missed.

[araucaria]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Haven't seen you around lately Araucaria.

Thank you Ernie. Maybe you missed this:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1321043