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This weekend

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This weekend's reading

Where Value Touches Ground

A weekend at the boundary where thermodynamics stops being physics and starts being theology.

  • ◇Value Is Not Arbitrary: Its Thermodynamic Roots in Existence Itself
  • ◇The Sacred as Thermodynamic Necessity in Complex Societies
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This weekend

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Lit on the map

Where Value Touches Ground

A weekend at the boundary where thermodynamics stops being physics and starts being theology.

Meaning CrisisRelevance RealizationProcess PhilosophyPhenomenologyConsciousness Studies
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This weekend's question

Where Value Touches Ground

“If mattering is thermodynamic before it is psychological, what does that do to the distinction between sacred and secular?”

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This weekend

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This weekend's quest

Where Value Touches Ground

Something is holding the universe together that isn't gravity. Three thinkers trace value from its thermodynamic floor to its sacred ceiling. Your task is to find the joints — the places where physics becomes meaning and meaning becomes obligation. The map has seven edges. Not all of them point in the direction you'd expect.

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  1. Observers
  2. ›Stephen Jenkinson
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BYOD: Bring Your Own Discernment · AI-assisted · Eternally in its infancy

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SJ

Stephen Jenkinson

Death, grief, ancestral accountability — dying as a moral obligation, civilizational death phobia, and the ethics of grief literacy at the edge of cultural collapse

Orphan Wisdom School
3 ideas9 connections

Canadian writer, teacher, and culture activist who spent two decades directing palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital before founding the Orphan Wisdom School in 2010. His award-winning book Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015) argues that dying well is a moral and political obligation, and that Western culture's death phobia and grief illiteracy are symptoms of a deeper civilizational failure. His work draws on theology, social work, and an ethic of ancestral and ecological accountability.

Website ↗Wikipedia ↗

Topics

Ethics2
Meaning Crisis2
Meta-Crisis2
Epistemology1
Civilizational Risk1
Existential Risk1
Sensemaking1
Systems Thinking1

Connected Observers

Zak Stein4Daniel Schmachtenberger1Lene Rachel Andersen1Iain McGilchrist1Matthew David Segall1John Vervaeke

Ideas in the Observatory

  • Acting Without a Plan When the Window Has Already Closed
    Acting Without a Plan When the Window Has Already ClosedThe dead don't get to negotiate.
    I
  • Personal Healing Does Not Automatically Repair a Broken World
    Personal Healing Does Not Automatically Repair a Broken WorldThe glaciers don't care that you did the work.
    I

Links

WebsiteWikipedia

Topics

Ethics2
Meaning Crisis2
Meta-Crisis2
1
  • The Ethics of Acknowledging Civilizational Death
    The Ethics of Acknowledging Civilizational DeathSitting at the bedside of the world
    I
    • Epistemology
    1
    Civilizational Risk1
    Existential Risk1
    Sensemaking1
    Systems Thinking1

    Connected Observers

    Zak Stein4Daniel Schmachtenberger1Lene Rachel Andersen1Iain McGilchrist1Matthew David Segall1John Vervaeke1
    ← All Observers