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AH's avatar

Brett, thank you for this very interesting article!

I am interested in the work of Vervaeke, Peterson, McGilchrist and others, and I appreciate very much how you have connected the dots between their works for me.

Reflecting on your article, it seems to me that being at the edge of chaos is also much related to Nassim Taleb´s work on antifragility. Taleb suggests, in my own words, that systems that are antifragile should combine and perhaps balance efficiency and resilience. In today´s world we focus, in his view, too much on the efficiency thereby largely ignoring the resilience part. Now I am thinking about it, could it be that the political spectrum (progressive - conservative but also change vs. tradition) reflect the same kind of opponent processing, so that -if we balance these two parts- we do the best relevance realization for society as a whole? This would mean that free speech is indispensible but currently unfortunately under threat. Curious about your thoughts on this.

Similarly, McGilchrist empasizes that, in Western societies, we rely too much on the LHS of the brain and too little on the the RHS. As a consequence, we (again) seem not able to do the best possible relevance realization, given that the RHS is crucial for checking whether our «maps of the world» ultimately make sense in the «real» world.

Finally, I wanted to ask you whether (some) gender differences may reflect opponent processes that are beneficial in, for instance, child rearing. I look forward to hearing from you!

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Doctor Grandelf's avatar

This is a mindblowing article on many levels, yet I do think it begs for a deeper look into the role of technology in the future, and how we reconcile our expanding influences with the delicate and complex web of "the ecosystem", as well as the role of art, and its higher potentials to transform our image of ourselves. As a solid starting point, this is one of the greatest things on the internet (Not much competition as far as I am aware) ;)

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