The reality of our present circumstances is seldom far from my awareness. It colors much of what I think about the future and the present. Maybe that's why I like reading history these days. It's a form of escape.
I don't feel depressed, by what I believe the future holds, but I am disappointed and I know that my children and grandchildren will face a vastly more challenging life than I did.
But perhaps all that is relative. My mother's life as a child was more challenging than her children's lives, and her parents' lives were similarly more challenging.
And my childrens' and grandchildrens' lives will merely be the first couple of generations in what is likely to be a long decline, if we're fortunate enough to avoid a precipitously violent one.
Modernity is ending.
In many ways, it reminds me of John Conway's game of Life. I used to play a version of it on my Apple II. You'd start out with a random, low density distribution of cells, and occasionally you'd get this explosive growth of cells and activity across the grid, only to watch it die down to a much lower density of cells at the end.
I think that's what humanity's experience with modernity will likely be. We're at the peak of that activity now. It won't last forever, or even very long.
It may explain the Great Filter, why we haven't encountered other intelligent species in our region of the galaxy. Civilizations develop technology and are propelled into overshoot and collapse, again and again, none surviving long enough to make their existence known to other civilizations.
And Conway's Life may be a reflection of the idea that we live in a simulation.
In any event, faced with the prospect of losing this civilization, many wonder "What is the point?"
I like that blog. It can feel depressing at first, but, yeah, the math is pretty clear.
Now, I don't believe he's necessarily correct on the issue of determinism and free will. I think there's something about consciousness that is non-deterministic. Much of it is, of course. It explains why so much of our behavior is simply habituated, a product of physics and the laws of thermodynamics. Nature expends only enough energy, never more. At least, not for long anyway.
But gravity is the weakest force in the universe, weaker even than irony.
But it holds the whole thing together.
I don't understand the nature of consciousness, but I've come to believe that there is more here than meets the eye. Whether that's a responsive universe, or some hacker running this simulation, I don't know. But I think there's a reality beneath this reality. Maybe "above"? These kinds of abstractions are perhaps unhelpful.
In any event, what is the point? Why are we here?
I recall how I felt when my marriage failed, itself a long process, relatively speaking; and my career as a naval officer, concurrently with my marriage. It felt like, "The end of the world."
It wasn't, of course. But it took a lot of therapy and personal reflection to figure that out.
One of the insights I think I gleaned during those days was that life is meaningless, we bring meaning to life.
We make meaning.
That requires action, and that action can be habituated or "deterministic," or it can be something else.
It can be a choice.
I also learned that the inner voice is an unreliable narrator. An emergent property of a habituated system. An idling loop.
So, be still. Now and then.
And don't get too caught up with the voice inside your head.
Finally, I learned that we are not here to "change the world."
The world is here so that we may learn to change ourselves.
So, what is the point of all this in the face of the collapse of civilization?
The point is that it was never about the external reality of "the world." It has always been about the interior reality of how we wish to be in the world.
We are here to do our best. To interrogate, as much as possible (It's not much, because who has the energy? See "determinism" above.) from time to time, is this the best we can do?
What is "the best"? Another worthwhile question.
Who do we choose to be in the world?
(Everything is contingent. We are in the world. It must shape who we choose to be. If we choose.)
Existence is the tension between binding opposites, being and nothingness. Existence to have any meaning, demands consciousness. An awareness of "something" beyond "nothingness" - being.
Being is the negation of nothingness. An affirmation. A cosmic, universal Yes. Which can only exist against the foundation of nothingness.
Consciousness, awareness of individual existence in a temporal dimension and the awareness of non-existence, of death, may bring about desire. Between "being" and "nothingness," perhaps consciousness desires being over nothingness.
Perhaps desire emerges from a metaphysical tension between binding opposites, faith and fear. Faith affirms, embraces, accepts. Fear denies, retreats and rejects.
The point of our existence is to navigate our timestream, our "lifeline" between being and nothingness, faith and fear.
It's to do our best, and the rest is not up to us.
Faith and fear.
Love is faith in action. The first derivative of faith.
Courage is love in action. The second derivative of faith. Acceleration, an element of force.
Anger is fear in action.
Hate is anger in action. A second derivative of fear. Acceleration, an element of force.
Anyway, we're all in this together. Nobody is getting out of here alive.
Let's do our best, as best we can, and don't worry about the results, except insofar as they may help inform what "our best" might have been, so perhaps we can do better going forward.
As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.
A broken record, I know.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:28 Wednesday, 15 May 2024