Thank you for this series and for all your efforts to hold the paradox and live the answer. How to remember clarity and love and not get swept away in the crowd is really the moment-by-moment question of our times. You remind us here that we have many paths to learn from if we look to the past which is also like looking at where it is possible for us to move forward. Sending you lots of strength and good wishes in all you are trying to hold in your posts, persistence and perspective.
As I read Mike Brock, he doesn't subscribe to the notion of Universal Consciousness. In his magnificent "The Grand Finale," a grand philosophical rumination exploring the search for meaning, he sees a Universe as "vast and indifferent."
However, the Universe speaks to us in deeds, eloquently, with laws of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, climatology, etc. . . illustrating universal principles of the behavior of energy/matter/gravity in space. The apex of these principles is "replication" as essential to life. All the laws of nature conspire to support replication.
So those who see the human brain as the Universe's pinnacle of evolutionary achievement and consciousness as its ultimate end product, recognize the analogy between the human brain and the Universe as a replication. Essentially, both consist of sources of energy, conduits of energy, and receivers of and responders to energy. Look at photographs of the energy signatures of the two side by side, and they are virtually identical. In short, the brain is a biological analog of the Universe that created it.
And if the unlikely three pounds of electrically charged, wrinkled grey protoplasm is awesomely conscious (capable of producing, say, nine Beethoven symphonies), imagine what consciousness exists in the vast, analogous Universe that created it in an act of replication.
In searching for meaning, you will find it in the Universe's evolutionary objectives: life, intelligence, consciousness, and self-replication. The Universe is not indifferent. It exhibits purpose. Purpose discloses meaning, and meaning reveals consciousness.
At the human level, we find purpose and meaning by following the Universe's cue to replicate our intelligence and consciousness in the minds of others (i.e. "engaging," as Mike correctly states): writers write, and speakers speak their thoughts; musicians play, record, and write their sounds; painters paint their images; cooks prepare their food and share their recipes; perfumers formulate their scents; sculptors carve their forms, all striving for replication in the minds of those who see, hear, taste, smell, touch their creations. And now the Universe's supreme replicants are busy replicating themselves with "Artificial Intelligence," compelled to fulfill the Universe's fundamental dicta!
And, perhaps, some replicate their consciousness in the "mind" of the conscious Universe through mind-melding meditation and altered states of consciousness. As Artificial Intelligence is "trained" by tapping into human activity, why not the Universe?
Thank you for this series and for all your efforts to hold the paradox and live the answer. How to remember clarity and love and not get swept away in the crowd is really the moment-by-moment question of our times. You remind us here that we have many paths to learn from if we look to the past which is also like looking at where it is possible for us to move forward. Sending you lots of strength and good wishes in all you are trying to hold in your posts, persistence and perspective.
As I read Mike Brock, he doesn't subscribe to the notion of Universal Consciousness. In his magnificent "The Grand Finale," a grand philosophical rumination exploring the search for meaning, he sees a Universe as "vast and indifferent."
However, the Universe speaks to us in deeds, eloquently, with laws of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, climatology, etc. . . illustrating universal principles of the behavior of energy/matter/gravity in space. The apex of these principles is "replication" as essential to life. All the laws of nature conspire to support replication.
So those who see the human brain as the Universe's pinnacle of evolutionary achievement and consciousness as its ultimate end product, recognize the analogy between the human brain and the Universe as a replication. Essentially, both consist of sources of energy, conduits of energy, and receivers of and responders to energy. Look at photographs of the energy signatures of the two side by side, and they are virtually identical. In short, the brain is a biological analog of the Universe that created it.
And if the unlikely three pounds of electrically charged, wrinkled grey protoplasm is awesomely conscious (capable of producing, say, nine Beethoven symphonies), imagine what consciousness exists in the vast, analogous Universe that created it in an act of replication.
In searching for meaning, you will find it in the Universe's evolutionary objectives: life, intelligence, consciousness, and self-replication. The Universe is not indifferent. It exhibits purpose. Purpose discloses meaning, and meaning reveals consciousness.
At the human level, we find purpose and meaning by following the Universe's cue to replicate our intelligence and consciousness in the minds of others (i.e. "engaging," as Mike correctly states): writers write, and speakers speak their thoughts; musicians play, record, and write their sounds; painters paint their images; cooks prepare their food and share their recipes; perfumers formulate their scents; sculptors carve their forms, all striving for replication in the minds of those who see, hear, taste, smell, touch their creations. And now the Universe's supreme replicants are busy replicating themselves with "Artificial Intelligence," compelled to fulfill the Universe's fundamental dicta!
And, perhaps, some replicate their consciousness in the "mind" of the conscious Universe through mind-melding meditation and altered states of consciousness. As Artificial Intelligence is "trained" by tapping into human activity, why not the Universe?
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