The experience of reality constantly
reminds me of how many ways so many people delude themselves with extreme
viewpoints – extreme viewpoints they cling to because somehow it feels better
and more clear to answer every question with “100% yes” or “100% no.”
My “experience of reality” includes everything
from the mix of things I am lucky enough to see from my back porch on a cool
calm morning like today, to the things I see in mathematics and the things I
see in reading about scientific experiments (and sometimes seeing them), to the
things I can see in meditation, particularly in a state which some describe as “cosmic
consciousness.” And yes, I keep an eye on places like Washington DC ten minutes
down the road. (Literally: Constitution Avenue, route 50, is the road I hear
but do not see on top of the deep forest ridge opposite the forested ridge I
look down from.)
Mathematics contains a nice, clear image of how we are
all stuck in the middle, not at the extremes. There are some dynamical systems
in which everything moves inexorably to a definite, fixed state – “fixed point
equilibrium.” There are other systems where everything moves to a totally
random stochastic state, with no patterns or form or correlation between what
happens in one place and what happens in another – “the heat death, the
ultimate gas.” The first is rigid like ice. The second is like fire. Life
itself is possible only BETWEEN these extremes of fire and ice. If we find this middle zone unnatural to us
and suspiciously complex, and we try to simplify it all by going towards fire
or towards ice – we end up opposing life itself. We are stuck here in the
middle. Given the alternatives of total fire and total ice, the middle is where
we want to be.
“Does God exist or does he not? If so,
is he/she one or is he a trinity? Will we have a life after death or not? Is
this imam or priest telling the truth or not? Is this computer system conscious
or not? Should we all strive to be focused, effective true Christians? Moslems?
Buddhists? Materialists?” In every one of these cases, people tend to demand a
simple “yes” or “no” answer. They tend to assume that any clear revelation of
truth must give a clear “yes” or “no.” But in all these cases, the demand for a yes
or no answer is in fact a demand for blindness, a demand which is not
consistent with a clear understanding of what is being discussed.
Of course, these are all big issues – so
where do I begin in describing how clear answers are possible which are NOT “yes”
or “no?”
First – some simple general thoughts. In
engineering, there is now a large school of “fuzzy logic,” which has led to
lots of practical automated systems in situations where the old binary expert
systems did not work so well. (It started becoming very popular in Japan after
a major government effort to fund rule-based automated systems, when they discovered
what actually worked and what didn’t in such applications.) A pure follower of
fuzzy logic might say “Thinking in black and white gets you in trouble. You
need to think in terms of degree of truth, of shades of grey, of truth value
BETWEEN 0 and 1.” But at one point Jesus warned us about those folks who are
neither hot not cold, but just lukewarm.
So which side do we support – thinking in black and white and thinking
in shades of grey? (This isn’t just philosophy; it’s also computer design!) My
own knee-jerk response: “Let’s try to get past thinking in black and white by
thinking in vivid color.” There is a place for simpler kinds of thought, but
the clearest vision is in vivid color. That often means breaking down a question...
and coming up with a kind of multidimensional description or clear image of
whatever we are asking about. It often means what Hegel and the Rosicrucians
talked about, responding to a thesis and an antithesis by striving for a
synthesis which transcends the binary extremes. This is all old stuff – but it’s
important to remember old stuff when we are at risk of falling into ancient
fantasies and delusions, as the people are who ask for binary answers to the
questions I listed above.
This morning, in particular, I am
thinking about some thoughts which came to me in Quaker meeting last Sunday,
and about an important science fiction trilogy I finished yesterday by Peter
Hamilton – “The Dreaming Void,” “The Temporal Void” and the “Evolutionary Void.”
Both of them bear very seriously on those questions, and on the question “What
is the meaning of life – in practical terms?” I am glad that retirement allowed me both
important experiences.
This new trilogy from Hamilton is really
pretty important and unique. I suppose I should write a glowing review of it.
It has characters I can empathize with a lot more than traditional boring kinds
of literature where everyone is fully absorbed by petty personal things. There
is a kind of primitive life out there where people just live day to day, without
thought of any grand or heroic goals. (Hey, kids, to get into Harvard, they say
you need “passion.” What is this “passion” if not some kind of heroic goal?) Is
that like ice? Is it like fire, then, to be fiery kind of fanatic whose whole
life is focused on some random choice of extreme goal, usually out of touch
with the complexities of reality? Hamilton’s trilogy is unique in really
working through the territory between that fire and ice, full of serious and
sincere heroic striving, but coping with the way that human fallibility and
limitations modulate the valid heroic striving. And, of course, it fully accepts
the fact that we live in a big galaxy – one of the core realities we can see
with our own eyes. It is such a fantasy to think as if earth were the only
planet which counts in this vast galaxy, let alone the universe and the cosmos!
Deeply as I respect this book... at the
end, I can see that he gives a binary answer to one of the key questions here,
an answer which I think is a bit biased towards the heroic – too crisp, too
black and white to be true. And yes, it has a strong, almost pure Silicon
Valley attitude; I fully appreciate Silicon Valley, but I try to be a bit
bigger.
That question is the question of
afterlife.
Old men (like me) are famous for
wondering what comes next: are we about to just evaporate completely, or will
we continue to exist somehow?
A couple of years ago, I had the great
experience of visiting one of the catacombs of the early Christians (before
Constantine’s radical reconstruction of his brand of Caesarian Christianity).
It was one hell of a full three-dimensional experience in color to feel those
cool damp rocky rooms, which were basically crypts, not churches. In fact, they
were very much the ancient version of corpsicle facilities, where inert bodies
are stored in hope/expectation that soon someone will come back and bring them
back to full life. Dawn of the living dead and all that. Zombie wannabees? It
was a very strict doctrine of the early church to believe in the “resurrection
of the body,” and those words echo in the Catholic Church today. Years ago, my
German grandfather, a Catholic, had his leg amputated – and the priest told him
he needed to have a special funeral and burial for the leg, lest he be reborn
one-legged. (My forthcoming cataract surgery reminded me of that.) But in fact,
most Catholics today, like most mass religions, state that the afterlife is a
kind of afterlife of the person in heaven. Almost all the Buddhist temples in
China have statues depicting the kind of thing you read about in the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, where the soul comes up to a gate or reception hall and faces... someone
important, whoever, who gives some kind of guidance to the next stage. People imagine that it is the same “me” who
floats out of the dead body, as in those great videos “What Dreams May Come”
and “Beetlejuice.” And it’s everyone.
But many important cultures (like the
Druze?) believe that some people have afterlives, and some people don’t. In fact, there is even a book in the Bible
(one of the Apochrypha, in the standard New English Catholic bible), the Book
of Esdras, which suggests this. It does NOT reflect another very vivid piece of
modern science fiction, Dante’s Inferno, which they teach to lots of kids in modern
“Christian” schools. It does not say that souls are allocated to hell versus
heaven versus limbo and so on. No one lives in hell burning for eternity.
Rather, those who don’t cut it, the chaff, are simply burned away to nothing,
to lifeless ash which drifts away on the wind. Every time I think of this, I
think of an old nun I saw on a place called “Chicken Dragon Mountain” in South
Korea, a woman who strived her whole life to achieve lack of emotion and
passion and emptiness..,. who had the weirdest expression on her face, a smile
of achievement (she did get to her goal!) and a rictus of terror (was this
REALLY what she wanted? Is it not as violation of her deepest soul?) both at
the same time. She reminded me of the “Crystalman smile” in the very important
science fiction novel Voyage to Arcturus by Lindsay. (Quick aside: if you ever
look it up, DON’T believe the “new introduction” by the cult version of
Gnostics who got it reprinted!) And so:
some people believe that they should dedicate their lives to becoming part of
the minority which DOES have an afterlife, which doesn’t just get burned to ash
by the great garbage collector in the sky. (Most powerful computer systems, whether
intelligent or conscious or not, do have garbage collection routines. It is not at all strange to suggest that our
spiritual environment has the same. It would be strange if it didn’t. It is
curious how some folks who have been
strict about deleting enterprises and people which did not contribute to their own
particular bottom line might well experience being deleted themselves, based on
a different bottom line.)
Hamilton’s trilogy essentially does take
that point of view, grounded in something like a synthesis of transhumanism and
popularized Gurdjieff teachings. He explores MANY viewpoints in some depth
(lots of pages to do that!), but ends up supporting the goal of evolution
towards the “postphysical.” A striving for a kind of transcendence, where
somehow our highest intelligence or consciousness migrates to another level of
existence. And no, in his picture there is not much hope of having that kind of
afterlife if you just hang around doing what your grandparents did in the local
farm or casbah. It basically happens
when an entire culture or species rises high enough to be ABLE to reach a
higher level of existence, which sounds like some kind of quantum hyperspace or
matrix of mind or something like that. Not pious, but vivid and real.
Vividness and real I appreciate... but I
simply do not agree with the binary nature of all this, and, as a mere human, I
cannot claim to know whether such a change is really possible.
So far as I can tell, loss of a body and
“physical” brain must be at least as severe in its implications as total loss
of one’s library and hard drives. Jane Roberts, in her (short clear) Oversoul
Seven trilogy, gives great images of people who move out of their bodies
regularly... but in a foggy state so barely conscious that they cannot do or
remember much later. Gurdjieff describes something similar. (I suppose that
Bennett’s book, Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?, explains this more clearly
than Gurdjieff’s own writings do.) That fits what I have seen as well. In their view, most people who strive to experience
“out of body travel” (what a gas! How binary can you get!)... might better
strive to raise the level of consciousness in their “essence,” so that they can
do more with the out of body stuff they ALREADY do routinely. In that view,
SOMETHING lives after the death of the body, but HOW MUCH? To put it another
way... if you value your data, maybe you should strive to store it or back it
up on a more durable medium.
But why? Why should we bother?
Long long ago, I remember thinking about
the meaning and possible heroic goals of life as I rode my bike down Haws Lane,
and walked by a forest next to a parking lot where Haws Lane met Bethlehem
Pike, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It seemed pretty clear that no matter
what we do, no matter how extreme our human abilities might be, it is not
realistic to imagine that the whole cosmos is at a crossroads where we decide
the outcome. No matter how huge it is... it is more realistic to picture the
cosmos as a kind of gigantic Markov process. Our impact may be much more than
the small impacts many people are content with, and we have every reason to try
for more.. but even so, it will be finite. In the cosmos as a whole, it is
still meaningful what intelligent people do, and it affects our large
neighborhood within the cosmos... but it is finite. Does it even matter at all?
It matters because it matters to US... because WE as intelligent creatures have
feelings which WE naturally care about, born into our “material” and “spiritual”
utility function systems. And so, a few weeks back, when someone at Quaker
Meeting asked: “How did this boy have the strength to carry on and do what is
rational in the face of so much extreme adversity and shock,” I could
truthfully say: “I faced some incredibly strong adversity and shock myself on
7/14/14... and it was not faith which kept me from totally falling apart of
going nuts.. it was memory of commitment... commitment to life, light and love”..
(see Rose-Croix)... which is an articulation of my nonverbal sense of what
seems ultimately good to me. Likewise, in a draft space policy for IEEE, I put
a “quotation in front:
“Who needs humans in space?
Who needs humans on earth?
Humans, that’s us.”
WE value human life, for its own sake,
as part of our fundamental ground. BUT that doesn’t mean that there is some
bean-counter regulation that all ova must be nurtured to become humans, or even
that fetal human brains less conscious than that of an adult cow should receive
more legal protection! That is such a grotesque twisting and misunderstanding
of what it really means to support life! And life on earth in general is very
much at risk at the present time. Will the entire planet go Esdras, and could
even more permanent hard drives get trashed? Maybe, maybe not. That’s something
we should pay real attention to.
===========================================
All for now. Lots more I ought to write,
but this is probably too long already for modern media.
Best of luck.
.
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