“Massively parallel experiments, not one worlding…”
My most loved piece of orchestral music is the Boléro by Ravel. No matter how many times I listen to it, the somatic experience of our first encounter always reverberates in my body.
I was on a retreat with a Sufi teacher who invited us to listen to the Bolero tape he brought us, not only with our ears. He suggested that we welcome the sound of the drums, the brass, and the strings in different parts of our body. The hypnotic effect of the music has further intensified by how we received it. Its impact on me was as if the music was soaring from without and within at the same time. (Don’t try it at home unless you have a Sufi master roommate. 🙂 )
That was many years ago, but since then, I can’t stop watching films and even podcast videos with my ears, eyes, and heart, too. That’s exactly what happened when I started listening to Michael Garfield in his podcast on Technological Metamodernism.
When my heart becomes jumpy, it is typically from the joy of a highly resonant chord in what I hear. What evoked that jumpiness was when Michael talked about massively parallel experiments. Watch out for it at https://youtu.be/rCOxqAVMg3o?si=WKn5-GtvAk2aYV-5&t=173 . He said:
“What is going to come out of the collapse of technocratic globalism is not going to be a single dominant philosophy or worlding, but an ecology of minds. Whether or not you consider artificial intelligence a mind, it’s safe to say that what we’re dealing with here now is… the population and proliferation of new domains and new information structures. And how we proceed in this matters enormously and depends on our ability to run experiments in massive parallel… Life didn’t start as a single good idea but as a web of richly interconnected fluid identities.”
Parallel experiments of AI being used for human and social development are happening but mostly disconnected and even unbeknownst to each other. I hope that the course on Technological Metamodernism will allow us to learn about and discover some patterns that connect them. It will start on 17-Sept-2024. Look it up, and if it calls you, join us.
