Nuclear Power Alt Media PR Comeback?

One of the weirder trends I see on alt-media is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power as a "green" alternative to fossil fuel power production even in the wake of not-so-long-ago Fukushima. I even see some youtubers cheerleading the money hungry nuclear weapons stockpiles of the US. ($30B-$50B per year to maintain) My guess is some buzz cut korea war era bureaucrats spent some money to promote nukes on the Internets before they went to their retirement parties.

I think this is a generational thing. If you were at least 10 years old in 1986 you'd be 42 years old today and would probably remember the news reports of the Chernobyl disaster, and if you're older you will remember Three Mile Island.

If your memory is good enough, and you meditate on these topics a while, eventually a whole cornucopia of corporate sociopathy will bloom before your mind's eye, such as the Bhopal Disaster which killed thousands of people. If you're in your forties you remember EPA superfund sites, Love Canal and leaded gasoline. Eventually the millenials and gen-Zers will be paying for all the fracking site well failures and ruing the energy boom.

Corporate sociopathy is really the concentrated lack of concern and recklessness of a million individuals all concentrated into singular events and accidents and accumulated pollution and destruction. One such example I saw this past summer was herbicide application along the high voltage powerlines a mile from my house. In a typical year, they brushhog the powerlines in the fall, but last year, probably to save some shekels, they sprayed trees and fields from helicopters during the peak of the bird breeding season. It turned my stomach to see it, but my lights are on and I'm paying my electric bill monthly, dutifully.

Nuclear power is that sociopathy plus the delusion that industrial civilization will persist forever and that the schemes of some engineers will thwart nature indefinitely and that our current mode of living will go on for hundreds if not thousands of years or that the shitty power companies or the governments of today will last in perpetuity. Even if something like the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is incorrect, the period between civilization ending events is shorter than the lifespan of nuclear waste. Rome couldn't even maintain sewers for more than a couple of centuries. Fuck. Michigan can't even maintain some WW2 era water lines.

I think a hail mary internet PR effort by the nuclear industry isn't enough to revive it. It's too expensive to build new plants and the end-of-life costs of the old plants are yet to be known as they transition into long term waste storage facilities.

Backlash Versus White Flight

From my POV, the whole Internet counterculture was powered by a serious loss in the credibility of "mainstream" institutions after 9/11 and the subsequent wars and the bank bailouts and financial crisis of 2008. The 2016 election put the cherry on top. Mainstream media figures were exposed as being in direct collusion with the Clinton campaign. At the same time, culture wars issues flare up left and right on social media. It seems like there's an ongoing polarization of the public, not only in the United States but throughout the western world, and perhaps the "silent majority" is getting ready to tell the screechy minority to STFU.

I think rather than a physical confrontation between the lefty establishment and "the new right" or the populists, or whatever they're called, the old establishment institutions will one by one face "white flight" (really yeomanry flight).

Elf World: Productivity without Rearrangement?

There are many movies and books that made an attempt at imagining the Garden of Eden/Elf world. Avatar and Lord of the Rings come to mind immediately. There's a similar race of beings in Stargate SG-1, the Nox. Native americans and other indiginous people are often depicted as in-tune with nature or a part of nature and as opposed to technological and industrial civilization.

These characters are often passive and or backdrop characters to the main action in a plot, because they're sort of a stand in and characterization of Nature. They're also pretty vaguely imagined because there's no Elf World or Garden of Eden canon to draw upon, while the Atlantis and city on a hill world has been a topic of thought and discussion for thousands of years.

There are basically two categories of strategies that one can imagine for Elf World agriculture. One is to maximize the productivity of a small area by intensive arrangement of materials and systems, which then opens up larger areas for wild plants and animals. The other is in-nature agriculture, with some clever method of harvesting and storing crops that's not resource intensive at all.

In the Avatar world, the creatures live in a world of overflowing abundance, so nature provides everything they need to survive and thrive without any technology or artifice. Even their transportation is provided for by nature.

Can you have high agricultural productivity without arranging resources for convenient harvest, or without at the minimum building a fence? Probably not.

Why the Internet is Corrosive to Institutional Authority

Colleges and universities are probably the next institutions that the internet will annihilate. The internet is corrosive to authority because "authorities" were like the central nervous system of the meta-animals of society. They had a monopoly on the collection, dissemination, and centralization of information, but now the internet is a much better central nervous system. Many of the functions of institutions like banks, governments, and academia can be replicated by internet based systems for very low cost.

Colleges are probably more exposed than banks or governments. The student loan and text book rackets are pretty obvious to even casual observers, and unlike banks or governments colleges don't have much political protection obtained by bribery and blackmail.

Ironically, the STEM fields that schools are so invested in promoting and teaching are probably where colleges and universities will first lose out to the Internet. If you're smart enough to get a degree in those fields, you're smart enough to teach yourself the subject matter by watching YouTube videos. In engineering, especially in tech, university credentials are pretty close to meaningless since jobs in that field are all about doing the next new thing.

Compulsion of Speech by Fringe Groups

The lefty culture warrior people frequently attempt to compel various types of speech, like using specific pronouns or other similar nonsense, or by pressuring feckless tech companies to censor or deplatform people. Meanwhile, right wing evangelical christian groups with an Israel fetish attempt to compel allegience to the state of Israel by government contractors and employees through oaths. These groups are small but vocal. Their battle is to control hot air, because they're too fringey to control anything else.

It's easy to imagine these battles over speech leading to political violence, because those groups are small and physically weak and because compulsion of speech is a fairly extreme violation of an individual. It's sort of a playground fight scenario.

Saxon Elves and Tribal Fantasies

We watched "The Last Kingdom" on Netflix. It's pretty entertaining and I think they did a pretty good job trying to imagine and depict the pinnacle of Saxon England. It's like an ode to Saxons and most of the main characters have an old anglo-saxon name like "Aelfflaed". The Saxon names prefixed with "Aelf", like "Aelfred" are concatenations of "Aelf = Elf" with some other word, which makes me think of the Lord of the Rings and circles back to a topic I sort of shelved a while back: frozen tribal conflict.

The idea of Saxon England is like Atlantis in a lot of ways. It's idealizable because it's lost. Are tribal societies any closer to "natural" for human life than Empires? Maybe not. A tribe is really an abstraction of family, but it's not a family. Tribal life could be arranged and maintained with every bit as much artifice, fraud, and parasitism as Empire life.

Negative-space Civilization Critiques

Some people view corporate and institutional life as the essential expression of what it means to be human, and see the life of the administrator as the ultimate human life. There's an opposing, long standing tradition and maybe genetic disposition to hating institutional and corporate life. More contemporary writers like Edward Abbey present the same themes as a guy like Diogenes of Sinope did a couple millenia ago: political man and corporate man are dimunitions of what it means to be a human being, and the delusions of would be Alexanders are toxic to everyone, including Alexander himself.

Corporate and institutional life lead unerringly toward empire and centralization. Centralization leads to corruption and stagnation and dissipation of all virtue. The leviathan, the system that was conjured up to protect all devours all as it replaces the cues and guidance of natural necessity with its own.

The critiques of people like Diogenes are sort of negative-space, "not-do" advice, though. There's not a real formulation of what man's place in nature actually is. This critique is really the missing-garden-of-Eden critique. Fallen world man is city-man and institutional man. The sort of environmentalism espoused by a guy like Abbey or Richard Proenneke addresses some of the leviathan-system problems of civilization.

Globalism: Worldwide Elite Imperialism

I got my first real professional job in the early 1990s. The company I worked for had been recently purchased by a large French conglomerate and was in the early stages of moving some local production facilities to India.

The people who were tasked with setting up the factory in India weren't eager about doing it and saw it as pointless, and a betrayal of their fellows. The jobs that were being eliminated were skilled labor jobs, but were some of the lower paying jobs in that company, so the amount that would be saved and returned to the company shareholders and management was pretty meager compared to the initial investment in the new facilities and also the inevitable decline in quality that came from replacing a skilled and trained pool of workers with a brand new unskilled pool of workers. Anyway, many years later, long after I left, that company basically imploded after a series of missteps and low cost competition from abroad. Live by the sword, etc...

Many manufacturing businesses in the USA and around the world were doing the same thing at the same time. They were helped along by recently passed laws and treaties that were abandoning what the LaRouche people call "the American System" in favor of something that resembled the British Empire, which always was a corporate empire.

The elites of this empire are a rando hodgepodge of business lizards of every nationality who absorb credit from the money printing banks while they and their patronage networks espouse left wing politics.

This isn't unique. It's happened over and over in history. Maybe it's just the result of a long period of stability of every kind. The "elites" with a monopoly on government positions and trade snuggle up with one another against the great unwashed hoardes of their home countries.

Faceberg Getting It From Both Sides

It'll be ineresting to see if and how quickly Faceberg can totally collapse and if that will mark the end of this tech bubble like Enron's implosion and scandals marked the end of the dot com bubble.

The west coast "tech" oligopolies of this "age of the data center" seem to be running afoul of the east coast political establishment, which seems to be totally wrapped up with the media, which is collapsing from competition with tech.

The libertarians are also starting to hate on the tech companies for being feckless and soulless supporters of cultural marxist ideologues and for being appendages of the state, even states like China.

Even normies are starting to realize faceberg is a bad actor and are starting to feel the weight of their spy app on their spy devices. The wealth of tech companies is illusory. Maybe the spell is about to be broken.

Financialization and a Split Economy

British East India Company Flag

The British East India Company flag is remarkably similar to the US flag. There are 13 stripes--supposedly for the 13 founders of the BEIC and of course the 13 original colonies in the US flag. "13" is a numeric reference, possibly, to the Knights Templar "Friday the 13th" downfall.

The modern world is the grandchild of the BEIC. It's corporate world, and corporate world is really "finance" world. The conquering armies and navies of age of exploration imperialism has been replaced with legalisms and fraud. This form of imperialism doesn't put people in chains or press them into service aboard a ship, it puts people in debt and makes them poor.

Every person, from the poorest to even the wealthiest corporate execitive in the system is playing an unwinnable game with rules that can be adjusted at any time. For poorer people, even for the middle class people, there's almost no attachment to this system. The inevitable outcome is a split economy and political split.

The Internet counterculture is the sharp edge of the political split. It seems like the political split is just in the early stages of pushing the creation of parallel economic institutions and even societal institutions.

Why is Appalachian Ohio Household Income Lower Than The Rest of the State?

Limit of the Advance of Glaciers in South East Ohio

The difference in median household income between the portion of Ohio that was covered by ice during the Pleistocene era, and the portion that wasn't is stark.

The map above is pretty old and the values are in 1999 dollars, but it shows the difference well. Generally, the per capita income and household income in Appalachia is a fraction of the wealthier portion of the state. If you scan through the areas with satellite or roadside imagery, the very subtle differences in the areas tell the story.

Both regions are in the same geographic "province" of the United States--the Allegheny Plateua. The landscape of south east Ohio is what Northeast Ohio would look like if it hadn't been glaciated. In Southern Ohio, there are rolling hills where erosion has worn down the rocks and there are more or less broad valleys where streams and rivers have formed arable land, but there are also lots of little rocky hill tops with no soil, which creates a double whammy problem. In areas with severe landscapes, travel distance is longer and more energy intensive to avoid hills, so it's really like the resources of Appalachian Ohio are diluted by a factor of 1.5 or 2.

In Northeast Ohio, the little hills were worn down by glaciers and the valleys were filled in with till so there are large regions of land with deep soil. Consequently, it was possible to support cities with larger populations. (If you look at topo map of Switzerland, you see the same patterns.)

Also Appalachian Ohio became a coal mining area while the rest of the state generated wealth with diverse industrial activity and agriculture. Resource extraction businesses are often bad at creating lasting wealth for the people because there's pretty minimal value added locally, so once the coal is used up, or becomes uneconomic, the money spigot just shuts off. Also, historically, the coal mining business was pretty malignant economically and preyed on their employees, so whatever wealth was actually created by the coal trade was sucked out of those regions leaving little behind.

Farm Truck Update: The Battle Against Decay

Muh farm truck serpentine belt broke recently because the A/C compressor was seized. Fortunately, it's a relatively inexpensive repair and if I wanted to do it myself, it'd be really cheap. I won't be surprised, though, if that incident created conditions that ultimately kill the engine. If that happens the cost per mile for this truck will end up being very high relative to all the vehicles I've owned.

In a world of all-change and perpetual decay of our property and our meat chariot bodies it can be difficult to take pleasure in small victories in a no-win war. Man's belief in his supremacy over the primal forces of our world is shown to be the vanity of Ozymondias or as futile as Gilgamesh's quest for immortality. I'm reminded of this not only by rust and mechanical breakdowns or the gray hairs on my head, but by walks around our woods.

lake deposited clay forms the bed of the creek on our property

In the last ice age, not so long ago in geological terms, the land our house is on was under water. It boggles my mind because we're on a hill that's about 100 feet above the nearest body of water: Big Creek and we're about 600 feet above Lake Erie. The landscape that we perceive as permanent is actually very young and subject to wild changes.

The glaciers that flowed over the great lakes filled up lower areas until they were stopped by higher relief landscapes and the warmer temperatures of the south. As each ice age passed, the glaciers receded back up the valleys, but sometimes ice blocked drainage channels for many years, which is possibly how the lake formed.

As water flowed along newly deposited till and glacial debris, rocks and boulders fell out first, of course, then materials like sand did, and the finest stuff, which forms clay, was carried to standing water where it settled out. Eventually the lake drained and the clay was covered over and in some places it is cut through by moving water.

United States Corporate Authoritarians and War By Other Means

It's fitting that tech companies carry out the "western" version of commie China's social credit system in the wake of GM's long con of the United States playing out in the usual way. (US taxpayers $11B in the hole. CEO paid $20M to ship jobs and manufacturing overseas.)

It's apparent that tech companies will implement a social credit system that other corporations will utilize and enforce. The Federal auhorities will bank their campaign dough and pass on taking responsibility as rights are eroded by private enterprises. 

The Revolutionary War in the United States really got kicked off by the vampire British empire abusing the colonists economically. Hopefully in our day other forms of competition and "warfare" can be utilized as alternatives to retarded old violence. It'd be much better to transform the way we live toward a more free and decentralized and sane way, rather than do another spin of the same old same old cycle.

Most of this blog is about the futility of establishing "systems" to try to solve humanity's problems. Humanism and the Enlightenment were a huge improvement on the modes of thinking of the medieval world, but in my appraisal, they've run full circle--the humanist enlightenment empire is just another shitty old empire with its own gods that limit how people think.

Lessons from the French and Indian War for Tech Companies

Many of the people who went on to found the United States were directly involved in the French and Indian War in the colonies that eventually became the United States. The F&I war was the American theater of a global conflict between the french and british empire. People like George Washington got an up close and personal look at the apparatus of the british empire and saw its weakness in North America.

Today, tech companies are inserting themselves into the culture wars nonsense on behalf of left wing ideologies and fraud politicians. This is all a result of the stupid presidential election and the fear of the "establishment" (corporate execs and NGOs) of the electoral backlash against neoliberalism, aka the political arrangement where they reap huge rewards for automation and slave labor.

Tech is the most ephemeral business there is because the underlying technologies and techniques are ephemeral. If you're 40 years old or more, you can probably remember names like Digital Equipment Corp. or Sun Microsystems, or COMPAQ or lol Kaypro. Another important factor, even more important today, is that the barrier to entry for starting new tech ventures is very, very low. The enterprises that look so strong are in fact tied to massive sunk costs of aging garbage hardware.

The Internet of today is (was?) the home of the counter culture, but tech companies are the establishment. This inherent tension seems to be playing out now.

The culture war has moved into an economic attack phase. This type of economic "war" has happened many times in history in various forms. NGOs and hidden hand muckety mucks seem to be pushing their peons in tech to cut the ability of people like Alex Jones, who's basically an infotainer, and Sargon, another infotainer, to make money through internet platforms.

The institutions that seem so strong today can get terminally ill tomorrow. We're in the era of war and imperialism by other means. The Internet will probably split into a New World internet and a sad old world internet.

Pop Culture: Somebody Else's Daydreams

Drawings are a paper representation of how the mind's eye sees. Theatrical makeup and women's beauty makeup emphasize the same high information features of the face as the pencil and charcoal drawings on the wall of Chauvet Cave.

Comic books and animation are short hand representations of the forms encoded in our brains. They're like a stimulus for active memory and entering into a reverie state. Many other pop culture products follow a similar pattern.

The movie They Live is a dramatization of the outcome of an entire populace that's been immersed in someone else's daydream. Loss of the ability to actively imagine is essentially the same as a loss of will and ability to shape the future.

Glaciers and Money

I've been half assed interested in geology for the past few years mainly because our property is near the southern boundary of the furthest advance of the Cuyahoga and Grand River Lobes of the glaciers that covered northern Ohio about 14,800 years ago. When you spend lots of time outside, eventually the more subtle features of the landscape become more obvious and familiar due to long association which ends up providing a more concrete way to make sense of the argot of geologists.

Our property sits on the pile of debris left behind by the glaciers as they melted. Actually, it's the pile that's slumped up against other piles that were left against the more resistant bedrock just to the south of where we live. In the ice age, Ohio was alternately covered and uncovered by advancing and retreating ice of various depths. In my county, when the ice was deep enough, the whole county was covered, otherwise, it only advanced along the west and east flanks of the county through river valleys.

After years of looking at maps about different statistics, I eventually noticed that the unglaciated areas are more likely to be the lower income areas in the United States than glaciated areas. I haven't done more than a qualitative look at this data mainly because I've got better things to do, but every once in a while I circle around to this topic and try to explain it.

Correlation is not causation. The unglaciated portion of Ohio is substantially poorer than the rest of the state; generally the median household income is about 50% less than the glaciated portion of the state. The unglaciated portion of the state is in Appalachia and is extremely hilly. The glaciated portion of the state is flatter, and more importantly is connected to the Lake Erie Plain, which eventually hooks up with the Mohawk Valley of New York.

The Mowhawk Valley provided a flat route for east-west overland traffic (today it's the route for Interstate 90) and was a main thoroughfare in the 1800s. Similarly, obviously, the great lakes provided a water route to the interior of the US for decades prior to train routes and areas near trade routes more easily participate in trade and are wealthier.

Locally, the wealthiest census tract areas tend to be on geologic zone boundaries, which is maybe a more interesting effect to think about.

Courts, Dogmas, SJWs and Anti-Hallucination

Heimdal and the Bifrost Bridge

I've been sniffing out this shared hallucination topic for basically as long as I've been writing this blog. It's interesting to think about that reverie state as the Bifrost Bridge and the passageway to the realm of the gods. Indeed that reverie state is perhaps the most pleasant state of being for a human and is maybe the most powerful and creative way to be as a human.

It's also interesting to think about the people and institutions who attack this reverie state of consciousness. Many business environments are sterile and lack all the real-world amenities to move into this mode of daydreaming, even for their employees who are "creative" types. Courtrooms and other "formal" settings are seemingly designed for the purpose of jamming up access to this mode of thinking. Indeed, quite a lot of human "hierarchy" is aimed at destroying free access to the reverie state and shared  hallucination.

The puritans of yesteryear, or dogmatic religious people in general, just like the SJW of today attempts to put traps and tripwires along the Bifrost Bridge to keep people in a low state of consciousness so the will of some oligarch can be imposed on a mass of people.

Communing with the Gods Versus Paper Plans and Writing

From: here

Shifting states of consciousness is a way to travel among the "worlds". People do this all the time, of course. While you're reading this blog you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you're walking down a sidewalk on a cold and rainy day. When you watch a TV show or browse social media or craigslist, you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you read this blog.

In previous posts, I argued that the network of filters that process sensory information form the basis of "symbolic" representation of the natural world. Those filters and networks coevolved with the natural world over eons and are it's meaty-electrical reflection, so we're connected to the natural world via the matter of our nervous system and the molecular memory of our very matter and bones and the bacteria in our guts, but also to the information and concepts of the universe that are imprinted on everything. (cf Meno's slave)

When we can shift consciousness by an act of will we can move around to different "rooms" of this palace of the universe that's actually in us. We can connect that palace of thought to the real world by various means and share them by various means. Generally these means are low fidelity and low bandwidth, e.g. writing, poetry, and speech. The philosophers who devised the scientific method came up with one technique for creating a formal connection.

The shared hallucination method of things like dungeons and dragons or a church service are actually much higher fidelity. Maybe, just maybe its possible to take a whole rooms full of people into that shared hallucinatory state for the purpose of planning, even for very ordinary day-to-day purposes. With that method, it's not necessary to come up with the paper, symbolic representation of that experience.

Shared Hallucination versus Laws, Money and Bureaucracy

When you read a really captivating book, you enter into a low grade hallucination. A role playing game like dungeons and dragons is an exercise in shared hallucination. A church service is a similar exercise in shared hallucination. The shared hallucination state is pretty hard to carry into an activity, though, since it requires a relaxed and idle body.

Laws are the shared hallucination of legislators, really these days in the United States, 99% of the time they're the shared hallucination of corporate lawyers that are then passed into the hands of legislators in the states and the federal government. For the citizen, though, who has to follow them, they're the opposite of that shared hallucination state.

The shared hallucination state is probably a pretty good model for organization without money or bureaucracy. Dungeons and dragons might be a pretty good model for advanced planning and analysis.

Advanced D&D and Gamification of the World

The western world today thoroughly resembles a game. There's only a handful of things that people do that connect them to the real world mainly by flattening their consciousness so it's really in the moment.

Most of the "culture wars" nonsense that goes on reminds me of Dungeons and Dragons or LARPing. Almost all the disputes in the culture wars take place over completely imaginary topics, or over some academic's ramblings. Some people can spend their entire life in that realm of consciousness and never even know there are other realms.

If you've ever played dungeons and dragons, you know what it means to achieve that shared-hallucination state of consciousness. The entry and exit into that mindset is a very subtle. Is that the day-to-day state of nearly everyone in the western world? Is it a shared hallucination of a gamified world?

The New Imperialism

Since the end of the cold war, corporations/oligarchs have been trying to drive the whole world back to the time of the British East India Company, but rather than subjugate poor people in distant lands, the current model seems to be to subjugate everyone everywhere. Divide and conquer schemes that were once applied to the Company Raj in India are now being applied to western countries via mass migration.

The oligarchy of yesteryear (well its grandchildren anyway) pretends to stand in solidarity with whom they formerly subjugated and terrorized against "white people" without even a hint of irony or skepticism. In the colonial era, physical violence was employed by corporations against their subjects, but today that's not really necessary or practical. It's a lot easier to steal from people with laws, regulatory bodies, etc...

Very predictably, people are sorting into "sides" and getting angry at their fellow men rather than the people who divide them and exploit them.

Mass Media, the Catholic Church and Oligarchy

When I was a pre-teen geek the history topic that fascinated me the most was the migration period. There's a good collection of artifacts from that era in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the exhibit is arranged so you can easily see how the classical world went off a cliff and was replaced by something new and weird.

One of the great mysteries of that era is how and why christianity supplanted the religions of those peoples. I think the catholic church was really a crude version of the mass media of those times. The religions that it supplanted were shamanic and maybe radically local, that is, tied to local natural shrines and gods of places. By contrast Christianity is totally generic and otherworldly and not tied in any way, shape or form to Europe, and that's probably one of the reasons it actually spread.

The mass media, mass market corporate world of today is like a constricted everywhere locality. While for the people of pre-christian Europe, their tribe and town might be the only thing they would ever know. Ironically, the mass media, mass market world of today makes people care about sports teams and the goings on of world cities so they don't know the first thing about things in their immediate vicinity.

Possibly Christianity was a gateway to a world beyond that local one, maybe even literally. While today, shamanism seems appealing because it's a break with generic corporate pavement world.

Since the catholic church was a transnational entity at a time when tribes were the peak of organization, it could serve as an intermediary between them and serve as a notary of contracts and treaties and ratify deals among oligarchs of the day, and then also serve as the mass media of the time and propagandize the common people with the rightness and justice of those deals.

Symbols from Sense Filter Networks

The active filtering mechanisms of our senses and brain are the basis for symbolic representation of the world. More precisely, they are the concrete things which symbols arise from. The association of these mechanisms form symbols and concepts. For animals like our ducks, their symbolic representation of the world is probably immediate and rooted in what they're experiencing at any given moment.

They're constantly looking for food, or scanning the sky for potential predators. They'll often spot birds or aircraft that are high in the sky long before I notice them. They're also tuned into the chattering of all the local song birds and their predator warnings so in that sense, their vision and brain is linked with all the other birds that are loosely flocking around our property at any given time.

The ducks are constantly squawking and chirping and calling out to communicate amongst themselves and us. Their communication is always about their immediate experience, even when it's in the context of exploring or learning about something new in their environment.

By contrast, human speech based learning is usually aimed at contextualizing new experience or concepts in terms of prior experience and concepts. The immediate world barely even exists in the consciousness of many people, except in the context of playing a sport or driving a car or some physical activity.

It's a pretty good mental exercise to put yourself into that immediate sense processing mode from time to time.