I’ve had these kinds of thoughts many times. I don’t think they were very healthy for me, and ultimately they’re not very useful. Whether they’re in some sense “correct” is an interesting question, though.
First, the concepts of right/wrong and credit/blame also exist within humans, or at least within animals. Applying those concepts to a level where they don’t naturally exist is also questionable. We humans do this a lot in part because our minds naturally treat other things as having minds when they don’t, and we do this historically in the context of religion and thinking the world was designed by something capable of having those categories applied to it.
Second, the laws that govern reality at a fundamental level are amoral, not immoral. What would it mean for those laws to be altered in such a way as to make a better universe? How much complexity and precision in the laws and in the initial conditions would that require? Because almost all possible sets of laws and initial conditions are amoral. This is in some sense a thermodynamic/entropic/probabilistic argument: amoral laws and conditions are exactly what we should expect for what kind of universe we might find ourselves in. If it were otherwise, that would be something that needs a deep level of explanation.
Third, a few parts of your post come down to a discussion of free will in a deterministic universe. I would ask, what is the alternative? Either the universe is deterministic, and it would be possible-in-principle for some entity outside it to use those laws to predict your actions and choices in advance in large part by modeling you. Or it is not deterministic, and such a prediction is not possible, and also no actually existing entity including you can be said to determine your choice. Neither options seems to get you what you’re after, and I have never found any suggestion of what a third option might even look like. The deterministic option at least lets you act for reasons, (usually) puts the locus of control within the part-of-the-universe you call you, and offers a path (become more powerful in various ways) to making that be the case more often. (And it is not necessarily impossible that this becoming-more-powerful could, someday, include changing what kind of universe you live in, with what laws.)
I’ve had these kinds of thoughts [referring to the OP] many times. I don’t think they were very healthy for me
I suspect that they are unhealthy for a lot of people.
Jordan Peterson asserts that many mass murders are motivated by desire for revenge against the Universe and offers as evidence the observation that many mass murders choose the most innocent victims they can. (More precisely, since Peterson is religious, he has “revenge against God”, but the nearest translation for non-religious people would be “revenge against the Universe”.) And of course for a person to accumulate a large pool of vengeful feelings, the person must believe or at least strongly suspect that the target of the feelings is responsible for the bad things that happened to the person.
I cannot recall whether Peterson ever explicitly said so, but I am left with the impression that Peterson considers vengeful feelings directed at the Universe (and possibly also other large collective entities, e.g., the Cambodian nation) to be more likely to accumulate to the extent that they blot out the ability to think rationally in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest than vengeful feeling directed at a mere person or clique of persons. (Harboring vengeful feelings directed at the Cambodian nation would be particularly harmful to you if you were Cambodian or lived in Cambodia.)
I would argue that the amount of murders committed by people with the desire for “revenge against the universe” is less than 0.01% of murders and probably much less than murders committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades. Should we conclude that Christianity is also unhealthy for a lot of people?
This idea of cherry-picking the worst phenomenon related to a worldview and then smearing with it the entire worldview is basically one of the lowest forms of propaganda.
With regard to healthy, I do believe I understand what you mean. I want a balance between the different ways of seeing the world, and this question is by no means an expression of the totality of existence. Still, I find it important, to see if I can hold that which is difficult a bit more gently.
I’ll take your points in order:
I can see this point, but of the ones you make, I wonder if this is the one it is easiest for me to see a counter to. Furthermore, since we ‘are’ also part of the universe, I would say that gives us an inherent right to evaluate what the Universe feels like, does it not? You say that other things don’t have minds, but since we are an amalgamation of those things, how would you differentiate? I know that it is a quagmire to do, but I also believe that it is too easy to say we are ‘separate’ in that sense. We have many of the essential elements of the universe inside us, and as such, where does it make sense to draw the line between ‘them’ and ‘it’? I mean, some argue we are machines, but that is another topic altogether.
I guess this could relate to your first point, that by adding ‘minds’ to concepts, laws and atoms, we are extrapolating. I’m on a bit of thin ice with regard to the laws and entropy, but isn’t it so that the laws of physics should also work in reverse, basically how a movie works. But if it goes both ways, doesn’t that imply that Life and the Laws are somehow connected? If immoral laws and energy can create moral life, moral life can also create immoral laws. How does it make sense to separate the two? Is that a stupid way to think about it?
Yeah, living life without ‘control’ of some degree is depression and hopelessness. I mean, to answer your question here, what if it is part of both? Since we are made of the universe, and have a certain influence, there is some semblance of free will. At the same time, there are forces that govern our behavior, that we, for various reasons, are unable to influence. That we are in this universe, doesn’t really make it impossible that we should exist somewhere else as well, and so we could ourselves be that entity outside, but could make the choice not to predict what is going on.
Now, I’ll not delve further into speculations and conjecture at this point. Again, thanks for your response.
Out of curiosity, have you had a chance to read the Free Will sequence yet? If so, what did you think?
If you would like a hard line between self and other, or between mind and not-mind, then yeah, you’re not going to find one. Not unless you postulate supernatural components of the world that enforce the distinction. A deeper explanation of why such a physical distinction is not going to exist is a bit more complicated, but if you feel like delving into it, have you tried the Quantum Physics sequence? Way clearer conceptually than what I got from textbooks in college (physics major) and way more precise than any other intro I’ve seen for a more general audience.
On entropy/thermodynamics: sorry, I used a metaphor that only half fit and that I didn’t explain at all. What I was trying to point at is, most possible physical laws that could generate a universe capable of sustaining some form of life have no moral valence at all. Morality is complicated, far more complex than the laws of physics, and you can’t pack a whole morality into a few short equations. Technically you probably could pack it into the initial conditions of the universe if you were a sufficiently smart creator god. But almost all possible configurations of particles and energies that could have existed in the beginning have no moral valence at all.
And if you’re wondering about amoral (not immoral) laws creating moral life/minds—I’d say you’ve got your causality backwards. The laws of reality generated us. We are the ones whose ancestors survived and reproduced slightly better in the ancestral environment. We got here in part because of the moral instincts that evolution managed to pack into a few GB of DNA. We have those instincts because they’re the ones that survived, and any other lineages died out. Part of the structure of our minds is that humans look for mind-like features in things that are not-minds, so now we look for morality outside ourselves. The time-reversal symmetry of physics doesn’t really come into it at all, except to confirm that yes, if you ran the laws of physics and they ended up in a configuration of the universe that contained no humans, then there would be no more morality.
And I apologize but I’m having trouble interpreting your last paragraph.
Morality is complicated, far more complex than the laws of physics, and you can’t pack a whole morality into a few short equations. Technically you probably could pack it into the initial conditions of the universe if you were a sufficiently smart creator god.
This is the premise of Stanislaw Lem’s (quite wonderful) story “The Eighteenth Voyage” (included in the collection Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy):
Of course, to program and pack such an ungodly wealth of information into one electron was no easy task. I must confess that I did not do everything myself. … Razglaz and I shared the work; I thought up the improvements and corrections, and he translated these into the precise language of the parameters of physics, the theory of vacuums, the theory of electrons, positrons, and sundry other trons.
What good, what wonderful things I planned during those hectic days! How often did I work late into the night poring over books on physics, ethics, and zoology in order to gather, combine, and concentrate the most valuable information, which the professor, starting at dawn, fashioned into the electron, the cosmic nucleus! We wanted, among other things, to have the Universe develop harmoniously, not as before; to prevent supernovas from jolting it too much; to eliminate the senseless waste of quasar and pulsar energy; to keep stars from sparking and smoking like damp candlewicks; and to shorten interstellar distances, which would facilitate space travel and thus bring together and unify sentient races. It would take volumes to tell of all the corrections I managed to plan in a relatively short time. But these were not the most important thing. I need not explain why I concentrated on the human race; to improve it, I changed the principle of natural evolution.
Evolution, as we know, is either the wholesale devouring of the weaker by the stronger (zoocide), or the conspiracy of the weaker, who attack the stronger from within (parasitism). Only green plants are moral, living as they do at their own expense, on solar energy. I therefore provided for the chlorophyllization of all living things; in particular, I devised the Foliated Man. Since this meant the stomach had to go, I transferred to its location a suitably enlarged nerve center. I did not do all this directly, of course, having at my disposal only one electron. I simply established, in cooperation with the professor, that the fundamental law of evolution in the new, debt-free Universe would be the rule of decent behavior of every life form toward every other. I also designed a much more aesthetic body, a more refined sexuality, and numerous other improvements I will not even mention, for my heart bleeds at the recollection of them.
Yes, your view is consistent with your arguments, and it makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that it partly dismisses the intention with my question.
We are humans, we are made of matter and energy, we feel and we evaluate. Yes, you can argue, correctly I assume, the Universe isn’t inherently moral, and to disagree with the spin I put to the question, but I am asking the Mind-you, not the Universe, how you feel, evaluate and discern this question, and the direct consequences those laws have in your life.
If you believe it is counterproductive to focus on the question, what I would find much more interesting is how you reasoned to get to that point.
Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it’s my fault or not, and whether it’s within my power to change or not.
Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, “Well, what is it you want from your free will?” After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, “A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness.” AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don’t live in that world).
Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it’s taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won’t make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it’s ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.
One positive note I’d add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they’re familiar with, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It’s sad how many opportunities we’ve missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that’s a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.
I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett’s books, that “The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints.” I would add, “and learn to build angels.” But we’re getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it’s really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it’s best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that’d been made. And it’s not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we’ve eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it’s likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there’s no reason we can’t make the Goddess of Everything Else win.
I wasn’t expecting this response from you. Thank you, I am truly grateful for you sharing this with me. It is definitely a gift I will treasure, and it is also something I can work with more easily.
I am more of an intuitive person. Reading psychology, sociology, social sciences and experimental ideas/theories, and a lot of fiction and mind-boggling film. I am prone to reflecting, and delving into introspection, self-understanding and communication, societal and relational understandings. I haven’t read that much, but I have talked and delved deep into the nitty-gritty of my own and the psyche’s of other people. And, from that discovery, I started to notice, ever slowly, that I didn’t like to focus on the bad, the ugly and the dirty, below a certain threshold.
Which simply means, I am not able to handle a fundamental part of reality, but it didn’t bug me that much, as I similarly to you, grew up with ideals like the Phantom; simple good against bad—and the Bible. As I got older, things got more complex, but I held on to this belief that I could find some kind of level of complexity or abstraction, where my actions, thoughts or inner changes would matter sufficiently to seem to warrant the effort.
And, to my dismay, I had to accept that I was chasing my own tail. To follow that line of thinking would never end, I would forever try to force complexity inside my simple box of reality, and the effort would just strain me and not really bring me forward. Even though I can easily imagine and hold things lightly, I don’t go beyond a certain limit—some kind of mind-speed limitor, a reminder that “I’m not there yet”, or “a lot of things are missing before it would make sense to look at these issues”.
I did however meet someone that I acknowledged as an equal in their pursuit of making sense of things, and at that point many things clicked in place for me. Much of the reason I have in the last years radically changed a lot of my views about things, is because I through my partner have been confronted with an understanding of the world that was so different from my own—but that was similarly well-founded—that I had to either ignore it or try to widen the box and include many of the elements I had previously disregarded, dismissed or simplified nearly out of existence. And I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
I find some solace in imagining having different Cognitive functions/People in my mind, like a team or something—all with different ways of seeing the world, that dig out different data and even interprets that data differently. The reason I do this is not because I like to make things overly complicated, but that I have simply found no better practical explanation for how radically different these parts of the psyche interact with and view the world. Their increased cooperation, has taken me and us to places where we are regularly confronted by many sets of opposites and dichotomies that are seemingly diametrically opposed, that somehow still fit together and can create new options and directions.
As with many things, it isn’t quite easy to translate this back the other way around, to simplify the complex. I can drive a bike, but I can’t really explain how. Or, when I start to delve seriously into how I drive a bike, all the nuances and details, depending on how far I take it, it might end up as hard because of the opposite problem, that there is too much information for it to be divulged easily.
With regard to your choice on how to interact with the future, I also see entirely different options entirely. And I don’t like to dismiss them, even when it hurts to feel or look at. But I am averse to sharing them directly, and I am trying to backtrack to somewhere where I can talk and express things without getting lost in the myriad of interconnected parts, a place where it can be explained more coherently and easy to follow.
Asking this question is part of it. But this isn’t where I’m at, it is simply the intersection point where I can talk about something without veering totally of course—I hoped :)
I’ve had these kinds of thoughts many times. I don’t think they were very healthy for me, and ultimately they’re not very useful. Whether they’re in some sense “correct” is an interesting question, though.
First, the concepts of right/wrong and credit/blame also exist within humans, or at least within animals. Applying those concepts to a level where they don’t naturally exist is also questionable. We humans do this a lot in part because our minds naturally treat other things as having minds when they don’t, and we do this historically in the context of religion and thinking the world was designed by something capable of having those categories applied to it.
Second, the laws that govern reality at a fundamental level are amoral, not immoral. What would it mean for those laws to be altered in such a way as to make a better universe? How much complexity and precision in the laws and in the initial conditions would that require? Because almost all possible sets of laws and initial conditions are amoral. This is in some sense a thermodynamic/entropic/probabilistic argument: amoral laws and conditions are exactly what we should expect for what kind of universe we might find ourselves in. If it were otherwise, that would be something that needs a deep level of explanation.
Third, a few parts of your post come down to a discussion of free will in a deterministic universe. I would ask, what is the alternative? Either the universe is deterministic, and it would be possible-in-principle for some entity outside it to use those laws to predict your actions and choices in advance in large part by modeling you. Or it is not deterministic, and such a prediction is not possible, and also no actually existing entity including you can be said to determine your choice. Neither options seems to get you what you’re after, and I have never found any suggestion of what a third option might even look like. The deterministic option at least lets you act for reasons, (usually) puts the locus of control within the part-of-the-universe you call you, and offers a path (become more powerful in various ways) to making that be the case more often. (And it is not necessarily impossible that this becoming-more-powerful could, someday, include changing what kind of universe you live in, with what laws.)
I suspect that they are unhealthy for a lot of people.
Jordan Peterson asserts that many mass murders are motivated by desire for revenge against the Universe and offers as evidence the observation that many mass murders choose the most innocent victims they can. (More precisely, since Peterson is religious, he has “revenge against God”, but the nearest translation for non-religious people would be “revenge against the Universe”.) And of course for a person to accumulate a large pool of vengeful feelings, the person must believe or at least strongly suspect that the target of the feelings is responsible for the bad things that happened to the person.
I cannot recall whether Peterson ever explicitly said so, but I am left with the impression that Peterson considers vengeful feelings directed at the Universe (and possibly also other large collective entities, e.g., the Cambodian nation) to be more likely to accumulate to the extent that they blot out the ability to think rationally in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest than vengeful feeling directed at a mere person or clique of persons. (Harboring vengeful feelings directed at the Cambodian nation would be particularly harmful to you if you were Cambodian or lived in Cambodia.)
I would argue that the amount of murders committed by people with the desire for “revenge against the universe” is less than 0.01% of murders and probably much less than murders committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades. Should we conclude that Christianity is also unhealthy for a lot of people?
This idea of cherry-picking the worst phenomenon related to a worldview and then smearing with it the entire worldview is basically one of the lowest forms of propaganda.
Hello AnthonyC,
thanks for your thoughtful reply.
With regard to healthy, I do believe I understand what you mean. I want a balance between the different ways of seeing the world, and this question is by no means an expression of the totality of existence. Still, I find it important, to see if I can hold that which is difficult a bit more gently.
I’ll take your points in order:
I can see this point, but of the ones you make, I wonder if this is the one it is easiest for me to see a counter to. Furthermore, since we ‘are’ also part of the universe, I would say that gives us an inherent right to evaluate what the Universe feels like, does it not? You say that other things don’t have minds, but since we are an amalgamation of those things, how would you differentiate? I know that it is a quagmire to do, but I also believe that it is too easy to say we are ‘separate’ in that sense. We have many of the essential elements of the universe inside us, and as such, where does it make sense to draw the line between ‘them’ and ‘it’? I mean, some argue we are machines, but that is another topic altogether.
I guess this could relate to your first point, that by adding ‘minds’ to concepts, laws and atoms, we are extrapolating. I’m on a bit of thin ice with regard to the laws and entropy, but isn’t it so that the laws of physics should also work in reverse, basically how a movie works. But if it goes both ways, doesn’t that imply that Life and the Laws are somehow connected? If immoral laws and energy can create moral life, moral life can also create immoral laws. How does it make sense to separate the two?
Is that a stupid way to think about it?
Yeah, living life without ‘control’ of some degree is depression and hopelessness. I mean, to answer your question here, what if it is part of both? Since we are made of the universe, and have a certain influence, there is some semblance of free will. At the same time, there are forces that govern our behavior, that we, for various reasons, are unable to influence. That we are in this universe, doesn’t really make it impossible that we should exist somewhere else as well, and so we could ourselves be that entity outside, but could make the choice not to predict what is going on.
Now, I’ll not delve further into speculations and conjecture at this point. Again, thanks for your response.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Out of curiosity, have you had a chance to read the Free Will sequence yet? If so, what did you think?
If you would like a hard line between self and other, or between mind and not-mind, then yeah, you’re not going to find one. Not unless you postulate supernatural components of the world that enforce the distinction. A deeper explanation of why such a physical distinction is not going to exist is a bit more complicated, but if you feel like delving into it, have you tried the Quantum Physics sequence? Way clearer conceptually than what I got from textbooks in college (physics major) and way more precise than any other intro I’ve seen for a more general audience.
On entropy/thermodynamics: sorry, I used a metaphor that only half fit and that I didn’t explain at all. What I was trying to point at is, most possible physical laws that could generate a universe capable of sustaining some form of life have no moral valence at all. Morality is complicated, far more complex than the laws of physics, and you can’t pack a whole morality into a few short equations. Technically you probably could pack it into the initial conditions of the universe if you were a sufficiently smart creator god. But almost all possible configurations of particles and energies that could have existed in the beginning have no moral valence at all.
And if you’re wondering about amoral (not immoral) laws creating moral life/minds—I’d say you’ve got your causality backwards. The laws of reality generated us. We are the ones whose ancestors survived and reproduced slightly better in the ancestral environment. We got here in part because of the moral instincts that evolution managed to pack into a few GB of DNA. We have those instincts because they’re the ones that survived, and any other lineages died out. Part of the structure of our minds is that humans look for mind-like features in things that are not-minds, so now we look for morality outside ourselves. The time-reversal symmetry of physics doesn’t really come into it at all, except to confirm that yes, if you ran the laws of physics and they ended up in a configuration of the universe that contained no humans, then there would be no more morality.
And I apologize but I’m having trouble interpreting your last paragraph.
This is the premise of Stanislaw Lem’s (quite wonderful) story “The Eighteenth Voyage” (included in the collection Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy):
Hello AnthonyC,
Yes, your view is consistent with your arguments, and it makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that it partly dismisses the intention with my question.
We are humans, we are made of matter and energy, we feel and we evaluate.
Yes, you can argue, correctly I assume, the Universe isn’t inherently moral, and to disagree with the spin I put to the question, but I am asking the Mind-you, not the Universe, how you feel, evaluate and discern this question, and the direct consequences those laws have in your life.
If you believe it is counterproductive to focus on the question, what I would find much more interesting is how you reasoned to get to that point.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Ah, I see.
Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it’s my fault or not, and whether it’s within my power to change or not.
Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, “Well, what is it you want from your free will?” After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, “A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness.” AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don’t live in that world).
Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it’s taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won’t make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it’s ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.
One positive note I’d add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they’re familiar with, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It’s sad how many opportunities we’ve missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that’s a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.
I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett’s books, that “The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints.” I would add, “and learn to build angels.” But we’re getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it’s really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it’s best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that’d been made. And it’s not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we’ve eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it’s likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there’s no reason we can’t make the Goddess of Everything Else win.
I wasn’t expecting this response from you. Thank you, I am truly grateful for you sharing this with me. It is definitely a gift I will treasure, and it is also something I can work with more easily.
I am more of an intuitive person. Reading psychology, sociology, social sciences and experimental ideas/theories, and a lot of fiction and mind-boggling film. I am prone to reflecting, and delving into introspection, self-understanding and communication, societal and relational understandings. I haven’t read that much, but I have talked and delved deep into the nitty-gritty of my own and the psyche’s of other people. And, from that discovery, I started to notice, ever slowly, that I didn’t like to focus on the bad, the ugly and the dirty, below a certain threshold.
Which simply means, I am not able to handle a fundamental part of reality, but it didn’t bug me that much, as I similarly to you, grew up with ideals like the Phantom; simple good against bad—and the Bible. As I got older, things got more complex, but I held on to this belief that I could find some kind of level of complexity or abstraction, where my actions, thoughts or inner changes would matter sufficiently to seem to warrant the effort.
And, to my dismay, I had to accept that I was chasing my own tail. To follow that line of thinking would never end, I would forever try to force complexity inside my simple box of reality, and the effort would just strain me and not really bring me forward. Even though I can easily imagine and hold things lightly, I don’t go beyond a certain limit—some kind of mind-speed limitor, a reminder that “I’m not there yet”, or “a lot of things are missing before it would make sense to look at these issues”.
I did however meet someone that I acknowledged as an equal in their pursuit of making sense of things, and at that point many things clicked in place for me. Much of the reason I have in the last years radically changed a lot of my views about things, is because I through my partner have been confronted with an understanding of the world that was so different from my own—but that was similarly well-founded—that I had to either ignore it or try to widen the box and include many of the elements I had previously disregarded, dismissed or simplified nearly out of existence. And I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
I find some solace in imagining having different Cognitive functions/People in my mind, like a team or something—all with different ways of seeing the world, that dig out different data and even interprets that data differently. The reason I do this is not because I like to make things overly complicated, but that I have simply found no better practical explanation for how radically different these parts of the psyche interact with and view the world. Their increased cooperation, has taken me and us to places where we are regularly confronted by many sets of opposites and dichotomies that are seemingly diametrically opposed, that somehow still fit together and can create new options and directions.
As with many things, it isn’t quite easy to translate this back the other way around, to simplify the complex. I can drive a bike, but I can’t really explain how. Or, when I start to delve seriously into how I drive a bike, all the nuances and details, depending on how far I take it, it might end up as hard because of the opposite problem, that there is too much information for it to be divulged easily.
With regard to your choice on how to interact with the future, I also see entirely different options entirely. And I don’t like to dismiss them, even when it hurts to feel or look at. But I am averse to sharing them directly, and I am trying to backtrack to somewhere where I can talk and express things without getting lost in the myriad of interconnected parts, a place where it can be explained more coherently and easy to follow.
Asking this question is part of it. But this isn’t where I’m at, it is simply the intersection point where I can talk about something without veering totally of course—I hoped :)
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence