Contents:
- Cyberdisciple’s Critique of Muraresku’s Foreward, that Grants Credit for Coverage of Loose Cognition, Dubiously
- Devised a Non-binary Way to Rank Adequacy of Coverage
Cyberdisciple’s Critique of Muraresku’s Foreward, that Grants Credit for Coverage of Loose Cognition, Dubiously
Graham Hancock foreward to Muraresku, The Immortality Key
https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/2020/10/12/graham-hancock-foreward-to-muraresku-the-immortality-key/
The rough quick assessment in that post is good, of whether Hancock at all covers the four key topics of the Egodeath theory:
“Per the Egodeath Theory’s four fields, he [Graham Hancock] has loose cognition (psychedelics), but no determinism/eternalism, a bungled self-control cybernetics, and a vague at best theory of metaphor.” Emphasis added. Breaking out the four topics assessments:
o Has loose cognition (psychedelics) — expressed as a simple binary “Yes”. The present post seeks to problematize and reduce that ranking, which implies 100% coverage. “Yes” is only correct as a first-order approximation. I’m clarifying the assessment as “Yes, yet bungled and vague” like some of the other key topics. The ranking depends on whether you emphasize “psychedelics” (easy to cover), or “loose cognition” (harder to cover).
o Has no determinism/eternalism — expressed as a simple binary “No”
o Has a bungled self-control cybernetics — expressed as a complex degree
o Has a vague theory of metaphor — expressed as a complex degree
Hancock covers loose cognition — in a very rough approximate or indirect sense.
Devised a Non-binary Way to Rank Adequacy of Coverage
It took me a few years to analyze how to go about ranking an author’s adequacy of coverage, and also whether the author elevates to prominence (& to structural centrality) the correct topics. I had to move from simple binaries (does he cover X, yes or no), to assessing structures of connections. So it’s worth reviewing how to go about such assessment.
When evaluating a theory (or book or Foreward) to see “if” it covers the four areas that Transcendent Knowledge can be divided into (loose cognition/psychedelics, eternalism/determinism, self-control cybernetics, analogy/metaphor), it is not a binary, so much as a matter of degree of emphasis.
For example, Manley Hall’s book The Secret Teachings of All Ages mentions determinism like one time, but that is a far cry from both covering that topic adequately, and, elevating that topic to give it prominence over the other topics.
In a couple posts maybe around 2010, I evaluated many authors, probably rating on a 1-10 scale, how much coverage (and prominence) the author gives to each of the four topics.
One can write pages about “psychedelics” with almost no coverage of “loose cognition”, so if I rank Hancock on “loose cognition/psychedelics”, I’d probably give him a lower ranking, no matter how many hundreds of pages he writes on “psychedelics”.
This division of Transcendent Knowledge into 4 topics is more like, for this quadrant, “psychedelics BUT ESPECIALLY loose cognition in general, regardless of how accessed”.
Assessing Wouter Hanegraaff’s 2005 Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism: first, I assessed in a simple binary: Does the book at all cover psychedelics? Answer: No; finding that coverage is a needle in haystack at best, which is the opposite of what a “revealing hidden esoteric knowledge” dictionary should do. Contrast that with his summary book of Western Esotericism with mushroom caps on the front, and his later articles about entheogens.
The more potent question is: does he write about Loose Cognition? Does he connect it with: Dissolve & Coagulate? Metaperception? How transformation of the mental model of time & control (from one stable model to a different stable model) is enabled by loosening cognition?
Such coverage is what’s required to earn a ranking better than a mere, rank “Yes the book is not bereft of some words saying something about psychedelics.”
I started theorizing (in April 1987) by writing about loose cognition rather than psychedelics; I rejected writing about psychedelics, and put all emphasis on instead writing about loose cognition and how it works, its dynamics, what it involves — such as metaperception and other such cognitive phenomenology. I didn’t write about psychedelics; I wrote about loose cognitive association binding, instead, which was my actual interest.
The sheer fact of an author writing about psychedelics doesn’t count much unless the author writes about psychedelics in a particular way.
It was hard to figure this out; it was a bit subtle. At first I was too lenient; I found myself giving authors too much credit for covering “my” areas, and I then said “That can’t be right, that’s far too high a score, they are far from possessing the Egodeath theory, despite mentioning key terms one time — or in some cases, a hundred times.”
I encourage stringent requirements and giving low rankings for an author’s coverage of a key topic, unless the author truly deserves a higher ranking on that topic. More precisely, it comes down to the number of connections made, and the structures of those connections.
I can critically rank my own 2006 main article this way, saying that it does cover kind of thoroughly the four topics (in summary outline form), yet still is lacking some efficient key connections that were established in the oldest mythology of ‘tree’ vs. ‘snake’, branching vs. non-branching, Possibilism vs. Eternalism.
When I published the article, I particularly recognized that my interpretation of Moses’ snake on a tree (as a time-pole) was not adequate, was missing a key idea. That idea, fully recognized Thanksgiving week 2013, is: tree vs. snake = Possibilism vs. Eternalism. The 2006 main article covers Eternalism: it has most of the key ideas, but lacks closure.
The Egodeath theory 