 
To: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU
Cc: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Subject: Options
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 16 Nov 92 12:33:08 EST."
             <15891.721935188@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU> 
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 14:43:08 EST
Message-Id: <16255.721942988@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU


I misspelled "Apocalypse" in my last message. Very sorry.

I want to respond to a couple of things that Bill wrote, and then
get on with what was supposed to be the second half of the "Apocalypse"
message.


>Hope everyone is enjoying life and doing well. We might as well enjoy it
>now-- chances are good it's going to get a lot weirder in the next
>decade.

I gather that you wrote this without seeing my "Apocalypse" message -- how
strange!

>I wrote those letters as part of a conversation on ocean colonization on
>the Extropians mailist. They're not focused to the CAMC conversation per
>se, but I thought they might be interesting.
> ...
>However, what I'm doing doesn't affect many of those on this list very
>much. Each one of us has to become our own _Center Of Power_, in
>whatever form suits us best.

I'd like to see this mailing list diverge a bit -- all of the readers,
I am sure, are primarily focused on things that are not directly
related to "CAMC" issues ... and yet, if communities are going to 
work, they're going to work by integrating all of these "peripheral"
concerns and issues. The communities will be the frameworks, and the
"peripheral" interests of the members will be the contents of the communities,
that is, the activities that the communities make possible -- so I disagree 
that they're not "focused to the CAMC converstion per se"! So long as they
are conceived of as fitting into a future CAMC context ...

I agree that each of us has to become our own Center of Power, and we'll
all be better served by knowing who one another are and what are the
Powers that Be among us, even if we never actually work together.

Right now I'm trying to write mythology. We're familiar with computer
hackers, and we've talked about genetics hacking becoming a real
possibility, now that biological knowledge and equipment are so cheap and
available -- I want to go farther. I want to hack meaning, something I
think everybody can do now that philosophy and culture have reached a
decadent stage and printed matter describing the various meaning-systems
(world-views) of all the peoples of history are easily available. That's
the direction of my Center of Power, and it's a practical application of
my studies in philosophy and religion, trying to devise a Theory of Meaning
that would explain why people believe what they believe.

But the point is that either everything is going to go to Hell real
suddenly, in which case we'll NEED each other, we'll need each other's
skills and support and just the knowledge that there are other people
out there with comprehensive visions and some competence who are trying to
keep some order in the world -- or else everything is going to keep on
going like its going, in which case the only place for people like us
will be in these situations of decentralized order, and the only hope for
the world will be for people like us to reach a critical mass and suddenly 
become the "public opinon" and maybe not have to fight so hard to live 
in a sane way. And we'll have to know each other as complete human beings,
not just as CAMC idealists. 

Anyway, the point that I thought I was going to make when I started was
that human beings have evolved hundreds of thousands of ways of organizing
themselves in groups, from hunter-gatherering to pioneer Mormon polygamy
to limited monarchy to substance-abusing temporary confraternities to hare 
krishna temples to nuclear families, and in nearly every case these
systems of organization have been forced on people as the most expedient 
way to organize their society given the economic and other pressures that
were motivating them. But now we can pick and choose what sort of group
organization we want, we can understand what the pressures are that tend
to keep such a group together, and we can apply them to our lives. Beyond
the nuts-and-bolts of economic organization, there will come a need for
a working social theory for intentional communities and societies --
"Group Process Hacking", a field related to my own so far but one which
I have been unable to explore at all yet on its own.

Let's hear some chatter out there ...

Tom

******************************************************************************
         Tom Price  |  tp0x@cs.cmu.edu  |  Simplicity, simplicity
******************************************************************************
 plutoniumsurveillanceterroristCIAassassinationIranContrawirefraudcryptology






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