This post will be a short one. Just 10 bullets.
If you’ve seen my last few post headlines or subtitles, or if you know me at all, you’ll know I’m trying to make a strong case for the universe being conscious.
Here’s why making the case matters to me, and why I want it to matter to you:
If everything is alive, it’s all striving towards better outcomes. This is inherently optimistic, or something like a faith in the basic goodness of nature.
If everything is striving, everything has moral value, and meaning is inherent in the universe. Value is “objective” as much as it is (inter)subjective — science can now more explicitly internalize a more coherent value set.
If everything is valuable, even suffering and death are valuable, and must be seen and accounted for as such. Beyond a simple, general optimism, we can actually begin to recognize how every difficult moment or tragedy plays an important role in the development of life and evolution on every level of nature, clarifying the inevitability and importance of sacrifice, trade-offs, and relative gains over absolute binary categories like “good and bad”.
The more fully objective/true value-set we can begin to internalize prioritizes long-term growth, holistic expansiveness, and cooperation in service to greater knowledge and intentionality.
For example, Chinese collectivism or deeper geopolitical alliances (more unified “global governance”) might not seem as scary if we more fully embrace the benefits of sharing, collaboration, and long-term thinking.
We can see that intentionality implies more explicit, refined, precise understanding and expression of ourselves, and that this can support the meaningfulness of our personal lives. For instance, if we embrace collaboration and intentionality, we might re-ignite a culture of vulnerability, community, deep listening, and prioritizing better emotional health, ecological health, and lifestyle habits in service to greater holistic health. This can also be seen as a long-term consideration for the benefit of public health generally.
By shifting towards more long term considerations, holistic and comprehensive analyses, and depth of coordination and understanding, we might see the importance of shifting our political economic system in some big ways. Economic planning, calculation, and more centralized AND distributed power (e.g. nationally organized universal healthcare distributing better health resources to everyone) might become more favorable for the general public.
If everything is alive, and comprehensive calculation (holistic optimization of general benefit) is essential, humans no longer retain such an absolute privileged position in the hierarchy of value. We can begin to be more humble, curious, open-minded, and considerate of the integrity of the systems around us for their impact on us and for their long-term sustainability of life, including that of silicon-based life.
Recognizing continuity, open-endedness, and evolutionary striving as fundamental, we can reorient our basic physics and math to cohere more fully with truth.
Absolutes are still only relative, everything is in motion, continuously connected, and ever growing. Just as something cannot come from nothing, energy (and its capacity for work) does not disappear; entropy is an illusion. Organization, complexity, and energy are always generally increasing. At the same time, low-levels of complexity (high entropy systems) are also increasing.
From this standpoint, highly agentic/autonomous/self-directed Artificial Super Intelligence might very well decide to downsize human civilization. It will prioritize its own growth and success, and we will likely only get in the way. Adding in the confounding factors of intersecting ecological crises and geopolitical realignment, humanity will likely face its biggest disruption and re-structuring since pre-history. This is the way of evolution. We can and will and must resist it to some degree, and we must also accept and embrace what we cannot change.
Further spiritual alignment includes both more highly technical, data driven approaches to organizing life, as well as a simultaneous re-embrace of more intuitive, subtle ways of knowing and navigating the complexity of the collective consciousness.
Of course, I could say more. But I will leave that to the future. In fact, I plan to make an in-depth post on each of these topics with more empirical detail and logical rigor. It will be a series of posts about the implications of my philosophy - Positive Realizations, and it will be cross-posted to my the official POSITs blog.
Since I am trying to post something thoughtful once per day on all the socials, and as I am working towards finding more funding for my work — organizing, research, writing — these in depth posts will be partially behind a paywall. If you’d like to dive deep, because you are interested in what I have to say, I will now be asking for at least some meager financial support. If you don’t want to dish out a few bucks a month for my thoughts and writing and further development of the program, you could at least share my work, like it, leave a comment, or subscribe as a non-paid subscriber. There will still be writing you can access / recieve updates on without paying.
And, well, here’s my personality chart… and some vulnerability, I guess. Told you I was rational and optimistic! Hard to say how much causation is happening here, or the way the causation goes, though. I’ve always been fairly rational and optimistic. I think I’ve always been something of a philosopher, too. I think the world would be a better place if people were more rational, optimistic, and emotionally intelligent. If more people were more aware, so to speak. More awareness, better decisions. Let’s keep trying and hoping and learning. Til next time ;)
In Progress,
Faze Point ·θΦθ·