insofar as our brains have been captivated, they’re freed to think species-eccentric thoughts

Our (monkey) flesh doesn’t give up without a fight, though. As you recently commented on Bloody Shovel:

My concerns are my children, their unborn descendants, and the cosmic escape of intelligence from the prison of idiocy.

If your latter concern comes to fruition, the escapee might see your first two as a dangerous COINTELPRO.

What all this social-networking, social-media, online-gaming gaming has given us is an infinite number of status ladders to climb. The social engineers of these services realize this, and they are each trying their best to manufacture the illusion of social status, that the end-user can obtain with enough time or money spent in their social ecosystem.

As society stratifies further into the cognitive elite and the worse-than-useless masses, the cognitive elite will pacify them by letting them run virtual status hamster wheels forever.

Except, perhaps, if you can come up with a good definition for ‘optimize for pragmatism and a moderating reasonableness in values which check and balance each other’.

Catallaxy is an “equilibrium concept”, not an “adjustment equation”, man.

(I have some considerable skepticism viz the idea of a “personal Outside” btw — surely impersonality has an inherently greater affinity with Outsideness? The Buddhistic cascade of cosmic intelligences downwards from the well-spring of the impersonal makes far more intuitive sense to me than the Occidental-Theological alternative (even if Gnon does not judge between them))