Posts tagged mythology

This train of thought has been very effective so far; even though I am quite sure that the more conventional rational agenda would disagree and even scorn it.
 
I must admit I am not very practiced in mathematics and physics. I did finish first year calculus, chemistry and physics (1989) and started some mechanics and statics (1990), but I have been reading informally. I am now reading an outstanding textbook on logic. My formal degree is in Economics (1986). I also formally studied English Literature (1981). However, I am 51 and I have nearly two decades of radically skeptical reading, thinking and writing behind me.

It is a glaring mental error of civilized thinking to dismiss the all-important perspective that dependent reality (DR) is imaginary. Conceptually DR is a virtual world. It is not part of the same continuum as independent reality (IR). Our existence is part of the IR continuum, but not our phenomenological reality. The world of our mind is a completely different world. It is pure imagination. What people popularly analyze and think about as “reality” is completely imaginary. We imagine when we think knowledge describes existence. Religion and science are equally part of that imaginary world. We imagine when we do science. No, I do not think we need BOTH Science and Art as you suggest. We need to imagine Science as art. Science is art. The thorn in the side of Science as a human-existential endeavor has been that we imagine it not to be art, not to be mythological. We imagine it to be empirical, or real.

We can certainly conceptualize IR, but in one way only: that it is existential. The only valid representation of IR is unity. We can only accurately think of IR as the singularity of our human existence. Therefore, my suggestion is that for humans, the only sane way to tell DR mythology is to accept human existence as singularity, and not to submissively seek knowledge and higher meaning (like “unity consciousness” or “god”) in the feverish mechanical expansion of the fractal imagination of the machine. We ought to stop defining ourselves in such shamanic terms.

I also do not believe there is a closed system, but anything is possible in the imaginary world of DR. In DR, we imagine scientific experiments as closed. Yet existentially whatever they are is in IR. What we imagine as controlled scientific experiments, are open in ways we cannot imagine, because they are in IR. Scientific experiments and all DR-mythology are wide, wide open in IR and we have no comprehension or control over what they are because we cannot know the dynamics in IR.  We cannot know the consequences of open determinism/probability. We cannot predict the future. This is why as a species we cannot afford to believe in anything but our own singular human existence, when we imagine our mythology. Unfortunately our species extinction is only an externality (like psychopathic corporations externalizing damage to outside parties) when we imagine the definition of our existence to be absolutely flexible, enabling us to expand it to include “machine.”

I know this is a radical mythology, but I think if it could become widespread, it may save us from species extinction.

1) How does my skepticism account for organizational, architectural and engineering accomplishments? Maybe it would help if I say that we are so full of shamanic conceit and tell such tall stories about our civilized successes, because we can somehow sense that we have no clue of the existential ramifications of our minds in abject submission to imagination-valorized markets.
2) How could we more directly paint our experienced reality (ER) and our non-experienced reality (NER) in this human-singularity mythological perspective? We can know that some independent reality (IR) has affected us, and some not, but we cannot define what has affected us. We cannot know it experientially/empirically. We can draw the ER-NER boundary or horizon (H) only in myth: in dependent reality (DR). We draw the ER-NER duality, like all dualities, as a figment of imagination. You say effective theories can tunnel through H and reduce the size of NER. I think that idea is invalid because no matter what we think or do, as long as we exist, we remain in existential singularity. The scenario you paint is enlarging ER. NER is virtually infinite. We are not affecting it. Instead, in our DR world of imagined analysis, we could further imagine H to have volume. H is actually an indefinitely expanding zone (EZ) a primed potentiality between ER and NER, and it exists because of the expansion of ER. EZ is an expanding zone generating more questions than answers, energizing extra-human evolution of IR. Doing science is harmonizing with the machine, without any concept whatsoever of the distinctive effect on human IR, except intuitively about on/existing or off/non-existing. Actually, we could paint our DR such that there is no ER and NER. In its place, imagine only the massive question generating EZ, exponentially expanding, affecting IR ever more potently in its hunger for, and generation of artificial intelligence (AI), and so fatally endangering the integrity of human existential singularity. We could narrowly paint this as technological singularity, or post-human IR. Instead as machine-minds, we call it, “transhumanism” or “rebecoming what we are” (after being broken in”The Fall”) or achieving Nirvana or being part of expanding sacred intelligence into the universe, or whatever. It is all nonsense, because in IR the human animal is extinct, and the story is over. There is no more human singularity.

Notes for further discussion:
1) Other animals do not talk and reflect. They live and think in IR. See DR in a slightly different depiction as in the first paragraph of the post above, as an expansion of IR. In the sense that humans are animals, DR unpredictably changes IR, colors it, distorts it, and renders it dystopian. It effectively destroys life.
2) The cultural realism, even the materialism of both Western philosophical rationalism (Aristotle and monotheism) and Eastern spiritual development (Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism) are similar in its systematic submission of the human animal to complex accounts of an actual omnipotent and immortal force. Civilized thinking is pervasively a self-fulfilling prophecy.