Flaker of Flints

One symptom of a society approaching some critical point is autocorrelation. Another one is what the physicists would call susceptibility, meaning you push the system in one direction—you give a little kick to it—and it starts running in that direction. You kick it the other way and it starts running in the other direction. The system is actually extraordinarily sensitive to very small perturbative events. One blog post can change the world. We've seen this more than once. One 4chan greentext will change the world. That kind of hypersensitivity suggests to me that we're in a period of great instability where we don't quite know what's coming out the other side.

In the Book of Daniel, the Son of Man is not a personification of the righteous community, but is conceived, in mythological fashion, as its heavenly doppelgänger. Now it is characteristic of mythological thinking that such a doppelgänger is conceived to be more real and permanent than its earthly counterpart and prior to it in the order of being. (From a modern critical perspective, the reverse is true. It "is a question of men before it is a question of angels." The human community is the datum of our experience and knowledge. The heavenly counterpart is posited on the basis of this datum.)

The end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

...In my view, these simply aren’t the sort of outcomes that you expect from atoms blindly interacting according to the laws of physics.  These are, instead, the signatures of higher-level causation—and specifically, of a teleological force that operates in our universe to make it distinctively cruel and horrible...

One reason for the interest in phase transitions is scale invariance: the fluctuations that exist near the critical point occur on all possible length and time scales. A second reason for our interest is called universality: the striking similarity in behavior near the critical point among systems that are quite different from each other far from the critical point.... How can correlations actually extend an infinite distance away, without requiring a series of amplification stations all along the way? We can understand such “infinite-range propagation” as arising from the huge multiplicity of interaction paths that connect two atoms in dimensions greater than one. (In one dimension, there is no multiplicity of interaction paths, and atoms become aligned only at absolute zero temperature.)

The single individual is higher than the universal.