How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman (Liveright, 2016). Ruth Goodman is a reënactor, costume drama and museum consultant, and historian of Tudor England “as it was lived”: not names and dates, nor tables of agricultural production by county, but the practical concerns of daily life from clothing to cooking to ploughing. We’ve already met her in
Such a brilliant example of the idea of social signaling
>A computer can write the self-flagellating tweetstorm about your personal privilege, but only you can voluntarily take the psychic damage of posting it in public.
I read that and burst out laughing in the London tube, good thing I’m not English
What makes humans special? You are quite close to the mark considering the mind-body coherence. Let’s extend it to: we are embodied spiritual beings with mind-body-soul woven together. Beyond even that, to be fully human is to have spiritual life in Christ animating the whole kit.
This will transcend even physical death and the remaking of a new heaven and a new earth until we are once again walking in the presence and love of God. Let the animals, computers and trans-humanists match that!
What an image thinking of all the Tudor men twisting themselves into the most high status stance. Thinking about it, though, embodied and physical ways of signalling status could be a response to LLMs eradicating the status signals related to intellectualism. The way you stand is hard to be anything but human. The way you write is increasingly met with suspicion about using the latest GPT or something similar.
> personally costly adherence to luxury beliefs. A computer can write the self-flagellating tweetstorm about your personal privilege, but only you can voluntarily take the psychic damage of posting it in public.
This is a great example of a luxury belief. Public self-mortification about your privilege is a way of signaling your membership of the cultural elite. There is no damage involved; quite the contrary. Doing this buttresses the poster's self-concept and social position.
Social damage would come from violating a luxury belief, for example, by asserting that your privileges are well-deserved because genetically endowed. (The luxury belief being contradicted here is the one that states that everyone is a blank slate and all people are therefore equal in all abilities at birth, and deserve equal outcomes.)
Psychic damage would follow the social/reputational damage from posting this if you were a narcissist, or otherwise had your self-concept bound up in your reputation or membership of an in-group.
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I completely agree with your thoughts on what it is to be human. As a schizoid myself I am acutely sensitive to the downsides of the schizoid-autistic reduction of human experience that is promoted by the transhumanists. What room is there in their vision for the sensation of coming out of the cold surf and throwing yourself down on the warm, silky-soft sand, and feeling the burning sun dry the water drops on your back, forming tiny, itchy salt crystals on your skin? Or the sense of harmony and rightness that comes from walking in a forest, and seeing scattered sunbeams shining down through the canopy onto the forest floor, highlighting seedlings and ferns?
I am also a big fan of domestic beauty and harmony (despite not being good at creating it myself).
Such a brilliant example of the idea of social signaling
>A computer can write the self-flagellating tweetstorm about your personal privilege, but only you can voluntarily take the psychic damage of posting it in public.
I read that and burst out laughing in the London tube, good thing I’m not English
“The more of your life that could be taken over by a machine, the faker, the less human, it turns out your life was.” A keeper 😂
Ruth Goodman's seven-episode series on Tudor Life is on Youtube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQvMybw_IJw
What makes humans special? You are quite close to the mark considering the mind-body coherence. Let’s extend it to: we are embodied spiritual beings with mind-body-soul woven together. Beyond even that, to be fully human is to have spiritual life in Christ animating the whole kit.
This will transcend even physical death and the remaking of a new heaven and a new earth until we are once again walking in the presence and love of God. Let the animals, computers and trans-humanists match that!
What an image thinking of all the Tudor men twisting themselves into the most high status stance. Thinking about it, though, embodied and physical ways of signalling status could be a response to LLMs eradicating the status signals related to intellectualism. The way you stand is hard to be anything but human. The way you write is increasingly met with suspicion about using the latest GPT or something similar.
> personally costly adherence to luxury beliefs. A computer can write the self-flagellating tweetstorm about your personal privilege, but only you can voluntarily take the psychic damage of posting it in public.
This is a great example of a luxury belief. Public self-mortification about your privilege is a way of signaling your membership of the cultural elite. There is no damage involved; quite the contrary. Doing this buttresses the poster's self-concept and social position.
Social damage would come from violating a luxury belief, for example, by asserting that your privileges are well-deserved because genetically endowed. (The luxury belief being contradicted here is the one that states that everyone is a blank slate and all people are therefore equal in all abilities at birth, and deserve equal outcomes.)
Psychic damage would follow the social/reputational damage from posting this if you were a narcissist, or otherwise had your self-concept bound up in your reputation or membership of an in-group.
--
I completely agree with your thoughts on what it is to be human. As a schizoid myself I am acutely sensitive to the downsides of the schizoid-autistic reduction of human experience that is promoted by the transhumanists. What room is there in their vision for the sensation of coming out of the cold surf and throwing yourself down on the warm, silky-soft sand, and feeling the burning sun dry the water drops on your back, forming tiny, itchy salt crystals on your skin? Or the sense of harmony and rightness that comes from walking in a forest, and seeing scattered sunbeams shining down through the canopy onto the forest floor, highlighting seedlings and ferns?
I am also a big fan of domestic beauty and harmony (despite not being good at creating it myself).