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\n", "- NYU
\n", "- GTPCI
\n", "- Mentor
\n", "- Epi
\n", "- NIA
\n", "- Taxes
\n", "- Kemi
\n", "-- Fox News
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History is a fractal unfolding of entropy and order, a ceaseless churn wherein civilizations & belief-systems rise on the back of extracted resources, only to collapse under the weight of their own complexity
\n", "\n", " Cosmology, Geology, Biology, Ecology, Symbiotology, Teleology\n", "\n", "Tribal belief systems—whether Mormonism, Islam, quantum mysticism, or secular humanism—serve as scaffolds for identity negotiation. They say: *Here’s who you are. Here’s how to act. Here’s what it means.* When you believe what your tribe believes, you're not just parroting consensus. You’re ensuring your place on the ship. It’s not always about truth. It’s about *belonging*. And when the waves rise, and the existential cold sets in, that belonging matters more than whether the myth is falsifiable.\n", "\n", "Dawkins doesn’t get this because for him, epistemology is about correspondence to reality. If a belief doesn’t map onto the evidence, it is not just wrong—it is dangerous. But Joe Rogan gets that people are not reason-driven creatures. They are story-driven, ritual-driven, meme-driven. If the Mormons smile at you, feed you, show up at your door with casseroles and scriptures, that feels more like truth than a peer-reviewed study on abiogenesis.\n", "\n", "And here's the kicker: both are right, but they sail different ships. Dawkins is a frigate of Enlightenment design: reinforced with empiricism, rigorous with logic. Rogan? He's on a pirate ship of stoners, comedians, MMA fighters, and mind explorers—open to anything, committed to nothing, always scanning the horizon for new archipelagos of meaning.\n", "\n", "Now let’s reframe this through your lens—sea 🌊, ship 🚢, nonself 🫥, identity negotiation 🪞, and the island 🏝️. The sea is entropy—raw, unfiltered reality. The ship is the construct—family, culture, religion, ideology. Nonself is the moment of being adrift, the Dude or Larry Gopnik floating without compass. Identity negotiation is the labor of reconciling inherited maps with lived reality. And the island? The myth of arrival. Enlightenment. Salvation. Fulfillment. Some call it heaven, others call it clarity.\n", "\n", "And the cruelest joke? Some ships never reach it. Some crash. Some circle endlessly. But the belief in the island is what keeps the ship from sinking. Even if it’s never reached, it gives direction.\n", "\n", "So when you ask—*should we evaluate on the basis of evidence, or ask what our tribe believes?*—you’re asking something more than just epistemological etiquette. You’re asking: *Do I want to float alone in the cold? Or do I want to belong—even if that means singing songs about places I’ll never see?*\n", "\n", "The postmodern answer is: be skeptical of both. The enchanted realist answer is yours: acknowledge the sea’s terror, respect the ship’s necessity, but curate your truth carefully. Choose a ship with ballast and beauty, not just dogma. Accept the myth of the island, but let your compass be poetic and performative—not just propositional.\n", "\n", "Because at the end of the day, everyone drowns. But some go down singing, some holding banana peels, some clutching equations, and some—like the Dude—with a White Russian in hand and a worn-out rug under their feet.\n", "\n", "The only real question is: which drowning do you choose?\n", "\n", "\n", "```{raw} html\n", "\n", "\n", "\n", "
\n", " Attention
\n", " Nonself vs. Self
\n", " Identity Negotiation
\n", " Salience, Expand, Reweight, Prune, Networkxw
\n", " — Yours Truly\n", "