Guide to technological innovation and the transhumanist future for individuals interested in the quest to enhance life and liberty through speciation:
- Introduction
- Who will benefit from this guide
- Context - breadth vs. depth
- Primacy of history, philosophy, politics, spiritual thought
- My Generalized Preferences
- My own
- A secular author
- A spiritual author
- My Recommendations for Source Material
- Great Books list
- Specific surveys - ideas, history, art, science, politics
- My Evaluation Methodology for Source Material
- Short Samples from Essays on this Website
- The Future
- Politics
- Ethics
- Epistemology
- Aesthetics
- Metaphysics
introduction
This site is primarily about transhumanist philosophy, with essays centering on how the world will cope with humanity’s natural upward drive towards cultural and physical speciation; The Speciation Imperative, in short.
Individuals are very interested in the future and what it holds for them and their family and friends, but their understanding of the role that technological innovation plays in shaping the future is vague and ambiguous. Technology is changing so quickly and touches on so many areas of our personal life and on our culture at large that we often are lost in the welter of information snippets and fleeting images that reach us during our hectic days.
How can we form the consciences of our children, in fact, how can we keep our own consciences tuned, when innovation presents us, on a regular basis, with unique ethical situations never seen in history before? How can we plan for and shape the future when we don’t know what, for good or bad, will be invented next?
To answer these questions without pursuing a career as a full-time scholar, it helps to have a Study Guide. The concept of time-energy budgets from Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson is very useful: “Time-energy budgets, that is, the amount of time someone spends on an activity and the energy expended on it. The forms and priorities of social behavior are constrained to a large extent by the time-energy budget.” The future is a perennial priority of social behavior, now more than ever. To get up to speed regarding technological innovation and the transhumanist future requires choices, good choices that do not waste precious time-energy, hence this guide.
The best guide we have is to learn from the application to everyday living, of first principles of axioms and the operation of their deductive logic, and the resulting inductive lessons of history: of what works and what doesn’t work, of what is permitted and what is not permitted. “Experiments against reality,” using Roger Kimball’s phrase, are a big waste of our time.
The role of the philosopher as legislator, that is, one who sets ideals and values adrift in the conceptual currents of society is proven to exist time and again by looking to actual historical facts proceeding from the promulgation of axioms. Karl Marx wrote in 1859: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.” After 13 decades of the greatest expenditure of worldwide blood and treasure in all human history, over a hundred million dead and an unprecedented diversion of wealth towards the most devastating weapons ever devised, Czech President Vaclev Havel announced to a joint session of the US Congress: “Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.” It would be wasteful to relearn this. Thus, for purposes of this guide, emphasis is placed on breadth of learning over depth of learning to establish maximum context within which to place scenarios of the future.
Elliott Sober in Philosophy of Biology stressed the importance of learning history as a prerequisite to establishing a broad context within which to understand things: “Evolutionary theory is important because evolution is always in the background. Nothing can be understood ahistorically. Of course, what this really means is that nothing can be understood completely without attending to its history.”
In my generalized preferences, my recommendations for source material and my samples of topics from this site, as outlined below, I stress the importance of history, philosophy, politics and spiritual thought. These areas contribute most to achieving a broad context from which to extrapolate what will work and what will not work in the future, as stated in my Purpose of Education essay:
Individuals are very interested in the future and what it holds for them and their family and friends, but their understanding of the role that technological innovation plays in shaping the future is vague and ambiguous. Technology is changing so quickly and touches on so many areas of our personal life and on our culture at large that we often are lost in the welter of information snippets and fleeting images that reach us during our hectic days.
How can we form the consciences of our children, in fact, how can we keep our own consciences tuned, when innovation presents us, on a regular basis, with unique ethical situations never seen in history before? How can we plan for and shape the future when we don’t know what, for good or bad, will be invented next?
To answer these questions without pursuing a career as a full-time scholar, it helps to have a Study Guide. The concept of time-energy budgets from Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson is very useful: “Time-energy budgets, that is, the amount of time someone spends on an activity and the energy expended on it. The forms and priorities of social behavior are constrained to a large extent by the time-energy budget.” The future is a perennial priority of social behavior, now more than ever. To get up to speed regarding technological innovation and the transhumanist future requires choices, good choices that do not waste precious time-energy, hence this guide.
The best guide we have is to learn from the application to everyday living, of first principles of axioms and the operation of their deductive logic, and the resulting inductive lessons of history: of what works and what doesn’t work, of what is permitted and what is not permitted. “Experiments against reality,” using Roger Kimball’s phrase, are a big waste of our time.
The role of the philosopher as legislator, that is, one who sets ideals and values adrift in the conceptual currents of society is proven to exist time and again by looking to actual historical facts proceeding from the promulgation of axioms. Karl Marx wrote in 1859: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.” After 13 decades of the greatest expenditure of worldwide blood and treasure in all human history, over a hundred million dead and an unprecedented diversion of wealth towards the most devastating weapons ever devised, Czech President Vaclev Havel announced to a joint session of the US Congress: “Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.” It would be wasteful to relearn this. Thus, for purposes of this guide, emphasis is placed on breadth of learning over depth of learning to establish maximum context within which to place scenarios of the future.
Elliott Sober in Philosophy of Biology stressed the importance of learning history as a prerequisite to establishing a broad context within which to understand things: “Evolutionary theory is important because evolution is always in the background. Nothing can be understood ahistorically. Of course, what this really means is that nothing can be understood completely without attending to its history.”
In my generalized preferences, my recommendations for source material and my samples of topics from this site, as outlined below, I stress the importance of history, philosophy, politics and spiritual thought. These areas contribute most to achieving a broad context from which to extrapolate what will work and what will not work in the future, as stated in my Purpose of Education essay:
The most general learning, relying equally on the tripod of the basic curriculum within all three realms [purpose, meaning, truth], is in the areas of history, philosophy, politics and spiritual thought. This is the knowledge all individuals within representative democracies should attempt to achieve, at least to the degree that informed decisions are possible. Representatives themselves require this most generalized knowledge during periods of rapid, indeed, revolutionary technological changes of unknown scope and duration.
My Generalized Preferences
My generalized preferences derive from the quest to enhance life and liberty through speciation and recur in essays on this site:
- The particular and local over the universal and global
- The ideal of excellence over the incompatible ideal of equality
- Metaphysical presuppositions of Leibniz/Whitehead/Husserl over Epicurus/Machiavelli/Hobbes
- Pluralistic culture of life over monistic culture of death
- Seriousness over impiety
- The correspondence theory of truth over coherence theory of truth
- Joyous life over the sordid life
- Individual volitional freedom over fate or determination as the prime driver of historical events, i.e., “even the smallest person can change the course of the future” [LOTR] over impersonal or random material causes of historical change
- In the matter of how to live in community with each other, the choice before us is stark: either we fear God or fear our neighbor - the former is preferred
- In addition to my preferences listed above, I have a preference for the preferences listed by a couple of authors I recommend in my Conceptual Timelines - one of a secular nature and one of a spiritual nature.
- Preference for the small over the great, particularly in the case of the human political community
- Preference for the qualitative over the quantitative, for the personal over the impersonal, for the discriminate over the indiscriminate, and for the varied over the uniform, in most major aspects of social life
- Preference for the effort to distinguish and consider what is real, as distinct from the contrived imagery of reality, in the view contemporaries take of their own civilization
- An emphasis on the importance of a controlled and courteous behavior, of manners, and of common decency, as means of redemption from the demonic component in the physiological inner man
- The belief that if we are to have hope of emerging successfully from the great social bewilderments of this age, weight must be laid predominantly upon the spiritual, moral, and intellectual shaping of the individual with a view to the development of his qualities for leadership, rather than on the prospects for unaided self-improvement on the part of leaderless masses
- True fear of God
- Fervent zeal for His Honour
- Deep hatred of sin
- Horror at the sight of sinners
- Indignation and compassion at the blasphemies of heretics
- Jealous adherence to doctrinal truth
- Especial sensitiveness about the particular means of gaining ends, provided that the ends be good
- Loyalty to the Holy Apostolic Church, of which the Creed speaks
- Sense of the authority in religion as external to the mind
- Above all, seriousness
My Recommendations for Source Material
Recommendations for source material are listed below, primarily broad surveys containing many reference pointers for further study. In addition, my own pointers for further study are listed in my Conceptual Timelines I & II. The text in blue is for a rich vein of source material and the text in red is for the mother load, roughly 40 sources of varying lengths to be chosen according to the interests of the reader. Anthologies with selected parts of these sources, both red and blue, are highly recommended for limited time-energy budgets.
One thing to consider for establishing broad context within which to consider the future, is that conceptual history is developed or built up in sequence - often one needs exposure to basic concepts from the Greeks or Romans or Medieval Scholastics before really understanding why modern thought has taken the turns it has.
One thing to consider for establishing broad context within which to consider the future, is that conceptual history is developed or built up in sequence - often one needs exposure to basic concepts from the Greeks or Romans or Medieval Scholastics before really understanding why modern thought has taken the turns it has.
- A shortcut to gaining this exposure quickly is to sequentially look at the conceptual ideas in italics at the beginning of each chapter in Great Thinkers of the Western World and Great Thinkers of the Eastern World.
- With extra time, one can survey historians who wrote broadly: Thucydides, Plutarch, Polybius, Edward Gibbon, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oswald Spengler, Christopher Dawson & Arnold Toynbee.
- Conceptual history in narrative form is presented well in: The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun and History of Beauty by Umberto Eco.
- Compiled contemporary surveys of works of the highest importance in the arts and sciences can be found in Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray.
- Lay versions of more scholarly scientific books in neuroscience and biophysics reviewed on this site include: A Universe of Consciousness by Gerald Edelman and Investigations by Stuart Kauffman. For cosmology see The Reality of Time and the place of mathematics within reality by Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin.
- Political history is extended into the near future in the recent trilogy of books by Chalmers Johnson, particularly Nemesis.
My Evaluation Methodology for Source Material
Since no one can experience or read more than a small fraction of the available historical and conceptual source material in existence, my recommendations on where to find some of the best inductive nuggets pointing towards our transhumanist future have been generated by parsimonious evaluation procedures. I have read extensively enough from first hand accounts, their later critical reviews, quantitative archaeological and anthropological research, and plain old vanilla, scholastically reliable history books, to have a good grasp of a wide range of historical facts, in and of themselves, without relying on other’s interpretations of such facts to an undo degree.
I try to avoid historical interpreters who rely too much on grand-scale determinism as the primary causes of historical effects. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America notes the difference between historians writing when excellence was the primary cultural ideal versus when equality was the ideal:
I try to avoid historical interpreters who rely too much on grand-scale determinism as the primary causes of historical effects. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America notes the difference between historians writing when excellence was the primary cultural ideal versus when equality was the ideal:
When the historian of aristocratic ages surveys the theater of the world, he at once perceives a very small number of prominent actors who manage the whole piece. These great personages, who occupy the front of the stage, arrest attention and fix it on themselves; and while the historian is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make these persons speak and act, the others escape his memory.
When, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent of one another, and each of them is individually weak, no one is seen to exert a great or still less a lasting power over the community. At first sight individuals appear to be absolutely devoid of any influence over it, and society would seem to advance alone by the free and voluntary action of all the men who compose it. When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often happens that you see the world move without the impelling force being evident. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and analyze the reasons that, acting separately on the will of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the whole mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. A cause sufficiently extensive to affect millions of men at once and sufficiently strong to bend them all together in the same direction may well seem irresistible, having seen that mankind do yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that mankind cannot resist it.
In reading the historians of aristocratic ages, and especially those of antiquity, it would seem that, to be master of his lot and to govern his fellow creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. In perusing the historical volumes which our age has produced, it would seem that man is utterly powerless over himself and over all around him. The historians of antiquity taught how to command; those of our time teach only how to obey; in their writings the author often appears great, but humanity is always diminutive.
Cultural and physical speciation occurs optimally under conditions where excellence is the ideal, not equality. We don’t all speciate equally at once. I prefer historians who try to detect large-scale patterns in the activities of humans through time. I pick and choose such historian’s theories as best fit my own interpretations of historical facts and my own view of history as similar to the biological life processes of catalysis-and-metabolism (alternating search and consolidation phases). I look for the historical design processes whereby cultural functions are translated into civilizational structures, or forms of living. I look for the consensual purposes at the roots of the cultural functions, and at what truths societies are aiming for. Some periods and places in history get more of my attention than others, when life appeared most meaningful and vital to both the epoch’s contemporaries, and in the judgment of succeeding generations.
I filter all others’ historical interpretations through my own ontological and epistemological worldview. I match the interpretations with the facts to the best of my critical ability. I have a preference for thinkers who summarize their experience and thought in their old age, when their source of income means little (such as George Santayana, Jacques Barzun & Chalmers Johnson to name a few). I also have a preference for thinkers who lived a relatively clean life as best as can be known, because the body and the mind are inseparable. Without proper movements of the body during life, proper thoughts are hard to come by.
I have not overly emphasized specialist conceptual thought or concepts that have been proven to not reflect reality; such as the race-class-gender identity politics or Marxist-progressive-socialist egalitarian politics, permeating institutions of higher education since the 1970s. These excursions into utopian delusionality can prove to be distractions from gaining the breadth of historically accurate and truth-based knowledge that best provides context for discerning how to enhance our moral consciences in the face of the cascade of new technology and speciation attempts.
I also look for thinkers who were brave enough to make long-term prognostications of the future based on their deep understanding of human nature, and who had a goodly number of such forecasts come true. To me, this is solid evidence that the individual thinker’s grasp of essential human nature should be given weight in formulating my own estimation of human nature in the light of my own experiences, and my own rationally developed thought.
I filter all others’ historical interpretations through my own ontological and epistemological worldview. I match the interpretations with the facts to the best of my critical ability. I have a preference for thinkers who summarize their experience and thought in their old age, when their source of income means little (such as George Santayana, Jacques Barzun & Chalmers Johnson to name a few). I also have a preference for thinkers who lived a relatively clean life as best as can be known, because the body and the mind are inseparable. Without proper movements of the body during life, proper thoughts are hard to come by.
I have not overly emphasized specialist conceptual thought or concepts that have been proven to not reflect reality; such as the race-class-gender identity politics or Marxist-progressive-socialist egalitarian politics, permeating institutions of higher education since the 1970s. These excursions into utopian delusionality can prove to be distractions from gaining the breadth of historically accurate and truth-based knowledge that best provides context for discerning how to enhance our moral consciences in the face of the cascade of new technology and speciation attempts.
I also look for thinkers who were brave enough to make long-term prognostications of the future based on their deep understanding of human nature, and who had a goodly number of such forecasts come true. To me, this is solid evidence that the individual thinker’s grasp of essential human nature should be given weight in formulating my own estimation of human nature in the light of my own experiences, and my own rationally developed thought.
Website Sampler
Quotations from various essays about the transhumanist future and in the classical areas of philosophy - intended as an overview of transhumanist philosophy and pointers to essays of interest.
The Future
The absolute key to the future is the protection of our inherent volitional freedom, this must not be diminished. History of Extropic Thought
I look to a kind of “cultural speciation” to occur prior to “human speciation.” Cultural speciation precedes human speciation. Cultural speciation is, by definition, the formation of sub-cultures. Ethics of Speciation
The requirements for individual perfectibility are: the ability to control the immediate environment at will, to ensure our indefinite longevity under ordinary conditions; and extreme physical and mental mutability, to ensure our ability to master all possible novel environments. In other words, we must become, ‘a perpetual living mirror of the universe.’ History of Extropic Thought
There can be no universal cyberspace. A total war between limited sovereignties and global tyranny lies before us. Critique of Barlow
It is not difficult to see how all life could become viewed as merely products traded on the commodity markets with totalitarian regulators. Ethics of Speciation
Progress is the movement of a population to ever higher peaks of meaning, all novel, while avoiding catastrophes. History of Extropic Thought
Members of the utopian “anointed” appoint themselves shepherds over the “benighted.” They want to institute emotivism as the world’s only ethical system because individuals who judge right from wrong via “feelings” readily respond to being told how they should feel about things. I can see the future crowds yelling exultantly, “We are free!” then looking around and quietly asking, “Can we say that?” Critique of Barlow
Our Western Culture has dissolved and its remnant civilization begun to fade. Yet where are the spaces protected from hostile criticism, from the urban rat race and prying eyes where new cultures can arise? A collectivized World State will leave little room for us to carve out our own havens of liberty. Critique of Barlow
What now is supreme existence? It’s a race with no finish line, just pure drive to think and create. Those in front don’t wait for those behind, they don’t even turn and look to see where they are. There is no standing still and no turning back, we are either in front, or we are behind. Humanity’s course was set irrevocably by the leading thinkers of the Western Enlightenment, and before that, by the early Western Culture. They chose one course for all humanity, for all time, the course of technological progression. When leading individuals achieve what they have already decided to do, namely, genetically and/or biomechanically design themselves and their progeny, or produce artificial sapience, options for human action will become tightly constrained. This is not being done with the consent of the rest of humanity, it is simply being done, one individual’s decision at a time, and that’s that. History of Extropic Thought
Anything that goes onto the Net can land on someone’s hard drive, and might remain in storage long after the writer has changed opinion three times, gotten a new boss who dislikes boat-rockers, etc. Dare we post our deepest, most interesting thoughts? Who can be sure that our old content won’t be used against us in a New World Order “show trial”? Critique of Barlow
Before a world polity calls for a constitution applicable to the entire planet, the practical political life of every person of the world must reflect thinking in global terms. Critique of Barlow
The development of technology to enhance and preserve life is always, by necessity, balanced with the development of technology to diminish, control and extinguish life; great power in one arises simultaneously with great power in the other. No wonder most individuals find it easier to aim at a simple, static, monistic utopia or to retreat to an animal existence of hedonistic materialism, or finally to entropic death-worship, the immolation urge. Ascending life in the liquid realm is strenuous and refined; without aiming towards a transcendental realm, we find ourselves back staring at the mud. Ominous Crimson Glow
The power of individual free will is not to be discounted, arguments of inevitability of any specific technological development becoming dominant in world culture are Marxist in nature. Epistemology
What theory of morphology would enable us to predict features of organisms that would evolve on any planet, in any environment? What forms of life are highly unlikely to evolve and how does selection work to achieve new families of forms? How does such a universal theory of forms fit the empirical facts of our own past and what part does random drift play in the speed at which forms evolve? Origins of Order
Our increasingly intimate connection to the communications and information capabilities, of the computer networks being embedded into social structures and the environment, coupled with advancing genetic engineering capabilities, will enable us to think in terms of kinetic living patterns. Such patterns have been inaccessible to us previously, they reveal the evolution of structure on varying spatio-temporal scales. They are nonlinear and counterintuitive to us now, they lead to organic logic as opposed to systematic logic. This bootstrap presents us with the breadth of description and the immensity of particulars that will facilitate wisdom and sublimity in individuals on a massive scale, leading to unknown emergent phenomenon. Consciousness Part II
It’s the reduction of uncertainty in the incoming stream of continuous reality that tells us somewhat of the precursors to this stream. The evolution of consciousness is accelerated as we get better at this. We increase our ability to choose more adaptive paths of action as we anticipate future dangers that would threaten our purposes. Our thought opens up technology, then technology opens up thought in a positive feedback loop. Technological obsolescence selects out unused concepts. Penetrating to the precursors to this incoming stream is what much of philosophical thought is preoccupied with. History of Extropic Thought
Perfect local environmental control would yield the indefinite survival of any species that achieves it. This is sustained fitness, the achievement of all purposes (whether we have chosen them or nature chose them for us) within a local environment, waiting for Fate to find us. Perfect speciation or perfect individual mutability to meet all possible environments would ensure the indefinite perpetuation of life itself. This is evolvability, the expansion of purposes, rushing towards a Destiny. Adaptability is the conjunction of evolvability and sustained fitness. History of Extropic Thought
It is important when dealing with such radically new technology, that we have some model to aid in developing political systems dealing with definitional issues such as “rights,” “responsibilities,” “consent,” “contract,” etc. The best models are always found within existing oral and written traditions because these embody the selections (genetic, somatic, cultural) that have actually occurred in history. Ethics of Speciation
I look to a kind of “cultural speciation” to occur prior to “human speciation.” Cultural speciation precedes human speciation. Cultural speciation is, by definition, the formation of sub-cultures. Ethics of Speciation
The requirements for individual perfectibility are: the ability to control the immediate environment at will, to ensure our indefinite longevity under ordinary conditions; and extreme physical and mental mutability, to ensure our ability to master all possible novel environments. In other words, we must become, ‘a perpetual living mirror of the universe.’ History of Extropic Thought
There can be no universal cyberspace. A total war between limited sovereignties and global tyranny lies before us. Critique of Barlow
It is not difficult to see how all life could become viewed as merely products traded on the commodity markets with totalitarian regulators. Ethics of Speciation
Progress is the movement of a population to ever higher peaks of meaning, all novel, while avoiding catastrophes. History of Extropic Thought
Members of the utopian “anointed” appoint themselves shepherds over the “benighted.” They want to institute emotivism as the world’s only ethical system because individuals who judge right from wrong via “feelings” readily respond to being told how they should feel about things. I can see the future crowds yelling exultantly, “We are free!” then looking around and quietly asking, “Can we say that?” Critique of Barlow
Our Western Culture has dissolved and its remnant civilization begun to fade. Yet where are the spaces protected from hostile criticism, from the urban rat race and prying eyes where new cultures can arise? A collectivized World State will leave little room for us to carve out our own havens of liberty. Critique of Barlow
What now is supreme existence? It’s a race with no finish line, just pure drive to think and create. Those in front don’t wait for those behind, they don’t even turn and look to see where they are. There is no standing still and no turning back, we are either in front, or we are behind. Humanity’s course was set irrevocably by the leading thinkers of the Western Enlightenment, and before that, by the early Western Culture. They chose one course for all humanity, for all time, the course of technological progression. When leading individuals achieve what they have already decided to do, namely, genetically and/or biomechanically design themselves and their progeny, or produce artificial sapience, options for human action will become tightly constrained. This is not being done with the consent of the rest of humanity, it is simply being done, one individual’s decision at a time, and that’s that. History of Extropic Thought
Anything that goes onto the Net can land on someone’s hard drive, and might remain in storage long after the writer has changed opinion three times, gotten a new boss who dislikes boat-rockers, etc. Dare we post our deepest, most interesting thoughts? Who can be sure that our old content won’t be used against us in a New World Order “show trial”? Critique of Barlow
Before a world polity calls for a constitution applicable to the entire planet, the practical political life of every person of the world must reflect thinking in global terms. Critique of Barlow
The development of technology to enhance and preserve life is always, by necessity, balanced with the development of technology to diminish, control and extinguish life; great power in one arises simultaneously with great power in the other. No wonder most individuals find it easier to aim at a simple, static, monistic utopia or to retreat to an animal existence of hedonistic materialism, or finally to entropic death-worship, the immolation urge. Ascending life in the liquid realm is strenuous and refined; without aiming towards a transcendental realm, we find ourselves back staring at the mud. Ominous Crimson Glow
The power of individual free will is not to be discounted, arguments of inevitability of any specific technological development becoming dominant in world culture are Marxist in nature. Epistemology
What theory of morphology would enable us to predict features of organisms that would evolve on any planet, in any environment? What forms of life are highly unlikely to evolve and how does selection work to achieve new families of forms? How does such a universal theory of forms fit the empirical facts of our own past and what part does random drift play in the speed at which forms evolve? Origins of Order
Our increasingly intimate connection to the communications and information capabilities, of the computer networks being embedded into social structures and the environment, coupled with advancing genetic engineering capabilities, will enable us to think in terms of kinetic living patterns. Such patterns have been inaccessible to us previously, they reveal the evolution of structure on varying spatio-temporal scales. They are nonlinear and counterintuitive to us now, they lead to organic logic as opposed to systematic logic. This bootstrap presents us with the breadth of description and the immensity of particulars that will facilitate wisdom and sublimity in individuals on a massive scale, leading to unknown emergent phenomenon. Consciousness Part II
It’s the reduction of uncertainty in the incoming stream of continuous reality that tells us somewhat of the precursors to this stream. The evolution of consciousness is accelerated as we get better at this. We increase our ability to choose more adaptive paths of action as we anticipate future dangers that would threaten our purposes. Our thought opens up technology, then technology opens up thought in a positive feedback loop. Technological obsolescence selects out unused concepts. Penetrating to the precursors to this incoming stream is what much of philosophical thought is preoccupied with. History of Extropic Thought
Perfect local environmental control would yield the indefinite survival of any species that achieves it. This is sustained fitness, the achievement of all purposes (whether we have chosen them or nature chose them for us) within a local environment, waiting for Fate to find us. Perfect speciation or perfect individual mutability to meet all possible environments would ensure the indefinite perpetuation of life itself. This is evolvability, the expansion of purposes, rushing towards a Destiny. Adaptability is the conjunction of evolvability and sustained fitness. History of Extropic Thought
It is important when dealing with such radically new technology, that we have some model to aid in developing political systems dealing with definitional issues such as “rights,” “responsibilities,” “consent,” “contract,” etc. The best models are always found within existing oral and written traditions because these embody the selections (genetic, somatic, cultural) that have actually occurred in history. Ethics of Speciation
Politics
The elites have decided that people who used to think-to-order are better controlled when they feel-to-order. Two American Traditions
Most order, or acquiescence of the governed, comes from coerced consent. This coercion consists of massive, coordinated, intentional fraud, coupled with a silencing of the truth. The Soviet state pioneered “disinformation” programs, forms of worldview warfare specifically designed to elicit the consent of deceived individuals. These have scientifically evolved into highly sophisticated techniques available to all advanced groups of influential and powerful elites. Citizens labor under a pervasive bombardment of false facts, false meanings and false values from the statist miseducation system, the shameless liars in the orthodox media and the virtueless reality of Hollywood's image makers. Critique of Barlow
Without history, depletion of a large store of meaning and context in our lives occurs. Absent truth, lies and propaganda reign. Critique of Barlow
The state tends to desire the eradication of the transcendent because it is only from within a transcendent order that the state can be judged truly. All other judgments are simply vying for power, just as the compost-modernists maintain. Two American Traditions
You cannot view humanity from a position both physically and executively on a pinnacle, without losing your own concrete connection to the individual humans down below. They are abstracted, objectified, undifferentiated into focus groups, test markets, statistics, etc. This mode of viewing humanity is essentially symbiotic in nature, in a radically egalitarian society. The equal individuals down below refuse to view anyone at all in terms of hierarchical gradations, thus transferring their obedience to abstract symbols, instead of to any human individual. Their allegiance is given to the corner office of the skyscraper, not to the inhabitant therein; to the corporate logo, not the corporate employee who made the product or provided the service they threw their money at. Cyber-Chartres
When humanity changes, the civil world changes. Thus, our current age’s emphasis on worldview warfare, on social engineering, and soon to be on genetic engineering reflects our urgent desire to alter the civil world according to our ideals. Ominous Crimson Glow
When language is used as a weapon to destroy or isolate context, understanding between individuals breaks down. This is why battles over changing language rage so furiously; the image of the old worldview must be tarnished and de-legitimized by breaking the old meanings, to make room for the new worldview. The language that political elites use is shaped, then the new worldview is filtered downward through imposition of educational standards. Consciousness Part II
What point could there possibly be in studying anything in a random universe coming from nowhere and going to nowhere? When the public starts to accept the rational facts of a random, purposeless, meaningless universe, and begins to behave like gangs of thugs grabbing what they can for enjoyment in the here-and-now while they wait to senselessly die, then the self-anointed technicists decide that maybe religion is good for the benighted public, to keep them in line. They never see how religions die when their inner spiritual truths are no longer believed by those in charge of passing the religion on to future generations. And why should those in charge want to be labeled irrational and disparaged by the anointed? The technicists turn out to be more imbecilic than the public they privately disparage while sucking at the teat of public grant money! They expect the individuals they revile, the irrational religious leaders, to help them keep the barbarians they themselves have produced, from raping their daughters and robbing their home! Physicist
The importance of each sphere of local autonomy is directly proportional to the closeness to the individual, who holds ultimate responsibility, through their representatives, for the consequences of the exercise of delegated authority and power. The most important sphere of local autonomy is the individual and the immediate family and the least important are global jurisdictions. Purpose of Education
Sovereignty, here, refers to the power of giving the law on any subject along with the power of punishment. Jurisdiction refers to which individuals exercise sovereignty in each particular case. Jurisdiction, a structural consideration, means more to liberty than the law itself, because stronger individuals make law for weaker ones. Strong individuals, with jurisdictional authority backing them, determine which entities qualify for inclusion in the human community, which are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, and which have the capacity to enter into consensual agreements. Critique of Barlow
All judges, all juries, all police, all legislators are all equal to every other individual, none can be obeyed as equals. Obedience is always a superior-inferior relationship, and obedience while maintaining the dignity of the inferior can only come when both inferior and superior are equal before higher authority. Absent higher authority, there is no dignity in humanity. Ominous Crimson Glow
Executive Power, one way or another, will have its way, and will act towards its own ends. Ominous Crimson Glow
Vacant freedom, in practice, unfolds as wars between gangs over turf. Liberty, on the other hand, arises when individuals in unresolvable conflict with each other, turn to law for resolution by judges to whom the parties have, by mutual existence in a consensual moral polity, accepted the method of choosing the judges and given them limited judging powers that they accept as valid. Critique of Barlow
Maybe I was overly harsh when I said the Enlightenment has resulted in a new dark age; it’s not so dark after all, it’s lit by this crimson glow. Perhaps the radiant light of knowledge that the Enlightenment promised to bring humanity, turned out to be the torch light of the death-worshipping Nuremburg rallies. We certainly know now, that the attempts to create rational utopias on Earth, arising from Enlightenment thinking, have produced more genocide, murder, torture and slavery in sheer numbers of individual humans this century alone, than the combined total produced in religious wars and intolerance throughout the whole of history. Recycled Nihilism
Our Western democratic governments were founded on the notion of rationality derived from the Enlightenment. Science is largely government funded. Science must maintain its corner on being the sole authority on what is to be labeled rationality. If science loses its monopoly on this authority, the particular form of government that feeds it loses its authority, jeopardizing science’s food supply. Science and Rationality
The twin manufactured “crises” of our age, environmental catastrophe and over-population, are both manifestations of nihilism. Spengler calls this attempt to reduce humanity to ciphers, and then to expertly manage the world population demographics, “Unfruitfulness.” Cyber-Chartres
Does not the One Worlder desire to eliminate all nation-states, all limited sovereignties capable of joining to act as a brake on global tyranny? A formless, indefinite civil war between wannabe Caesars wishing to divvy up the world as their own private property? How can religion guide science when science supplants it as a religion in its own right? Yet what guidance does science provide humanity? Does it say anything about purpose or meaning whatsoever? Ominous Crimson Glow
When the Enlightenment destroyed higher authority, all notion of authority went with it. The social bond of dignity between leaders and followers went also. The followers have been in continuous revolt against the notion of excellence, standards of behavior, high culture and leadership authority since then. Statism is the end result, a mass of “equals” expressing themselves as “public opinion” swaying to and fro to the tune of the media piper, demanding direct action to meet their needs. Government responds by imposing the burden of meeting these needs on the backs of those individuals too weak to resist. Consciousness Part II
Most order, or acquiescence of the governed, comes from coerced consent. This coercion consists of massive, coordinated, intentional fraud, coupled with a silencing of the truth. The Soviet state pioneered “disinformation” programs, forms of worldview warfare specifically designed to elicit the consent of deceived individuals. These have scientifically evolved into highly sophisticated techniques available to all advanced groups of influential and powerful elites. Citizens labor under a pervasive bombardment of false facts, false meanings and false values from the statist miseducation system, the shameless liars in the orthodox media and the virtueless reality of Hollywood's image makers. Critique of Barlow
Without history, depletion of a large store of meaning and context in our lives occurs. Absent truth, lies and propaganda reign. Critique of Barlow
The state tends to desire the eradication of the transcendent because it is only from within a transcendent order that the state can be judged truly. All other judgments are simply vying for power, just as the compost-modernists maintain. Two American Traditions
You cannot view humanity from a position both physically and executively on a pinnacle, without losing your own concrete connection to the individual humans down below. They are abstracted, objectified, undifferentiated into focus groups, test markets, statistics, etc. This mode of viewing humanity is essentially symbiotic in nature, in a radically egalitarian society. The equal individuals down below refuse to view anyone at all in terms of hierarchical gradations, thus transferring their obedience to abstract symbols, instead of to any human individual. Their allegiance is given to the corner office of the skyscraper, not to the inhabitant therein; to the corporate logo, not the corporate employee who made the product or provided the service they threw their money at. Cyber-Chartres
When humanity changes, the civil world changes. Thus, our current age’s emphasis on worldview warfare, on social engineering, and soon to be on genetic engineering reflects our urgent desire to alter the civil world according to our ideals. Ominous Crimson Glow
When language is used as a weapon to destroy or isolate context, understanding between individuals breaks down. This is why battles over changing language rage so furiously; the image of the old worldview must be tarnished and de-legitimized by breaking the old meanings, to make room for the new worldview. The language that political elites use is shaped, then the new worldview is filtered downward through imposition of educational standards. Consciousness Part II
What point could there possibly be in studying anything in a random universe coming from nowhere and going to nowhere? When the public starts to accept the rational facts of a random, purposeless, meaningless universe, and begins to behave like gangs of thugs grabbing what they can for enjoyment in the here-and-now while they wait to senselessly die, then the self-anointed technicists decide that maybe religion is good for the benighted public, to keep them in line. They never see how religions die when their inner spiritual truths are no longer believed by those in charge of passing the religion on to future generations. And why should those in charge want to be labeled irrational and disparaged by the anointed? The technicists turn out to be more imbecilic than the public they privately disparage while sucking at the teat of public grant money! They expect the individuals they revile, the irrational religious leaders, to help them keep the barbarians they themselves have produced, from raping their daughters and robbing their home! Physicist
The importance of each sphere of local autonomy is directly proportional to the closeness to the individual, who holds ultimate responsibility, through their representatives, for the consequences of the exercise of delegated authority and power. The most important sphere of local autonomy is the individual and the immediate family and the least important are global jurisdictions. Purpose of Education
Sovereignty, here, refers to the power of giving the law on any subject along with the power of punishment. Jurisdiction refers to which individuals exercise sovereignty in each particular case. Jurisdiction, a structural consideration, means more to liberty than the law itself, because stronger individuals make law for weaker ones. Strong individuals, with jurisdictional authority backing them, determine which entities qualify for inclusion in the human community, which are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, and which have the capacity to enter into consensual agreements. Critique of Barlow
All judges, all juries, all police, all legislators are all equal to every other individual, none can be obeyed as equals. Obedience is always a superior-inferior relationship, and obedience while maintaining the dignity of the inferior can only come when both inferior and superior are equal before higher authority. Absent higher authority, there is no dignity in humanity. Ominous Crimson Glow
Executive Power, one way or another, will have its way, and will act towards its own ends. Ominous Crimson Glow
Vacant freedom, in practice, unfolds as wars between gangs over turf. Liberty, on the other hand, arises when individuals in unresolvable conflict with each other, turn to law for resolution by judges to whom the parties have, by mutual existence in a consensual moral polity, accepted the method of choosing the judges and given them limited judging powers that they accept as valid. Critique of Barlow
Maybe I was overly harsh when I said the Enlightenment has resulted in a new dark age; it’s not so dark after all, it’s lit by this crimson glow. Perhaps the radiant light of knowledge that the Enlightenment promised to bring humanity, turned out to be the torch light of the death-worshipping Nuremburg rallies. We certainly know now, that the attempts to create rational utopias on Earth, arising from Enlightenment thinking, have produced more genocide, murder, torture and slavery in sheer numbers of individual humans this century alone, than the combined total produced in religious wars and intolerance throughout the whole of history. Recycled Nihilism
Our Western democratic governments were founded on the notion of rationality derived from the Enlightenment. Science is largely government funded. Science must maintain its corner on being the sole authority on what is to be labeled rationality. If science loses its monopoly on this authority, the particular form of government that feeds it loses its authority, jeopardizing science’s food supply. Science and Rationality
The twin manufactured “crises” of our age, environmental catastrophe and over-population, are both manifestations of nihilism. Spengler calls this attempt to reduce humanity to ciphers, and then to expertly manage the world population demographics, “Unfruitfulness.” Cyber-Chartres
Does not the One Worlder desire to eliminate all nation-states, all limited sovereignties capable of joining to act as a brake on global tyranny? A formless, indefinite civil war between wannabe Caesars wishing to divvy up the world as their own private property? How can religion guide science when science supplants it as a religion in its own right? Yet what guidance does science provide humanity? Does it say anything about purpose or meaning whatsoever? Ominous Crimson Glow
When the Enlightenment destroyed higher authority, all notion of authority went with it. The social bond of dignity between leaders and followers went also. The followers have been in continuous revolt against the notion of excellence, standards of behavior, high culture and leadership authority since then. Statism is the end result, a mass of “equals” expressing themselves as “public opinion” swaying to and fro to the tune of the media piper, demanding direct action to meet their needs. Government responds by imposing the burden of meeting these needs on the backs of those individuals too weak to resist. Consciousness Part II
Ethics
The key to choosing is in deciding what to destroy versus what to preserve. The choice of destruction simplifies future choices because once something is destroyed, it no longer takes up time or energy to think about future choices involving it. Destruction is always the easy choice; destruction of a forest, an unborn child, a way of life, a civilization. The choice of preservation is very difficult, because things that are preserved always continuously take time and energy to choose to keep preserving. The work of preservation is an extravagant vocation in the face of unavoidable entropic processes of dissolution and decoherence, such a work implies a teleological view of existence; preserving the family line, the family homestead, the family business, a way of life, a view of the stars. Ethics of Speciation
One of the strange things to be preserved would be your enemies, to be preserved for the sharpening of your own existential skills and in the hope that a seed may be about to burst forth, that your enemy will see your superior form of life and join together in hopes of a synergetic increase in meaning. Such a choice would appear to be indeed, a sponge for evil. Ethics of Speciation
The only force leading to liberty or slavery is the force that forms consciences, that provides a humble internal check on right and wrong in the light of human error. Ethics of Speciation
The purpose of survival leads to the economics of survival, but man does not live by bread alone. Survival means nothing by itself, the question is what kind of survival? Should humanity live on its knees or die standing? Should humanity live in plump servility or starve in freedom? Should humanity survive aimlessly in a featureless desert of equality or should it risk destruction scaling the peaks of excellence? Ethics of Speciation
To develop character means to refine our coarse emotional states and base desires into civilized and tasteful emotional states and higher desires. It also means to seek the truth, in community with others, sharing common meanings within a clear and practical language, doing good oneself and promoting good in the larger spheres of local autonomy. Purpose of Education
Technology is not morally neutral when it still is in the midst of the political and design processes of governance and creation, but by the time it results in a fixed artifact, there is only rationality in it, no morality whatsoever, unless the artifact becomes mutable again and the human will comes into play once more. Cyber-Chartres
Save us from the malice of evil-doers as much as from the malice of judgers of evil. What a dilemma! Unity and the Death Wish
If we awaken only when we distinguish between good and evil, what of our educational system that is training our students to “Don’t judge”? Does this not mean that our educational structure’s primary goal is to keep our students asleep? For what purpose do we want succeeding generations to be asleep? Unity and the Death Wish
Not only must we have control of what information flows outward, but growing up and maturing is learning to select which patterns our attention should be focused on by progressively blocking out more and more of our environment. The Transparent Society sends us back to infancy, a cacophony of environmental input. As you mature, you want your door locked, you want isolation, you want time and space to formulate and test unique thoughts, then control of which thoughts are released into the open. Transparent Society
Criticism doesn’t breed affection, it destroys friendship. From an evolutionarily adaptive standpoint, asking for criticism is simply finding out who your friends are. Transparent Society
The relativists’ mantra of “Don’t judge,” and “Accept people as they are,” are axioms of barbarism. Consciousness Part II
One of the strange things to be preserved would be your enemies, to be preserved for the sharpening of your own existential skills and in the hope that a seed may be about to burst forth, that your enemy will see your superior form of life and join together in hopes of a synergetic increase in meaning. Such a choice would appear to be indeed, a sponge for evil. Ethics of Speciation
The only force leading to liberty or slavery is the force that forms consciences, that provides a humble internal check on right and wrong in the light of human error. Ethics of Speciation
The purpose of survival leads to the economics of survival, but man does not live by bread alone. Survival means nothing by itself, the question is what kind of survival? Should humanity live on its knees or die standing? Should humanity live in plump servility or starve in freedom? Should humanity survive aimlessly in a featureless desert of equality or should it risk destruction scaling the peaks of excellence? Ethics of Speciation
To develop character means to refine our coarse emotional states and base desires into civilized and tasteful emotional states and higher desires. It also means to seek the truth, in community with others, sharing common meanings within a clear and practical language, doing good oneself and promoting good in the larger spheres of local autonomy. Purpose of Education
Technology is not morally neutral when it still is in the midst of the political and design processes of governance and creation, but by the time it results in a fixed artifact, there is only rationality in it, no morality whatsoever, unless the artifact becomes mutable again and the human will comes into play once more. Cyber-Chartres
Save us from the malice of evil-doers as much as from the malice of judgers of evil. What a dilemma! Unity and the Death Wish
If we awaken only when we distinguish between good and evil, what of our educational system that is training our students to “Don’t judge”? Does this not mean that our educational structure’s primary goal is to keep our students asleep? For what purpose do we want succeeding generations to be asleep? Unity and the Death Wish
Not only must we have control of what information flows outward, but growing up and maturing is learning to select which patterns our attention should be focused on by progressively blocking out more and more of our environment. The Transparent Society sends us back to infancy, a cacophony of environmental input. As you mature, you want your door locked, you want isolation, you want time and space to formulate and test unique thoughts, then control of which thoughts are released into the open. Transparent Society
Criticism doesn’t breed affection, it destroys friendship. From an evolutionarily adaptive standpoint, asking for criticism is simply finding out who your friends are. Transparent Society
The relativists’ mantra of “Don’t judge,” and “Accept people as they are,” are axioms of barbarism. Consciousness Part II
Epistemology
Being and truth are, of course, different aspects of the same ontological primitive. Unless you begin with a care for truth, you will never have knowledge, you cannot begin with knowledge itself and get anywhere at all. You begin down a path of critical reasoning utterly dependent on granting the authority to produce legitimate criticism to various individuals, an obvious self-selectional solipsistic sinkhole. Recycled Nihilism
Life is a struggle between seeking and avoiding surprise, recognition is the serious business of turning the novel into the ordinary, to help us know what we can do with it. History of Extropic Thought
The truth is, we are an energy lens, shaping and directing light to our will. We acquire knowledge by directing our internal searchlight at the metaphysical unknown in search of something we can call a problem to work on. As our searchlight sweeps the metaphysical night sky, we map what reveals itself in the beam and interpret the map according to our utility of the moment. When the beam reveals a problem, we stop to study it; in other words, we become specialists. History of Extropic Thought
Every whole branch of science speaks its own moral language, there really can never, ever be any overarching synthesis of knowledge, on any level. No “Theory of Everything” is out there. All systems of knowledge are local, not universal, because while they point toward one whole truth, they all begin from different perspectives, different metaphysical presuppositions, even different genetically inherited mechanisms for perceptual categorization that precede the mental operation of recognition, the divvying up of reality into rational categories. Ominous Crimson Glow
To me, verifiability is every bit as important as falsifiability is. I agree that where possible, we want our beliefs to be supported by vulnerable observational evidence. Experimental evidence, though, begins with theory, which is wide-open, and ends with relative boundaries being drawn around events and objects that constitute what the experiment is, and what the evidence is. The only real event and object that can be described in an absolute sense, is the whole knowable universe. Since we can’t do this, we fall back on utility, we describe each event and object as best fits our needs of the moment. In science, we try to get as much consensual agreement on these relative boundaries as possible, so that our experiments can be repeated. Obviously, no experiment or event is ever exactly duplicated, there are only degrees of similitude. All events are historical, unique and irreversible, but many scientifically agreed on events are similar enough to suit our needs of the moment. Verifiability occurs when we bring scientific knowledge to bear on our life through technology, or the natural refinement of words into actuality. Science and Rationality
Scientific knowledge can never amount to more than a radically understated portion of reality, minutely localized on both a spatial and temporal scale. We use probability statements and vast metaphysical assumptions to paper this over and give ourselves more confidence than we deserve to have. Even on a human scale, our social sciences cannot deal adequately with human intentionality, with the choosing of human ideals and the irrationality of human faith, nor can they doubt doubt itself, or explain explanation itself, or theorize theory itself. Thus, the social sciences are fundamentally revealed to be simply political programs in disguise. Ominous Crimson Glow
Ideas divide, migrate, adhere, differentiate and die, just as cells do. History of Extropic Thought
Deconstruction, indeed compost-modernism as a philosophical program, destroys all foundation of authority and justice, including it’s own foundation, it is the essence of anti-rationality, it is “self-destructive.” This is nothing more fancy than nihilism, it leads inexorably to authority and celebrity worship, self-granted authority and celebrity: smug nihilism. Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) puts it that truth is “what our peers will let us get away with saying.” We then choose our peers and place them on altars for our worship, since only they have been granted the authority (by ourselves, of course, hence, the smugness) to pronounce on “truth,” which becomes nothing more than consensual validation, a civilizational sclerosis of narrow-minded, self-selected credentialism. Epistemology
The technological evolution of cyberspace will be in the direction of how our minds work, our spectrum-of-focus, our tradeoffs between depth and breadth of thought, or between cold abstract intensity and dreamy associative creativity. But, where this evolution falls short of how we actually think, our minds will evolve to fit the technology; we will, in fact, think radically differently than we do now after long use. Cyber-Chartres
The dominant ideology that is “in the air” is scientific nihilism. With the rise of the superstitious Bohr interpretation of QM, and the mystic promotion of the Big Bang-then-Big Crunch/Heat Death quantum cosmology, modern humans have been bereft of the existence of purpose and meaning in any aspect of their lives, if they want to claim to be rational. Cyber-Chartres
I am seeking, rather than the design process itself, the knowledge of how we can learn such a design process. Coincident with this search, is a seeking for knowledge of how we can learn to penetrate the transcendental realm, the mechanism of how we recognize the sacred, how we distinguish it amidst the welter of our mundane sensory experience. Cyber-Chartres
Life is a struggle between seeking and avoiding surprise, recognition is the serious business of turning the novel into the ordinary, to help us know what we can do with it. History of Extropic Thought
The truth is, we are an energy lens, shaping and directing light to our will. We acquire knowledge by directing our internal searchlight at the metaphysical unknown in search of something we can call a problem to work on. As our searchlight sweeps the metaphysical night sky, we map what reveals itself in the beam and interpret the map according to our utility of the moment. When the beam reveals a problem, we stop to study it; in other words, we become specialists. History of Extropic Thought
Every whole branch of science speaks its own moral language, there really can never, ever be any overarching synthesis of knowledge, on any level. No “Theory of Everything” is out there. All systems of knowledge are local, not universal, because while they point toward one whole truth, they all begin from different perspectives, different metaphysical presuppositions, even different genetically inherited mechanisms for perceptual categorization that precede the mental operation of recognition, the divvying up of reality into rational categories. Ominous Crimson Glow
To me, verifiability is every bit as important as falsifiability is. I agree that where possible, we want our beliefs to be supported by vulnerable observational evidence. Experimental evidence, though, begins with theory, which is wide-open, and ends with relative boundaries being drawn around events and objects that constitute what the experiment is, and what the evidence is. The only real event and object that can be described in an absolute sense, is the whole knowable universe. Since we can’t do this, we fall back on utility, we describe each event and object as best fits our needs of the moment. In science, we try to get as much consensual agreement on these relative boundaries as possible, so that our experiments can be repeated. Obviously, no experiment or event is ever exactly duplicated, there are only degrees of similitude. All events are historical, unique and irreversible, but many scientifically agreed on events are similar enough to suit our needs of the moment. Verifiability occurs when we bring scientific knowledge to bear on our life through technology, or the natural refinement of words into actuality. Science and Rationality
Scientific knowledge can never amount to more than a radically understated portion of reality, minutely localized on both a spatial and temporal scale. We use probability statements and vast metaphysical assumptions to paper this over and give ourselves more confidence than we deserve to have. Even on a human scale, our social sciences cannot deal adequately with human intentionality, with the choosing of human ideals and the irrationality of human faith, nor can they doubt doubt itself, or explain explanation itself, or theorize theory itself. Thus, the social sciences are fundamentally revealed to be simply political programs in disguise. Ominous Crimson Glow
Ideas divide, migrate, adhere, differentiate and die, just as cells do. History of Extropic Thought
Deconstruction, indeed compost-modernism as a philosophical program, destroys all foundation of authority and justice, including it’s own foundation, it is the essence of anti-rationality, it is “self-destructive.” This is nothing more fancy than nihilism, it leads inexorably to authority and celebrity worship, self-granted authority and celebrity: smug nihilism. Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) puts it that truth is “what our peers will let us get away with saying.” We then choose our peers and place them on altars for our worship, since only they have been granted the authority (by ourselves, of course, hence, the smugness) to pronounce on “truth,” which becomes nothing more than consensual validation, a civilizational sclerosis of narrow-minded, self-selected credentialism. Epistemology
The technological evolution of cyberspace will be in the direction of how our minds work, our spectrum-of-focus, our tradeoffs between depth and breadth of thought, or between cold abstract intensity and dreamy associative creativity. But, where this evolution falls short of how we actually think, our minds will evolve to fit the technology; we will, in fact, think radically differently than we do now after long use. Cyber-Chartres
The dominant ideology that is “in the air” is scientific nihilism. With the rise of the superstitious Bohr interpretation of QM, and the mystic promotion of the Big Bang-then-Big Crunch/Heat Death quantum cosmology, modern humans have been bereft of the existence of purpose and meaning in any aspect of their lives, if they want to claim to be rational. Cyber-Chartres
I am seeking, rather than the design process itself, the knowledge of how we can learn such a design process. Coincident with this search, is a seeking for knowledge of how we can learn to penetrate the transcendental realm, the mechanism of how we recognize the sacred, how we distinguish it amidst the welter of our mundane sensory experience. Cyber-Chartres
Aesthetics
The movements of the body are inseparable from the thoughts of the mind. Purity of our bodily movements is a prerequisite to purity of our worldviews. Cyber-Chartres
As a species, we are always trying to turn ourselves inside out, to externalize concretely what is in us. We produce the theoretical and technological systems, then turn around and say, yup, that’s us. Recycled Nihilism
It is the dual function of high culture to simultaneously foster enhanced consciousness and virtuous actions. High culture, above all, must be protected from the world dominance of statism, autocracy and organized crime. Consciousness Part II
I have no panacea, no universal utopia, only localized efforts at fostering and preserving high cultures serving as beacons to attract individuals to turn upward and away from the ominous crimson glow down below. Ominous Crimson Glow
The aesthetic standard of civilized life is the sufferance of the tragic failure to preserve beauty, and the sustenance of the joyous promotion of artistic mutability; the promise of the surprising new is partial recompense for the cherished old passing away. The political standard of civilized life is the rational promotion of good and the moral confrontation with evil. Consciousness Part II
As a species, we are always trying to turn ourselves inside out, to externalize concretely what is in us. We produce the theoretical and technological systems, then turn around and say, yup, that’s us. Recycled Nihilism
It is the dual function of high culture to simultaneously foster enhanced consciousness and virtuous actions. High culture, above all, must be protected from the world dominance of statism, autocracy and organized crime. Consciousness Part II
I have no panacea, no universal utopia, only localized efforts at fostering and preserving high cultures serving as beacons to attract individuals to turn upward and away from the ominous crimson glow down below. Ominous Crimson Glow
The aesthetic standard of civilized life is the sufferance of the tragic failure to preserve beauty, and the sustenance of the joyous promotion of artistic mutability; the promise of the surprising new is partial recompense for the cherished old passing away. The political standard of civilized life is the rational promotion of good and the moral confrontation with evil. Consciousness Part II
Metaphysics
I view living history in a catalytic and metabolic context. It is catalytic in terms of the interplay between competitive directions in the social realm and cooperative actions in the physical realm. An example of autocatalysis, is when competitive social forces achieve closure in a consensual purpose, to build a civilization through coordinated activity. It is metabolic in terms of the interplay of search and consolidation phases of consciousness’ directional evolution towards extropy. The form of one’s life follows the functions chosen in that life, so too for civilization. The achievement of a self-sustaining metabolism of an ascending civilization is essentially a design problem. History of Extropic Thought
There is no ontological randomness, such a concept would make the universe unintelligible, there is only epistemological randomness, aka ignorance. Science and Rationality
Either we can be reduced by neo-Gnostic physics down to random activity between two voids, or else we are designed all the way down. Either purpose enters in at the smallest scales, or you can never sneak it in later. Absent purpose aiming at truth, there can be no meaning. Cyber-Chartres
It is very productive to think of patterns of thought in terms of river channels, with “constriction/resistance” reflected in their curves, falls, shallows, currents, floods, etc. The physiology of “constriction/resistance” is what I was describing in my examples of preferred evolutionary branches of ontogeny, preferred protein folding spaces, preferred protein design spaces, preferred mental activity patterns, etc. Virtually everywhere you turn in the biological sciences, preferred physical structures and preferred dynamic patterns turn up; not randomness, but design. Ethics of Speciation
Again, the concept of preferred branches comes up, language is not completely mutable, it is limited. There is a design inherent at all scales of reality which dictates that only some forms and actions are possible and not others. Even at the smallest level we are constrained, the Heisenberg Principle simply is a reflection that we cannot see the past or the future, only the other particles in space around us at the frozen “now.” We cannot see their spin, or momentum, only their position. If we wanted to see their spin, or momentum, we would have to allow some motion, hence, we would not see their position. Epistemology
An individual’s existence is only at the expense of others. At the expense of others’ freedom of action, their energy, their air, their water, their earth, their space and their time. When an individual comes into existence at conception, he immediately begins appropriating all of these from his environment, he imposes on everyone and everything else from the beginning of his life to the end of it by actively grabbing what he needs and wants from everything around him. You move through life, from conception to death, appropriating space and time, energy and matter from the living entities in your environment. What right do you have to exist at all, where did it come from? Ethics of Speciation
The gap between the object of our worship and ourselves is vast, unbridgeable. Every deeply religious thinker comes to this image. It must be “mediated” regardless of what the object is. We must have the free will to choose our object, to choose our mediator, this means we can choose wrongly (undeserving) as well as rightly (deserving). We agree that the “right” choice can only be made with, in essence, grace. Cyber-Chartres
Humanism supplies the vision or the functions and initiates the design process. Technicism supplies the knowledge of what designs result in which forms. Technicism is thus both science and technology. History of Extropic Thought
Those who cannot feel the presence of evil in the world, in this post-gulag, post-holocaust world, are blind to the microscope they are being placed under in the World Surveillance State. The sense of the presence of evil is required for peaks of meaning to lift up. Cyber-Chartres
The dichotomy of vision, nihilism for the anointed on the one hand, and religion for the benighted on the other hand, is really no more than a competition among religions. The nihilistic scientific worldview has absolutized random activity as its deepest metaphysical presupposition, it has committed civilizational hara-kiri by deifying chance. Science has conquered over superstition by co-opting it. Physicist
In truth, any thinking physicist should feel deep shame over having no explanatory power to their equations, no metaphysical foundation that could be termed rational by any stretch of the imagination, no confidence over extending their equations forward into more complex areas because they don’t even know why they work in the few areas that they do work. Shame is in order. Physicist
We described sacred space this way: space which, by its patterning of human interrelatedness points man to that which gives him the power, the energy, the might, the motivation, to seek the source of his own life. We also said about art and artifact: Sacred space doesn’t give him this, it only is a sign along the way. As artifact, it engages him beneath his consciousness, on the level of his artistic sense, convicting him and persuading him to continue in his choice, to continue pointing his face ahead, when all the culture around him is drunk on images of carnality and blood lust. It is art to the degree to which it makes its object self-evident, it embeds in the person so sheltered the emotional education of his sentiments, to seek that which he ought to seek, when reason fails him. Given the above definitions: When sacred space does this, it does what Chartres did. Cyber-Chartres
It seems hard for some scientists to believe, but one fair coin, tossed forever, could come up tails every time. Or it could come up heads every time, forever. And still be fair. Science and Rationality
Reilly Jones © 2007-2023
There is no ontological randomness, such a concept would make the universe unintelligible, there is only epistemological randomness, aka ignorance. Science and Rationality
Either we can be reduced by neo-Gnostic physics down to random activity between two voids, or else we are designed all the way down. Either purpose enters in at the smallest scales, or you can never sneak it in later. Absent purpose aiming at truth, there can be no meaning. Cyber-Chartres
It is very productive to think of patterns of thought in terms of river channels, with “constriction/resistance” reflected in their curves, falls, shallows, currents, floods, etc. The physiology of “constriction/resistance” is what I was describing in my examples of preferred evolutionary branches of ontogeny, preferred protein folding spaces, preferred protein design spaces, preferred mental activity patterns, etc. Virtually everywhere you turn in the biological sciences, preferred physical structures and preferred dynamic patterns turn up; not randomness, but design. Ethics of Speciation
Again, the concept of preferred branches comes up, language is not completely mutable, it is limited. There is a design inherent at all scales of reality which dictates that only some forms and actions are possible and not others. Even at the smallest level we are constrained, the Heisenberg Principle simply is a reflection that we cannot see the past or the future, only the other particles in space around us at the frozen “now.” We cannot see their spin, or momentum, only their position. If we wanted to see their spin, or momentum, we would have to allow some motion, hence, we would not see their position. Epistemology
An individual’s existence is only at the expense of others. At the expense of others’ freedom of action, their energy, their air, their water, their earth, their space and their time. When an individual comes into existence at conception, he immediately begins appropriating all of these from his environment, he imposes on everyone and everything else from the beginning of his life to the end of it by actively grabbing what he needs and wants from everything around him. You move through life, from conception to death, appropriating space and time, energy and matter from the living entities in your environment. What right do you have to exist at all, where did it come from? Ethics of Speciation
The gap between the object of our worship and ourselves is vast, unbridgeable. Every deeply religious thinker comes to this image. It must be “mediated” regardless of what the object is. We must have the free will to choose our object, to choose our mediator, this means we can choose wrongly (undeserving) as well as rightly (deserving). We agree that the “right” choice can only be made with, in essence, grace. Cyber-Chartres
Humanism supplies the vision or the functions and initiates the design process. Technicism supplies the knowledge of what designs result in which forms. Technicism is thus both science and technology. History of Extropic Thought
Those who cannot feel the presence of evil in the world, in this post-gulag, post-holocaust world, are blind to the microscope they are being placed under in the World Surveillance State. The sense of the presence of evil is required for peaks of meaning to lift up. Cyber-Chartres
The dichotomy of vision, nihilism for the anointed on the one hand, and religion for the benighted on the other hand, is really no more than a competition among religions. The nihilistic scientific worldview has absolutized random activity as its deepest metaphysical presupposition, it has committed civilizational hara-kiri by deifying chance. Science has conquered over superstition by co-opting it. Physicist
In truth, any thinking physicist should feel deep shame over having no explanatory power to their equations, no metaphysical foundation that could be termed rational by any stretch of the imagination, no confidence over extending their equations forward into more complex areas because they don’t even know why they work in the few areas that they do work. Shame is in order. Physicist
We described sacred space this way: space which, by its patterning of human interrelatedness points man to that which gives him the power, the energy, the might, the motivation, to seek the source of his own life. We also said about art and artifact: Sacred space doesn’t give him this, it only is a sign along the way. As artifact, it engages him beneath his consciousness, on the level of his artistic sense, convicting him and persuading him to continue in his choice, to continue pointing his face ahead, when all the culture around him is drunk on images of carnality and blood lust. It is art to the degree to which it makes its object self-evident, it embeds in the person so sheltered the emotional education of his sentiments, to seek that which he ought to seek, when reason fails him. Given the above definitions: When sacred space does this, it does what Chartres did. Cyber-Chartres
It seems hard for some scientists to believe, but one fair coin, tossed forever, could come up tails every time. Or it could come up heads every time, forever. And still be fair. Science and Rationality
Reilly Jones © 2007-2023