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.
A whisky drinking Hitch as Virgil is a nice touch. I wish I had met him IRL. What a vicious brilliance.
I met Sagan at Cornell in the 80s. He had a sweet pad, a fondness for good weed (of which Cornell had much) and a bit of a creepy thing for co-eds. Fascinating extemporaneous speaker.
There's a new NEW Yorker article out about Yarvin which fits in with your thesis here.
"Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”
Love how Yarvin decided the world was wrong rather than himself.
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.
A whisky drinking Hitch as Virgil is a nice touch. I wish I had met him IRL. What a vicious brilliance.
I met Sagan at Cornell in the 80s. He had a sweet pad, a fondness for good weed (of which Cornell had much) and a bit of a creepy thing for co-eds. Fascinating extemporaneous speaker.
There's a new NEW Yorker article out about Yarvin which fits in with your thesis here.
"Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”
Love how Yarvin decided the world was wrong rather than himself.
But don't all the megalomaniacs?
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?
https://davidlsmith.substack.com