I was responding to Heyoka's journal and for some reason I just kept typing. Ended up articulating a lot of what I believe in writing for the first time, so I'm sticking it here too. Repost follows...
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
- Albert Einstein
I empathize with your empathy, so to speak. I too feel (over)sensitized to the energies and emotions I witness in the world, and have for quite some time. I've come to the conclusion that it is a blessing, because I remember other times in my life when I felt nothing, and I much prefer feeling too much than not enough. I think a lot of the problems in the world stem from people not feeling enough (thanks Prozac).
One of the more memorable moments like this I've recently had was when I was watching a really excellent documentary about the evolution of humans, as best we understand. It went into great detail about the desperate struggle for survival of the Neanderthals. As the last great Ice Age descended, they tried so damn hard to make it. But they failed, and now there are not two kinds of humans anymore. Our brothers, the Neanderthals, failed in their quest for survival, and are forever gone.
It's hard to convey the power of how deeply I felt that struggle. I somehow managed to glimpse for a second the 50,000 years of families slowly dying out, of fathers searching in vain for food for their children as the snow gradually stayed for longer and longer each year.
I cried so long and hard thinking about it, and it made me feel very small but somehow precious. I believe we are on the brink of another such failure. I'm not saying I think we'll fail, I'm just saying it's going to be decided in our lifetimes. We are passing the event horizon, the Point of No Return.
Moore's Law
Intel founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double each year. Ten years later Moores Correction stated that the number of transistors per chip would double every 18 months... Goodman calculates that in 2009 we would produce a processor for each neuron in each human on the planet. Shortly before 2050, we would produce as many transistors in one year as there are milligrams of mass in the Earth. "At some point this gets ridiculous, doesnt it?"
My personal fusion bbq of science and religion has led me to conclude certain things about evolution, and our place in it. Many people are most fascinated and fixated with the moment that the first single celled organism appeared on Earth. I agree that was a fantastic moment, but really there was another event in evolutionary history that seems a lot more relevant to our present situation. When did single-celled organisms somehow "figure out" that they could join together into a large, exponentially more complex and powerful being?
We are on the brink of either destroying ourselves, or of making a nearly identical evolutionary leap. Evolution isn't going to have us grow bigger brains and lose our hair, becoming some kind of terrestrial Greys. At least not exclusively. The way more significant evolutionary step that can, should, and hopefully will take place, is our transformation from single "cells", to a species organism.
I already see any cooperative group of humans as an organism. Not "like" an organism. I see it as an actual organsim, as real as you or me. Recently I've been most fascinated with corporate organisms, as they seem the most powerful and among the more self-aware. Other examples of human social organisms range from the couple, the family, the city or country, the crowd at a concert or rave or movie, angry mobs of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and California. I think you get the point.
I see what we are doing here as the precursor to this evolution. Communication is our instinct. Just why the hell do we care so much that we spend time writing here, or talking to other people at all? We want to share our thoughts with them, and have theirs shared with us. We want to function as a single organism, if even for a moment, because that feeling of being really understood is among the most right feelings there is. The Net is such a huge step toward the realization of this goal, for reasons I think are obvious.
Some people who I've mentioned this to say it sounds like Big Brother, like the sacrifice of individuality for something that isn't worth it. I disagree, because the human organism I think we are capable of becoming doesn't shun individuality, it embraces it as another facet in the human jewel, a holographic miniature of the whole.
The "religion" part of it comes from the fact that I believe once we achieve the human organism, we will be easily capable of leaving the Earth and exploring space. This is not only because this organism will have little difficulty with solving such problems as accelerating to near the speed of light, but the time to travel elsewhere in the galaxy becomes managable in the context of a human organism, which is not bounded by a seventy-something year average lifespan.
Maybe we'll be the first planetary organism to strike out in the universe this time around. I doubt it, but it is possible, someone has to be first. What I find highly unlikely is the idea that we will be the only planetary organism to evolve and start looking for others. I'm not saying I expect to find Klingons, I'm saying something more like Carl Sagan's idea he conveyed in Contact.
Eventually I believe we will all find each other, linking up in the evolutionary miracle to form larger organisms. Maybe that's it, ad infinitum. I like to think that eventually we all manage to link up, like the bubbles in the foam from soap slowly popping to form larger bubbles, until finally there is just one big bubble.
That bubble, that final organism, is the universe. It is God, Tao, Brahman, whatever you want to call it. It is the thing I love most and am thankful every day to be a part of. I believe this Friend has been achieved an infinite number of times in the past, and will continue to do so for eternity. Each time it is achieved, it is the happiest moment that could possibly occur.
The only thing is, once this One state is reached, however big a party it may have been before we did it, as soon as it's done we aren't "we" anymore. We're the big I, and it is the most intensely real definition of "alone" that can be imagined. There is no concept of how long this state lasts, because time is relative as is space, neither of which will exist anymore.
I have weird theories on how thought becomes reality at that point, that whatever that universal organism thinks of is as "real" as anything that "actually exists". Very wacky philosophical questions arise when I think about this One state, but they are beyond the scope of this already way long post.
Anyway, in the end I think that big fella blows himself up real good (I mean himself in a gender non-specific way, as I obviously don't think of this creature as a boy or a girl). Call it the Big Bang, call it Creation, call it whatever you like. The universal organism disintigrates itself, or turns itself inside out, something to start this whole crazy trip again.
Ahem, geez I didn't mean for all that to come out here. Hope you liked some of it anyway.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
- Albert Einstein
I empathize with your empathy, so to speak. I too feel (over)sensitized to the energies and emotions I witness in the world, and have for quite some time. I've come to the conclusion that it is a blessing, because I remember other times in my life when I felt nothing, and I much prefer feeling too much than not enough. I think a lot of the problems in the world stem from people not feeling enough (thanks Prozac).
One of the more memorable moments like this I've recently had was when I was watching a really excellent documentary about the evolution of humans, as best we understand. It went into great detail about the desperate struggle for survival of the Neanderthals. As the last great Ice Age descended, they tried so damn hard to make it. But they failed, and now there are not two kinds of humans anymore. Our brothers, the Neanderthals, failed in their quest for survival, and are forever gone.
It's hard to convey the power of how deeply I felt that struggle. I somehow managed to glimpse for a second the 50,000 years of families slowly dying out, of fathers searching in vain for food for their children as the snow gradually stayed for longer and longer each year.
I cried so long and hard thinking about it, and it made me feel very small but somehow precious. I believe we are on the brink of another such failure. I'm not saying I think we'll fail, I'm just saying it's going to be decided in our lifetimes. We are passing the event horizon, the Point of No Return.
Moore's Law
Intel founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double each year. Ten years later Moores Correction stated that the number of transistors per chip would double every 18 months... Goodman calculates that in 2009 we would produce a processor for each neuron in each human on the planet. Shortly before 2050, we would produce as many transistors in one year as there are milligrams of mass in the Earth. "At some point this gets ridiculous, doesnt it?"
My personal fusion bbq of science and religion has led me to conclude certain things about evolution, and our place in it. Many people are most fascinated and fixated with the moment that the first single celled organism appeared on Earth. I agree that was a fantastic moment, but really there was another event in evolutionary history that seems a lot more relevant to our present situation. When did single-celled organisms somehow "figure out" that they could join together into a large, exponentially more complex and powerful being?
We are on the brink of either destroying ourselves, or of making a nearly identical evolutionary leap. Evolution isn't going to have us grow bigger brains and lose our hair, becoming some kind of terrestrial Greys. At least not exclusively. The way more significant evolutionary step that can, should, and hopefully will take place, is our transformation from single "cells", to a species organism.
I already see any cooperative group of humans as an organism. Not "like" an organism. I see it as an actual organsim, as real as you or me. Recently I've been most fascinated with corporate organisms, as they seem the most powerful and among the more self-aware. Other examples of human social organisms range from the couple, the family, the city or country, the crowd at a concert or rave or movie, angry mobs of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and California. I think you get the point.
I see what we are doing here as the precursor to this evolution. Communication is our instinct. Just why the hell do we care so much that we spend time writing here, or talking to other people at all? We want to share our thoughts with them, and have theirs shared with us. We want to function as a single organism, if even for a moment, because that feeling of being really understood is among the most right feelings there is. The Net is such a huge step toward the realization of this goal, for reasons I think are obvious.
Some people who I've mentioned this to say it sounds like Big Brother, like the sacrifice of individuality for something that isn't worth it. I disagree, because the human organism I think we are capable of becoming doesn't shun individuality, it embraces it as another facet in the human jewel, a holographic miniature of the whole.
The "religion" part of it comes from the fact that I believe once we achieve the human organism, we will be easily capable of leaving the Earth and exploring space. This is not only because this organism will have little difficulty with solving such problems as accelerating to near the speed of light, but the time to travel elsewhere in the galaxy becomes managable in the context of a human organism, which is not bounded by a seventy-something year average lifespan.
Maybe we'll be the first planetary organism to strike out in the universe this time around. I doubt it, but it is possible, someone has to be first. What I find highly unlikely is the idea that we will be the only planetary organism to evolve and start looking for others. I'm not saying I expect to find Klingons, I'm saying something more like Carl Sagan's idea he conveyed in Contact.
Eventually I believe we will all find each other, linking up in the evolutionary miracle to form larger organisms. Maybe that's it, ad infinitum. I like to think that eventually we all manage to link up, like the bubbles in the foam from soap slowly popping to form larger bubbles, until finally there is just one big bubble.
That bubble, that final organism, is the universe. It is God, Tao, Brahman, whatever you want to call it. It is the thing I love most and am thankful every day to be a part of. I believe this Friend has been achieved an infinite number of times in the past, and will continue to do so for eternity. Each time it is achieved, it is the happiest moment that could possibly occur.
The only thing is, once this One state is reached, however big a party it may have been before we did it, as soon as it's done we aren't "we" anymore. We're the big I, and it is the most intensely real definition of "alone" that can be imagined. There is no concept of how long this state lasts, because time is relative as is space, neither of which will exist anymore.
I have weird theories on how thought becomes reality at that point, that whatever that universal organism thinks of is as "real" as anything that "actually exists". Very wacky philosophical questions arise when I think about this One state, but they are beyond the scope of this already way long post.
Anyway, in the end I think that big fella blows himself up real good (I mean himself in a gender non-specific way, as I obviously don't think of this creature as a boy or a girl). Call it the Big Bang, call it Creation, call it whatever you like. The universal organism disintigrates itself, or turns itself inside out, something to start this whole crazy trip again.
Ahem, geez I didn't mean for all that to come out here. Hope you liked some of it anyway.
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
trixel:
Sea otter friends, holding paws:
trixel:
That didn't go very well. 