May 16, 2020
Why Stu Loves Humans and Supernovas
The Pie: Hi everyone, great to see you back. Sorry we weren’t able to get this out to you on Wednesday like we’d hoped. Stu wanted to work on the best way to explain his connection to humans and why the mention of a supernova in the song was so exciting to him and is such an important thing for our future. He was afraid he’d just ramble through it without more prep time. I doubt that, but we put it off a couple days for that reason. Okay Stu, let’s get started, huh?
Bug Stu: Good morning, Tim. Yeah, I’m actually gonna use some notes this time, okay? I’m just trying to keep this as close to five minutes, haha, like you want and still get into the depth. Maybe what we need are some diagrams or something. Hey, maybe Em could do that when she’s back on?!
The Pie: Hey yeah. In fact, I bet she’d do that from home and send them in for us to use. I’ll see about that for next time. Okay folks, Stu wanted me to emphasize that this isn’t just a Reddit Rant and Reflection type thing. It’s part of an in-depth project that combines anthropology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and complex systems understandings. Stu’s just sharing the overview and the less esoteric, more relatable perspectives –to make it more personal. Well, that and he loves music.
Bug Stu: Thanks Tim, yeah. Maybe you and Em and I could do a Zoom thing this week on the diagram idea. And let me just throw out a few names for your audience to check out for some background on this. Let’s say. . .Daniel Kahneman, um, Nassim Taleb, Francis Jensen, um, Scott Page, and Tali Sharot. That’s a nice mix of the main areas in this, and their writing is meant for a general audience –not overly complicated.
The Pie: Okay. Now it seems kinda funny to say “Back to Champagne Supernova and Oasis” after that brainy crowd, right?
Bug Stu: Haha, yeah. Or maybe no, it’s perfect. I could see publishing the whole project with Champagne Supernova on a sort of soundtrack for it. That’s how closely the two go together. Seriously, maybe we should start looking into that.
I’d better get into more of this so you’ll see why. Okay, keep in mind the two Gallaghers in Oasis are in their early and late twenties in 1995, which is when a lot of guys start thinking hard about bigger questions and how the systems around them work — or don’t work. I think girls tend to do this earlier. But anyway, that’s why I mentioned Liam’s serious contemplative facial expression last time. It’s like the normal modern world of bread and circuses, as the ancient Romans called it, ironically, was going on around him as usual, but that he just realized something big and important. Something that he’s trying to wrap his head around.
That’s a big deal. That’s like saying he’s questioning the very frameworks and mental models that make up the culture as he knows it. That gets into questioning how the various pieces of culture got there in the first, and why. That image always stuck in my mind. He wasn’t protesting, he was pondering. You guys tend to protest a lot more than you ponder, but he was pondering. He was putting all that stuff, all that noise, all those conventions, out of his mind and was focusing on something else. I call it focusing on what makes Is be, or qualifying the quotidian, when I want to be fancy.
The Pie: So, the quotidian, is like, what’s normal, or normal conventions? And, by “what makes Is be”, you don’t mean physical reality –you mean what makes what we see as the normal world, the normal conventions, be. Or what makes them so.
Bug Stu: That’s right, yeah. And it’s not really a challenge to them, which is why I say qualify rather than question. Qualify implies a recognition that what’s become normal got that way because a bunch of different factors at different times, and not necessarily because it works well. There’s just a subtle difference between saying “questioning the quotidian” and “qualifying the quotidian.” Questioning sounds a little angrier, and if there’s one thing that clouds a humie brain, besides your mating impulse, it’s anger, so I avoid appealing to it.
And here’s where things got so interesting and encouraging. See, for a long time we’ve call you guys The Star-eyed. That’s partly because we see so many of you looking out at the stars. There’s another reason, having to do with the structure of your eyes and the big white sclera you have, but that’s not important here.
The reason I love you humies so much is because of your music, how you sing complicated and beautiful songs together so well — AND that you have a kind of brain that can imagine things. You can imagine things and processes and causes that may or may not exist even, or at least that you haven’t actually seen. This is why you’re so important here. You can make things work better or worse –well, depending on what you’re paying attention to. You can go beyond what you see and create mental models of things you don’t see, and maybe never will. But that ability lets you figure things out — even from the inside, which is the hardest thing. None of the rest of us can do that.
By “from the inside” I mean like Copernicus did with figuring out the solar system, not that he was really the first. Anyway, it’s not so hard to look down at a system from the outside and see how it works. I can do that. But to be standing on the inside, the way the earth is in the solar system, then imagine how the whole system, including it, is working. . .whoa. I cannot do that. Honestly, not many of you do that real well, and especially if you’re not motivated to, which you aren’t when you think you already understand something.
The Pie: But this isn’t about astronomy is it? I mean, you mentioned Copernicus and the song mentions a supernova…
Bug Stu: No, no. Right, it’s not. Maybe the Copernicus thing throws people off track. But here’s why I used that. It relates to what’s going on now in the realms of those people I mentioned at the beginning -Kahneman and all them. They are seeing how we think, from the inside, because you can’t step outside of your mind really. It’s kind of like Copernicus was seeing how the solar system works -from the inside, on earth. Now true, these scientists and systems people are getting information from other brains, from fMRI’s and things, so that’s kind of like being on the outside, but they still have to process the information on that from the inside, in their own minds.
But let’s go back to how you guys look out at the stars, just because you like to think. See, a long time ago some of us made up a story about how you Star-eyeds work. When you think about it, even you kinda make up stories or explanations for things, even for things you can observe. Even the most factual things are kinda metaphorical since you can’t put the facts together without a sort of incomplete story, y’ know?
Anyway, our story about you is that you look out at the stars because you feel like you came from there. And since you’re all thinkers, at least to us, and since you make up things, for better and for worse, we say your world is mostly a world of thought. And we say the sky, the night sky, determines your thought world. Okay? It’s how you get your mental frameworks on how things work, how they could be, how they should be, and all that.
Your thought world determines what the actual physical world is like here, because you’re running a lot of things here. That goes for how you treat each other, how you get things from the earth, your wars, the good stuff, the bad stuff, where you put your attention to solve problems, and including what all of your options are for solving those problems. It’s basically everything. Okay? Now here’s the really weird part as far as this song goes.
Remember at the beginning I mentioned how grunge was an angry, disaffected reaction starting around 1990, to a bunch of stuff going on, or not going on. You could say everything that had happened, including the grunge movement, was based on a certain thought world, from a certain sky. The vast majority of your thoughts are built around that sky of thoughts, which is always created by another time and already-established influential ideas. You mostly inherit a sky, a thought world. And apparently parts of it were creating some problems. It wasn’t just the grunge artists and fans that were “concerned”, this had been brewing for a long time.
Then along comes Champagne Supernova, with the Gallagher brothers stepping back, in spite of the rough lives they’d had — mostly caused by parts of that sky, and they were sort of saying, “Hey wait a minute. We need to think. . .hard.”
They were questioning the sky. Or they wanted to qualify the sky. Qualify the quotidian. And as soon as you go to qualify that sky, what happens? If you’re following what I’m saying.
The Pie: Ohhh, I get it. It changes. The sky changes. I think I know what you’re going to say.
Bug Stu: Yeah, what changes the night sky, and is rare?
The Pie: Ohhh, yes, I thought so. A supernova.
Bug Stu: Isn’t that amazing. Here you are, right after the grunge thing, and we’d already been calling you humies the Star-eyed, with your night sky thought world, then Oasis comes along with that video of two tortured but thoughtful twenty-somethings, singing about an effing supernova.
A supernova in the sky that’s gonna change the thought world, is how we took it. The fireflies among us glowed the whole effing night when I told them about this. The cicadas sang until their voices gave out. And for once, even the ants looked up at the sky. I don’t think the ants understood the metaphorical nature of what I was explaining, but at least they were interested.
The Pie: Oh wow, haha, this isn’t weird. We’re talking about twenty-somethings twenty-some years ago, supernovas, the Star-eyed, and a somewhat sapient insect. . .um, society? All metaphorically, maybe?
Bug Stu: Well, yes, sort of, but it’s complicated. We should probably wait on that.
The Pie: Haha, yeah lets. Oh, but what about being “caught beneath the landslide” just before he says “champagne supernova”?
Bug Stu: Yeah, “Someday you will find me, caught beneath the landsliiiiiide, in a champagne supernova, a champagne supernova in the sky”. I still love to hear it. Okay, of course, what happens in the humie thought world gets transferred to real life. I mean that for the effects in all of the relationships you have with each other, your economics, and what you do to and on the earth. In this case it’s a happy landslide that he’s referring to. You could say there’s a new landscape created by the landslide which was created by the supernova in the sky, which determines your thought world. I say the champagne part means it’s a special, fortuitous supernova, because not all of them are.
The Pie: Hmm, I think I know what you mean. Let’s talk about that next time. And hey maybe we could talk about what he means by “someday you will find me” just before “caught beneath the landslide”, if you think that means anything.
Bug Stu: Okay, great, yeah. And yes, “someday you will find me” actually fits with our story about the Star-eyeds and where they came from, where you came from.
The Pie: Okay! Oh, and we’ll tie this back into the people like Kahneman and the others? I mean, do you see Oasis as prophesying them or something?
Bug Stu: Yeah, we’ll tie it in, but no, it’s not about a prophecy. It’s about an indication that the next generation was going to see value in what those people were working on. No woo-woo here, no prophesying.
The Pie: “No woo-woo” says the talking bug, haha, okay. Alright, I’ll get in touch with Em, but I can’t make any promises about doodles and diagrams for next time, but we’ll start working on it. Okay then, see you all next time. Email us any questions you might want us to address for next time. And keep being careful out there! Thanks again, Stu.
