She's what we call 'see-worthy' I feel like my transport should be an extension of my personality.
This is my window to the different world. And every minute is a different show. I may now understand it. I may not even necessarily agree with it. But I accept it, just sort of glide alone.
You want to keep things like even keel.
You want to go with the flow, the sea refuses no river.
The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving.
Saves on introductions and goodbyes.
The ride does not require an explanation, just occupants, that's where you guys come in.
It's like you come on to this planet with a crayon box.
You may get the 8-pack , you may get the 16-pack,
But it's all what you do with the crayons, the colors that you're given.
Don't worry about drawing within the lines or coloring outside the lines.
I say color outside the line, color right off the page.
Don't box me in, we are in motion to the ocean, we are not landlocked.
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century.
I'm afraid we are losing the real virtues of living life passionately, the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life.
Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite.
Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life.
But one thing that comes out from reading you guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as… a real kind of exuberance ) of feeling on top of it.
It's like your life is yours to create.
I've read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration.
But when I read them, I always have the this awful nagging feeling that something actually essential is getting left out.
The more you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of force, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses.
And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract, he's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about.
It's something very concrete. It's you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequence.
It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting.
Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference.
It makes a difference first of all in material terms, it makes a difference to other people and it sets an example.
In short, I think the message here is that we should never simple write ourselves off, and see ourselves as the victim of various forces.
It's always our decision who we are.
Creation seems to come out of imperfection.
It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration.
And this is where I think where language came from.
I mean it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another.
And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival.
Like, you know, “water” We came up with a sound for that.
Or “Saber-toothed tiger right behind you.” We came up a sound for that.
But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we are experiencing.
What is “Frustration”? or what is anger or love?
When I say "Love", the sound comes out of my mouth, and it hits another person's ear, travel through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know through the memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I am saying and say yes, they understand.
But how do I know they understand, because words are inert. They are just symbols, they are dead.
And so much of our experience is intangible, so much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable.
And yet, when we communicate with one another, we feel we are connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion.
And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.
If we're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of it's interaction with the environment.
Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of the mankind. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon Man.
Now interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological , development of cities, cultures and cultural, which is human expression.
Now what you're seen here, is the evolution of populations. Not so much the evolution of individuals.
And in addition, if you look at the time scales that's involved here, two billion years for a life, six million years for the hominid, a hundred thousand years for mankind as we know it— you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agriculture, when you get to scientific revolutions and industrial revolutions, you are looking at ten thousand years, 400 years, 150 years. You're seen the further telescoping of this evolution times.
What that means is that as we go through new revolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within the generation.
The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence, the analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of organism. And you knit two together with the neurology. Before on the old evolution evolution, one would die and the other one would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, none-competitive grouping.
Independent from the external.
And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and the desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process…where the individual is just at the whim of the collective.
So, you produced a neo-human with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolution recycle, because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence, as intelligence piles one intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes, until you reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human. Human and neo-human potential.
It could be something totally different; It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existence; Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter intuitive. That's the interesting part, the old evolution is cold, it's sterile, it's efficient, okay? And its manifestations are those social adaptions.
You're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, war, predation. These would be subject to de-emphsis, these would be subject to de-evolution.
The new evolution paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be manifestations of new evolution. That is what we hope to see from this, that would be nice.
A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community.
He thinks to himself, “I must be insane.” What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vest interest in considerable losses and catastrophes . These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-destined needs.
Man wants chaos, in fact, he's gotta have it. Depressions, strife, riots, murders, all this dread, we're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state, created out death and destruction. It's all of us, we revel in it.
Sure the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies.
But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no.
Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them.
The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven't given us any other options, outside the occasional purely symbolic participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?
I feel that time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfaction into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of voice be heard.
-I keep thinking about something you said. About you often feel like you are observing your life from the perspective of an old woman about to die.
-Yeah, I still feel that way sometimes. Like I'm looking back on my life. Like my waking life is her memories.
-Exactly, I heard that Timlarry said that he was looking forward to the moment when his body was dead, but his brain was still alive. They say that there's still 6 to 12 minuted of brain activity after everything else is shut down. And a second dream consciousness, well that's infinitely longer than a waking second.
-For example, I wake up and it's 10:12, and then I go back to sleep and I have those long, intricate,beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours, and then I wake up it's 10:13.
-So that the 6 to 12 minutes of brain activity, I mean that could be your whole life. I mean you are that woman looking back over everything.
-OK, what if I am, what would you be in all that?
-Whatever I am right now, I mean maybe I only exist in your mind. I'm still as real as everything else.
-I've been thinking also about something you said.
-What's that?
-Just about reincarnation and where all the new souls come from over time. Everybody always says that they've been the reincarnation of Cleopatra, or Alexander the Great. I always want to tell them they were probably some dumb fuck like everybody else. I mean it's impossible, think about it. The world population has doubled in the past 40 years, right? So if you really believe that ego thing of one external soul, then you have only 50% chance of your soul being over 40. And for it to be over 150 years old, then it's only one out of six.
-So what are you saying then? Reincarnation doesn't exist. or that we're all young souls like where half of us are first-round humans?
-No, I'm just trying to say that somehow that reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is. There was this article by this biochemist that read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of a species is born, it has a billion memories to draw on. And this is where we inherit our instincts.
-I like that, it's like this whole telepathic thing going on that we're all part of it, whether we are conscious or not .
That would explain why there's all these seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts. Like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously, a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study, they isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles, the relation to the general population, and they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people. Their scores went up dramatically, like 20%. So it's like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on them. It's all like we are telepathically sharing our experiences.
In a way in our contemporary world view, it's easy to think that science has come to take place of the God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will, these problems have been around for a long time since before Aristotle in 350 BC, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys are worried about how we can be free..if God already knows in advance everything you're gonna do.
Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world, now these laws, because they are so trustable, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself, we are just physical systems, too. We are just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water. And our behavior isn't gonna be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look at whether it's God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you're gonna do or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything. There's not a lot of room left for freedom.
So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will.
So, oh it's just an historical anecdote. It's sophomoric. It's a question with no answer. Just forget about it. But the question keeps staring you right in the face, you think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make, or take responsibility, you can only be held responsible; you can only be found guilty, or admired or respected for things you did of your own free will.
The question keeps coming back we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look at all your decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens, there's some electrical activity in your brain, your neurons fire, they send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. The twitch, you might, say reach out your arm, looks like a free action in your part. But every one of those—every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws, etc.
So now it just looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions and the whole rest of our history, and the whole rest of human history and even before is really just sort of the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws/
We think we are special, we think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat.
I mean that's really challenge by this pic. So you might be saying, well wait a minute, what about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probability theory, there's room. it's loose, it's not deterministic. And that's gonna enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it's not really gonna help, because that happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit of random. They swerve, their behavior is absurd, in the sense that it's unpredictable, and we cannot understand it based on anything that came before . It just does something out of blue, according to a probabilistic framework.
But is that gonna help with freedom? Should our freedom just be a matter to probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That just seems like worse, I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving, so we can' t just ignore the problem, we have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that it entails, not just bodies, but persons. That means trying to solve the problem with freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality.
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