I posted this at my favorite astronomy site today -- it shows my brand of evangelism-without-quite-being-off-topic.
The thread I was responding to was about how important it is to get humanity off planet and distributed before some bigass whack hits the Earth -- super volcano, asteroid impact, singularity, doesn't matter. The site's typical reader has a PhD in a hard science and publishes papers in journals, so I'm vastly under-credentialed to post there, but the owner of the site has written me privately that he likes my sermons sprinkled across the threads. So yay for that. The piece: Good news: we're already succeeded! (Prepare for a sermon. Cut me a break. Live on my side of the fence for a few paragraphs.) With all our talk about humans transforming into "other creatures" that "fit" new ecosystems or, even, nesting inside AI machines, I ponder often what it is that we think we are preserving when each new "embodiment of mind" that moves us father from our original "home:" the human brain. At sixty-three years of age, I know about attrition. I know how my mind has changed over the decades and how many "usefulness-outlived toys" I long ago left on the cluttered floor of my history careers, skill sets, passions, fads, educational degrees, friends, religions, dogmas, ideals, morals every time I examine myself, I find a "constantly evolving into other forms of being" me. Fifty six years ago, for a few days, a Schwinn bike was my whole reason for getting out of bed. Whoever arrives on distant orbs will have notions we cannot resonate with, and in all probability they will not have any deeper grasp than we do about what the "next step" for civilization should be, though they may have a long list of "could be's." There is a way to ENTIRELY pierce this uncertainty about the future of us. To see our history of literally emerging from a chemical soup and finally devising a brain that can begin to comprehend a universe so vast, I doubt if anyone here thinks that humanity is the only intelligent life in the cosmos surely the "intelligence" that's behind the impulse to organize matter into ever more complex states (local decrease in entropy) is as potent a force in nature as the second law of thermodynamics. Since we are so comfortable with becoming engineered organisms or robots, why not just IDENTIFY with life in general? After all, humanity is thought to be moving into, what?, thousands of other kinds of "operational modalities," and soonish enough, the varieties of "vehicles of thought" will be so expansive as to constitute numerous distinct species or, well, life!!!! This is something everyone can do: dwell upon the concept of "pure life" being our deepest nature and that somewhere somewhen there will be a "form of us" evolving and pushing AWARENESS into the cosmos. To hold one's breath and only want our present "meat robots" to be the "future us," is a myopic parochial chauvinism yet it is sinless to adore being what we are in particular that's cool, eh? Folks, we ARE that very "wave front of awareness." We can be found thinking that we are the tippy top top of bestest mostest awareness as it is expressed here on earth, but miss not that everything ELSE is as pristinely AWARE as we. While we are, ahem, the preferred embodiment of that awareness that we wish to preserve, it is equally true that that awareness is found in the least creature even bacterium are now known to communicate with chemicals they emit. Indeed, where ISN'T awareness found? Every religion holds this to be true: awareness is the basis of existence for example, Christ says that the rocks themselves would cry out if He were to stop preaching the truth. Even the rocks!!! I know. I know. You've never met a talking rock. Don't miss the concept in the bath water. Awareness is the primal identity what car I drive, what clothes I wear, whatever "today's ideas" are that flood my mind, these things will change, but the basic "awareness principle" will not. This is a principle already active throughout the entirety of existence. We already are on the most distant planet, and "they" will know that we are "over here" too. When I look into the dark, I know my eyes are not able to resolve it into the faint dots of light it contains; my meat bot's camera lens just cannot "cut it," but teleologically I know that what I call "I" is already cooking up spicy dishes for itself to consume in every dark corner-that-is-not-actually-dark. Somewhere there is a virus in pure glee as it finds a host, elsewhere a germ pogosticks with delight to find its preferred carbon source, or a whole planet's Gaia has found a way to become, with each species being a "tissue," an immense brain/mind/telescope/knower. What matters it to us if the talking-dog only wants to discuss bones recently dug up, or if a copper molecule snuggles up (migrates) to another copper molecule as like-attracts-like in an alloy. A bird of a feather knows another and resonance and attraction and communication and companionship is assured. This is LIFE: recognition of "other as self," and it is already seen in the first moments after the big bang as the laws of nature, the very laws of nature! discover "themselves" and form tribes of distinct species of particles until a short time later there it is evolved enough to find itself having expanded to exploding stars that pepper everywhere with manifestations of PRIMAL AWARENESS. Then, suddenly, spontaneously forming amino acids in space clouds, planets that absorb their star's radiance (love?,) and BLAM, wiggly thingies in the mud .a blink later, some guy is flagging down a taxi while texting about the latest fine essay by our beloved Paul Gilster. [owner of the site] Can you feel the distance of time and vastness of space and the fecundity of materiality supporting your very next thought? Though you might want to describe it differently than I just did, you are exactly just that "next way of being" that infinite recursivity has devised. We are soaring throughout the stars right now. The "us" that's peering into the light-filled darkness can only and always find another us already peering back. Let the volcanoes cover the Earth with red oceans of death and black shrouds of ash nyah nyah nyah, can't touch us! I will never be a star quarterback, but I have been Bret Favre. You will never be a giant throbbing planetary brain, but you've been one in many of your sci-fi readings. We will never set foot on Mars, but we are Oppy right now absorbing the sedimentation layers of Vicky like a nun loving her next rosary bead. I'm everywhere right now finding every you. Every biologist studying knows the presence of self staring back up from the petri dish. The physicist precisely knows how strongly a nucleus wants to be itself instead of an expansive wave form and delights at this in particular and at the majesty of laws of nature mystically arising from virtuality in general. So, who's still reading this essay? Me. I'm the you that cared enough to go this far into these words. Thanks to everyone here for being the me that didn't have time to go where you all are right now. I love it that you're elsewhere. Basking in plenitude here. Edg
