Since we have to give probabilities, I’ll say 10%, but note well, I’m not saying there is a 10% probability that the world ends this year, I’m saying 10% conditional on us being in a transhumanly controlled environment; e.g., that if we are in a simulation, then 2012 has a good chance of being a preprogrammed date with destiny.
As I point out in the other comment, the real year of maximum alignment was 1998. So perhaps SubGenius is the true faith, the few true SubGenii were raptured that year, and 2012 is just when the cosmic wrecking crew come in to clean up.
It’s a coincidence of note in itself that the midpoint of the current “galactic solstice” should have occurred so extremely close to a millennial year in the dominant planetary calendar; also that the third Christian millennium begins so close in time to the start of a new Mayan cycle. It would be easier to understand all this if both Mayan and European cultures had a visible history of caring about “galactic alignment”, and there was a visible history of adjusting the calendar accordingly. We know the Mayans were eager astrologers, and the beginning of the “Christian era” was probably associated with the transition between the zodiacal Age of Aries and Age of Pisces (12 signs in the zodiac, divide up the 26000-year precession into 12 periods and you get approximately 2000-year epochs). So we can point to ways in which ancient astronomy has shaped the calendar, but not enough to definitely explain Christian 2000 and Mayan 2012 as attempts to synchronize the calendar with galactic 1998.
It’s already a stretch to posit a secret history of influential esoteric astrology shaping the western calendar. But if we then try to explain the coincidence of this period in time with general technological and scientific acceleration, basically you either have to say that it’s just a coincidence, or that it’s not a coincidence and reality is connected in ways far beyond what we currently understand. The simplest version of that hypothesis, for this community, is “we’re living in the Matrix”.
it’s not a coincidence and reality is connected in ways far beyond what we currently understand. The simplest version of that hypothesis, for this community, is “we’re living in the Matrix”.
And in other communities that hypothesis class is called...?
There’s no name for the general idea. But for people who habitually think that everything reduces to computation and/or that physics is largely figured out, the Matrix is the quickest way to reintroduce fundamental uncertainty about what’s behind the appearances of the world.
Another formulation which might have some potency for an audience of materialist futurists, would be to suggest that the stars and planets are all already superintelligences, engaged in purposeful aeon-old interactions about which we know nothing, and that the minutiae of our life and history on Earth are shaped by a local superintelligence, or its agents, by means that we do not know, towards goals that we do not know. Earth is not a rare oasis of life in a cosmic desert; the sum total of our lives here is more like a day’s worth of microbes living and dying, in the dark under a small rock, in a jungle bursting with larger lives and dramas.
If you start just with the data of experience, rather than presupposing physical or computational reductionism, the possibilities are even broader. A dream presents an example of a hallucinated world and narrative which is not only unreal, but often logically incoherent and only imagined rather than experienced, to a degree that isn’t recognized while it’s taking place. Also, the events of dreams can be the product of knowledge and concerns which the dreamer does not consciously recall during the dream (but which will be remembered and understood once awake), and also just the result of external sensory stimuli, transduced into something that fits the dream context.
One might suppose that waking life is a similar phenomenon, but on a higher scale. Perhaps if one looked at all the facts of one’s circumstances with an IQ of 5000 (whatever that might mean), it would be obvious that it’s all a sham and a delirium. That line of thought could lead back to the Matrix, but there ought to be other, more mentalistic, models of real causality (causality outside the illusion), which provide an alternative conception of higher reality. For example, you could combine solipsism, metaphysical idealism, and the idea of a temporary self-induced occlusion concerning your own nature and powers, to arrive at the guess that you are Something, somehow floating in existential isolation, which has produced the illusion of a body and senses and a world, and the illusion of being a limited denizen of that world with no existence before it. Why did you do this? Maybe you went mad in eternal isolated boredom, maybe it was a mistake, who knows.
There are many variations on this sort of hypothesis. It doesn’t have to be solipsistic, for example. But what distinguishes it from the materialist paranoia of the Matrix is that it doesn’t even hold onto the idea that states of mind are “really” material processes, occurring in a physics known or unknown. There is a more direct coupling between appearances and intentions, as in a dream when analysed from the cognitive point of view.
Obviously, if reality were like that, then events might be connected in ways far removed from conventional probabilistic causal thinking. If the world of the senses were just a symbolic realization of the agenda of some governing intention, then events might be orchestrated in all sorts of unusual ways.
Another class of rogue hypothesis might be called the “big dumb spirit-force” hypothesis. Earlier I spoke of superintelligent celestial bodies, the implication being that they are actually giant nano- or pico-computers of a sort that the human race has begun to imagine, and their vast ancient computations are what governs us. A peculiar alternative would be to suppose something like astrology, in which celestial objects are big dumb objects after all, but they exert influences which act “directly” on sensibility, culture, and evolution (I mean in a way which has the directness of physics, rather than the indirectness of cosmic darwinism, whereby the cosmic environment imposes changing conditions on the biosphere).
There is also a type of transcendental hypothesis which is mostly defined negatively. It amounts just to saying that reality consists of “entities” in “relationships”, and not only are you oblivious to most of them, you can’t even conceive of most of them. And not only that, but you aren’t even properly conceiving of what’s happening right in front of you, and of who and what you yourself are. You have to imagine everything you have experienced and thought, and everything that you have ever heard of and thought you understood, as completely superficial, when it’s not outright wrong. To even conceive of the situation as “you getting reality wrong” would still be getting it wrong, in the sense of missing the essence of everything. In other words, you and your life have a meaning other than “semi-intelligent entity blundering through local corner of reality using its inadequate concepts”; your existence (in the broad sense of everything you know about, not just the actions for which you personally take responsibility) has significance, but you are completely blind to it.
Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.
I especially can’t imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.
Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there’s no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.
It’s easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things.
First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn’t been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It’s the December solstice which is the “galactic solstice” at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment.
OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What’s always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day.
Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration.
Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it’s not every day that a human probe first reaches interstellar space, the black hole at the center of the galaxy visibly lights up, and we begin to measure the properties of the fundamental field that produces mass, all of this happening within a year of an ancient, astronomically timed prophecy of world-change. It sounds like an unrealistic science-fiction plot. So perhaps one should give consideration to models which treat this as more than a coincidence.
It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)
I don’t have a stable opinion on that topic. But the question here is whether, given that hypothesis, it’s rational to attach significance to 2012-ism.
Irrationality Game
If we are in a simulation, a game, a “planetarium”, or some other form of environment controlled by transhuman powers, then 2012 may be the planned end of the game, or end of this stage of the game, foreshadowed within the game by the Mayan calendar, and having something to do with the Voyager space probe reaching the limits of the planetarium-enclosure, the galactic center lighting up as a gas cloud falls in 30,000 years ago, or the discovery of the higgs boson.
Since we have to give probabilities, I’ll say 10%, but note well, I’m not saying there is a 10% probability that the world ends this year, I’m saying 10% conditional on us being in a transhumanly controlled environment; e.g., that if we are in a simulation, then 2012 has a good chance of being a preprogrammed date with destiny.
Upvoted solely because 1999/2000 was foreshadowed so much more heavily.
As I point out in the other comment, the real year of maximum alignment was 1998. So perhaps SubGenius is the true faith, the few true SubGenii were raptured that year, and 2012 is just when the cosmic wrecking crew come in to clean up.
It’s a coincidence of note in itself that the midpoint of the current “galactic solstice” should have occurred so extremely close to a millennial year in the dominant planetary calendar; also that the third Christian millennium begins so close in time to the start of a new Mayan cycle. It would be easier to understand all this if both Mayan and European cultures had a visible history of caring about “galactic alignment”, and there was a visible history of adjusting the calendar accordingly. We know the Mayans were eager astrologers, and the beginning of the “Christian era” was probably associated with the transition between the zodiacal Age of Aries and Age of Pisces (12 signs in the zodiac, divide up the 26000-year precession into 12 periods and you get approximately 2000-year epochs). So we can point to ways in which ancient astronomy has shaped the calendar, but not enough to definitely explain Christian 2000 and Mayan 2012 as attempts to synchronize the calendar with galactic 1998.
It’s already a stretch to posit a secret history of influential esoteric astrology shaping the western calendar. But if we then try to explain the coincidence of this period in time with general technological and scientific acceleration, basically you either have to say that it’s just a coincidence, or that it’s not a coincidence and reality is connected in ways far beyond what we currently understand. The simplest version of that hypothesis, for this community, is “we’re living in the Matrix”.
And in other communities that hypothesis class is called...?
There’s no name for the general idea. But for people who habitually think that everything reduces to computation and/or that physics is largely figured out, the Matrix is the quickest way to reintroduce fundamental uncertainty about what’s behind the appearances of the world.
Another formulation which might have some potency for an audience of materialist futurists, would be to suggest that the stars and planets are all already superintelligences, engaged in purposeful aeon-old interactions about which we know nothing, and that the minutiae of our life and history on Earth are shaped by a local superintelligence, or its agents, by means that we do not know, towards goals that we do not know. Earth is not a rare oasis of life in a cosmic desert; the sum total of our lives here is more like a day’s worth of microbes living and dying, in the dark under a small rock, in a jungle bursting with larger lives and dramas.
If you start just with the data of experience, rather than presupposing physical or computational reductionism, the possibilities are even broader. A dream presents an example of a hallucinated world and narrative which is not only unreal, but often logically incoherent and only imagined rather than experienced, to a degree that isn’t recognized while it’s taking place. Also, the events of dreams can be the product of knowledge and concerns which the dreamer does not consciously recall during the dream (but which will be remembered and understood once awake), and also just the result of external sensory stimuli, transduced into something that fits the dream context.
One might suppose that waking life is a similar phenomenon, but on a higher scale. Perhaps if one looked at all the facts of one’s circumstances with an IQ of 5000 (whatever that might mean), it would be obvious that it’s all a sham and a delirium. That line of thought could lead back to the Matrix, but there ought to be other, more mentalistic, models of real causality (causality outside the illusion), which provide an alternative conception of higher reality. For example, you could combine solipsism, metaphysical idealism, and the idea of a temporary self-induced occlusion concerning your own nature and powers, to arrive at the guess that you are Something, somehow floating in existential isolation, which has produced the illusion of a body and senses and a world, and the illusion of being a limited denizen of that world with no existence before it. Why did you do this? Maybe you went mad in eternal isolated boredom, maybe it was a mistake, who knows.
There are many variations on this sort of hypothesis. It doesn’t have to be solipsistic, for example. But what distinguishes it from the materialist paranoia of the Matrix is that it doesn’t even hold onto the idea that states of mind are “really” material processes, occurring in a physics known or unknown. There is a more direct coupling between appearances and intentions, as in a dream when analysed from the cognitive point of view.
Obviously, if reality were like that, then events might be connected in ways far removed from conventional probabilistic causal thinking. If the world of the senses were just a symbolic realization of the agenda of some governing intention, then events might be orchestrated in all sorts of unusual ways.
Another class of rogue hypothesis might be called the “big dumb spirit-force” hypothesis. Earlier I spoke of superintelligent celestial bodies, the implication being that they are actually giant nano- or pico-computers of a sort that the human race has begun to imagine, and their vast ancient computations are what governs us. A peculiar alternative would be to suppose something like astrology, in which celestial objects are big dumb objects after all, but they exert influences which act “directly” on sensibility, culture, and evolution (I mean in a way which has the directness of physics, rather than the indirectness of cosmic darwinism, whereby the cosmic environment imposes changing conditions on the biosphere).
There is also a type of transcendental hypothesis which is mostly defined negatively. It amounts just to saying that reality consists of “entities” in “relationships”, and not only are you oblivious to most of them, you can’t even conceive of most of them. And not only that, but you aren’t even properly conceiving of what’s happening right in front of you, and of who and what you yourself are. You have to imagine everything you have experienced and thought, and everything that you have ever heard of and thought you understood, as completely superficial, when it’s not outright wrong. To even conceive of the situation as “you getting reality wrong” would still be getting it wrong, in the sense of missing the essence of everything. In other words, you and your life have a meaning other than “semi-intelligent entity blundering through local corner of reality using its inadequate concepts”; your existence (in the broad sense of everything you know about, not just the actions for which you personally take responsibility) has significance, but you are completely blind to it.
Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.
I especially can’t imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.
Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there’s no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.
It’s easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things.
First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn’t been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It’s the December solstice which is the “galactic solstice” at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment.
OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What’s always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day.
Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration.
Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it’s not every day that a human probe first reaches interstellar space, the black hole at the center of the galaxy visibly lights up, and we begin to measure the properties of the fundamental field that produces mass, all of this happening within a year of an ancient, astronomically timed prophecy of world-change. It sounds like an unrealistic science-fiction plot. So perhaps one should give consideration to models which treat this as more than a coincidence.
Why pick out those events?
It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)
This begs the question: how likely do you think it is that we are in a transhumanly controlled environment?
I don’t have a stable opinion on that topic. But the question here is whether, given that hypothesis, it’s rational to attach significance to 2012-ism.