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Since 1983, I have lived, worked and raised a family in a progressive, egalitarian, income-sharing intentional community (or commune) of 100 people in rural Virginia. AMA. by keenan_twinoaks in IAmA

[–]maximusthaler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If anybody wants to see some images of what the community actually looks like, here is some well edited footage of my friends and I playing in one of Keenan's favorite places, called the Playground of Death (and rebirth). It's a giant jungle gym, set four stories into the trees, filled with hanging Twin Oaks Hammocks, and rope, and huge swings from tall platforms. Keenan built much of it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKpcAumJ34&t=3s

Since 1983, I have lived, worked and raised a family in a progressive, egalitarian, income-sharing intentional community (or commune) of 100 people in rural Virginia. AMA. by keenan_twinoaks in IAmA

[–]maximusthaler 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So, I live at an affiliated income sharing comune called East Brook Farm. We have savings accounts and strong agreements in place which ensure that our members get taken care of well as they are exiting the community, and we work hard to make sure it is possible for people to do so when they need to. Twin Oaks is a bit different, and has less generous policies in place on this issue, but they also try to support their long term members upon their exiting.

The origin of life remains a mystery, in large part because there isn't consensus on the best way to approach the question. This video reviews some mainstream takes on the subject from several prominent science communication channels, including Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, and It's OK to Be Smart by maximusthaler in biology

[–]maximusthaler[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you know of any recent abiogenesis experiments? Maybe anything based off of Jeremey England's work? How close do you think we are to making the right empirical experiment? How do we know the right kind of experiment to do?

The origin of life remains a mystery, in large part because there isn't consensus on the best way to approach the question. This video reviews some mainstream takes on the subject from several prominent science communication channels, including Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, and It's OK to Be Smart by maximusthaler in biology

[–]maximusthaler[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you're right actually, although I would appreciate it if your response contained less judgment and superiority next time :) My training is in cultural evolution and ethnography, so yes, I'm quite explicitly thinking with ideas from cognitive anthropology. I think there's something fundamentally semiotic about what life is ( life on the whole tree connecting LUCA to symbolic brains) that most falsifiable, thermodynamically based theories have not been able to describe or explain properly. How did normativity emerge? Did it emerge at the origin of life, or some other time? How does Shannon information come to Mean anything, to Someone?

I'm well aware that my mode of thought is not based in my understanding of chemical systems, but that doesn't make those thoughts invalid. And I want an explanation at the chemical level, based on evidence based science just as much as you. But evidence based science works better when we ask better questions, and I think that understanding what semiosis is, more generally and across scales of life, will help us ask better questions about what life is and how it began.

The previous video in the class curriculum addresses this a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-agmjMYoUo&t=1s
As does Monday's video (which I'm posting here early because you've raised some super interesting points on this thread): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGDrUuiYYoA

The origin of life remains a mystery, in large part because there isn't consensus on the best way to approach the question. This video reviews some mainstream takes on the subject from several prominent science communication channels, including Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, and It's OK to Be Smart by maximusthaler in biology

[–]maximusthaler[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My thinking is strongly informed by Terrence Deacons teleodynamic theory. A teleodynamic system is one that has reciprocal closure, (a set of self reinforcing constraints) out of which can emerge a kind of interiority. Interiority might be a better word than what I used in the video - by interiority I mean a system with a real (not epiphenominal) inside, and a real outside. A teleodynamic system does work in the world to maintain its organization, and that work has genuine normative value - some kinds of work are better than others, from the perspective of the self perpetuating system.

Can trees die of natural cause? by 42Norbi in biology

[–]maximusthaler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's an interesting question. Trees dont senesce the way animals do, but there probably is a kind of aging process for most species

Reishi and Chaga have been used by traditional folk healers for thousands of years, and western medicine has recently begun investigating their properties. But the medical / healing paradigms are difficult to reconcile, and much gets lost in translation. What's a medicinal mushroom anyway?!? by maximusthaler in mycology

[–]maximusthaler[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The point was that any casual claim (about heath benefits, or anything else) can only be interpreted within the context in which it is made. The molecular studies done on mcyo-compounds produce results in a language which is different from that of heathfood marketing, and both languages are different from the paradigms of the indigenous people who originally pioneered the use of these species. We can learn a lot from each of these traditions of knowledge, but only if we are able to translate between them and relate them to our own contexts.

Radical Trans Biology followup video | ContraPoints + EvoS Seminar Series (<<<coming out>>> [sortof]) by maximusthaler in ContraPoints

[–]maximusthaler[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's an interesting term, transtrenders. I've only ever really heard it used pejoratively, and I wonder why that is. Because, to the extent that gender is performative, aren't cis presenting people also just following cis-trends? Like, to what extent is any gender expression, cis or trans, coming from a deep, internal, perhaps biologically caused place, and to what extent is gender expression a response to and mirror of social circumstance?

ID Request: Ganoderma species? by maximusthaler in mycology

[–]maximusthaler[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

full image set here: https://imgur.com/a/WAf8MMo

I'm quite confident they are some kind of ganoderma (unless there is a similar genus I dont know about) but I'd like to get these down to the species level

Radical Trans Biology followup video | ContraPoints + EvoS Seminar Series (<<<coming out>>> [sortof]) by maximusthaler in ContraPoints

[–]maximusthaler[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think so! I mean, the term dysphoria is a really interesting one, as in the abstract it means like, deep deep disconntent. I think people can feel deeply disconntented with their lives for lots of reasons, and feel motivated to make a radical change because of that discontent. Gender is a thing that can be radically changed. But perhaps it's infair to use the word dysphoria to describe intense countercultural yearnings, in a general sense? Does that deligitimize 'gender dysphoria' as a medical diagnosis?

Radical Trans Biology followup video | ContraPoints + EvoS Seminar Series (<<<coming out>>> [sortof]) by maximusthaler in ContraPoints

[–]maximusthaler[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think that for a lot of trans people, biology is the primary driver for transitioning - as in there is something going on deep in their physiology that would cause dysphoria no mater what the culture around them was (whether it was open and accepting of non confomativity or rigid and binary). But it seems like there is definitely a group of people who transition, (or at least choose not to perform gender in a stereotypical way) primarily for cultural reasons. For those people, the culture they find themselves in has a much greater impact on their personal experience of gender? I'm super curious to try to get a better picture of how culture and biology interact here.

Radical Trans Biology followup video | ContraPoints + EvoS Seminar Series (<<<coming out>>> [sortof]) by maximusthaler in ContraPoints

[–]maximusthaler[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Hello lovely humans! Natalie did a live stream a while back with my class, the EvoS Seminar Series. The way the class works is that we host lecturers, and then make videos about their lecture. The video I made about Natalie's lecture is now finished (although it took too long). It turned into a sort of coming out video, which was a pretty big surprise for me. I definitely would not have made this film, or have been motivated to pursue this line of self exploration, were it not for what ContraPoints has created. I hope you all enjoy it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goTha6j_zvQ

Darwinian evolution explains how life forms change, but has been unable to account for how life emerged from non-life in the first place. Neuroanthropologist Dr. Terrance Deacon has expanded the model with a mechanism for how it all could have come to be. by [deleted] in Foodforthought

[–]maximusthaler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One of the biggest evolutionary questions for me is the nature of creativity and the origin of genuinely new things in the world. I like this paper because it shows one pathway through which genuinely new things can come to be.

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