An international network of/for intelligent organisms
Slime mold and human society
Do you know anyone who could be interested? I would really appreciate to get in touch
Greetings ftom Belarus!
Alexandra Godina
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by ian on
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Hi
I'm fascinated - and frightened by what's happening not just in Belarus but in the world in general. People are indeed decentralising and self organising using messaging systems - and it does look a hell of a lot like emergant behaviour. What frightens me is what happens next - we have a bunch of power hungry gits in charge who don't like it.
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Exactly. Unpredictable set of events - great hopes, great opportunities and great dangers. It would be interesting to get in touch with some scholars who are researching these processes, especially interdisciplinary studies of such phenomena (biology and social studies in this case, since such patterns are natural).
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How to visualise the patterns ? I can take slime mould and turn its movements in to abstractions that tell me things about what it's up to but beyond simple crowd movement ( which slimes model quite well ) how do we visualise shifting human opinions and actions.
The other problem with collectivism is who's collective? I'm generally in favour of it because it tend to be things I agree with - BLM, pro diversity etc but the far right are just as much using these decentralised tactics as well, so on the flip side, how do you monitor and modulate to stop things tipping over into mob violence?
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I will think about it. So far, I am following patterns in real time events+manipulative narratives in media+amount of discussions in Telegram chats - how they affect each other and how chat discussions translate into real life. The visualisation could be just geographic - we will try to see it on the election day on Aug10 (people will go voting, some will stay at their polling stations, some will move somewhere else, and this is completely unpredictable at the moment). In chats - there are dozens of different chats, all of which are growing right now, and they are all interconnected - as soon as some valuable information or a result of brainstorming appears, it immediately gets into other chats, channels, and also regular media. More and more info in regular media comes from social media. The process intensifies when the tensions are growing, This is what I am observing now in Belarus.
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Permalink Reply by Evan Brown on
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Hello from America.
I understand what you mean. But an issue with this is that the internet works slightly differently in different countries. Some censor things, or the media doesn't report on it in other countries, it's not in someone's native language, the media skews the information, etc. I've seen what you're talking about going on here too. I know the situation in your country is completely different, and I have a deep love and sympathy for the Belarusian people. But people everywhere in every country are starting to realize that their governments are oppressive. If several of us in different countries could get together maybe we could exchange information about what's going on around us from a native perspective. Without all the media and government censorship keeping us all divided and separate. We're all one species, but it's our borders and those who enforce them that divide us.
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On the slime analogy it gets more even insidious - when two strains meet, they either avoid each other or interact. If they interact it always ends badly for one - it can be straight off killed digested or, one one works its way inside and s attacks at an organelle level - destroying and digesting nuclei or expelling them from the cell, taking over its victim by replacing the control structures and exploiting the existing cellular architecture.
That sounds a hell of a lot like white European history...
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Wow! This is extremely interesting! Thank you so much for sharing! Let's see which of Belarusian blobs prevails - the bigger and nicer one or the small nasty one. Please keep your fingers crossed for us!
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I somewhat agree with you Ian, but I don't necessarily think that it's due exclusively to white Europeans, but rather religious Europeans, or even organized religion as a whole. I know this is a can of worms many won't agree with, or may even be offended by. This is not my intention, I respect everyone as an individual human. That being said many of the problems in society historically and even today come not from cultural and linguistic barriers, but primarily religious intolerance. The crusades saw Christian Europe spread like a cancer across the map, decimating any who refused to kneel before their god. Between 1530 and 1780 over a million white European Christians were enslaved by North African Muslims. And don't even get me started on Islam and Judaism. Many major wars have been fought over religion whether or not that was the main purpose. The problem I believes stems from the fact that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all stem from the religion of Abraham, but each iteration is retold with key differences. This leads to each group believing that their doctrine is entirely correct, and the others are false retellings meant to lead people from the path of righteousness. Each group then believes it is their duty to spread their word and crush any who oppose them to avoid their god bringing his wrath down upon the world. In doing so they created a divide that spans centuries, and paved the way for other forms of asinine intolerance.
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Great idea Evan! Nice to meet you ;)
I am actually monitoring all propaganda, misinformation and manipulations in media too. Let's keep in touch and figure out how we can cooperate. We have a foundation registerd in Poland - Sustainable Strategies Network. It's new, and after all this craze is over (not clear yet when it will be over, though), we can all sit together, talk and brainstorm.
My best regards!
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Sorry, I didn't reply earlier. At the moment, you can sign this petition and tell other to do the same. The situation is getting worse - yesterday, for example, army and militia were used against cyclists who joined drivers and pedestrians in a protest to support two DJs arrested and severely beaten up a day before for playing an old protest song "Changes" ("Перемен") by Victor Tsoy at an official concert organised by the authorities to stop a rally by the opposition candidates. Two cyclists ended up in hospitals. Noone knows what will happen tomorrow, at the election day. What we know is that it's completely decentralised, people are prepared for the Internet to be switched off, and the authorities are ready to use violence against people. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/07/belarus-goes-to-the-p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/world/europe/belarus-election-al...
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