If that metaphor means humanity launching intelligent AI, without our baggage, and us going extinct I see that prediction as perhaps grim but technically functional.
Otherwise, if we’re just thinking economics, the only thing I can think of is UBI meets something like Michio Kaku’s hyper-abundance coming to fruition, and the question there is whether the planet can support such a bold enterprise as giving 7 billion + people exactly what they need and want. If successful that at least defangs the situation a bit albeit it does bugger my imagination to think of how that could be sustained in the long haul.
I might be a bit too much of a John Gray fanboy for my own good. My own experience though, similar to his line of thinking, is that Darwinian evolution is baked into the bottom line and one would literally need to get us off of a biological substrate to stop that from being a thing, and even then with a limited food or energy source AI could have very similar forms of destructive competition if anything, at all, fundamental to existence is in scarce supply.
Secular humanism is an attempted bridge over that and it functions to the degree that we can both have a prosperous enough society for it not to fall into disrepair and to the degree that people take the threat of nature red in tooth and nail overthrowing order seriously and as a perennial threat rather than thinking - ‘oh, nazis, commies, and evil people? They were so 20th century - we’re made of different stuff because we grew up with tv and computers’. I grew up surrounded by that later way of thinking (ie. ersatz triumphalism) and I think it’s a big part of how we got here.
Also apologies, my use of ‘ersatz’ there was a bit floral. I really can’t stand the Francis Fukuyama ‘End of History’ lens though. At best it might have been the end of a binary between communism and capitalism and a return to what one might be able to consider business-as-usual history which is defined more by a sea of smaller conflicts rather than one or two monolithic ones.
First let’s dissect Darwin, his theory doesn’t take into consideration various forms of genetic mutation. The concept of natural selection is incomplete mainly due to the fact that it’s only correct in certain circumstances. It also doesn’t take much into consideration for social behavior of animals who’s entire existence is reliant upon it. The supposed rule that the fittest survive to propagate is blatantly false when the mechanism of natural selection is more closely akin to the process of Alan Turings morphogenesis. For example Richard Dawkins only has one child Juliette Emma Dawkins who as far as I know has no children of her own. Now a subhuman piece of white trailer trash I know has 8 subhuman children. Of which she has custody of none. They will no doubt go on to reproduce many more and land us in the idiocracy prophesied by Mike Judge. So one could say that Richard Dawkins is exceedingly inferior or one could say that the trailer trash is superior based on the current theory of natural selection provided. I’ve seen this same formula played out in the canid species as well as primates and various other animals the world over.
So based on observation alone the entire theory is debunked.
A more accurate theory of evolution would be the chaos theory.
I don’t actually see what you’re saying about number of children as a rebuttal against it, rather I see it as something far worse - the real evil of evolution is that quantity trumps quality. Pure replicators would crush anything that’s trying to figure out what reality and truth are and our systems only survive that assault to the degree that they’re rigged to advantage quality, or in one sense rigor, over quantity of babble or trailer park and Russian bot memetics. Survival fitness payouts are on a very narrow scale, what works works heuristically (even just by luck) of the participating individuals even if the trait or behavior that wins the race assures that even more than 50% of those participating in that strategy have a chance of dying a horrific death or failing catostrophically, the closest analogy of which I can think of is internet peacocking where people mangle their identities so badly - just for the sake of being shiny - that they either hit big or miss big, if they miss big they’ve lost everything, and meanwhile all the gray and sensible people, per the attention span of the internet, practically don’t exist.
It’s a process that has no reference to human values. Technically both high IQ and truth-seeking preference get in the way of evolutionary procreative success because such situations or preference lead to the, lets just say participant’, preferring quality over quantity, and nature will run a train of quantity right past them. Heck, nature’s fine with the people who can barely spell having ten kids as the intelligentsia having two, one, or none because it not only has no preference whether we have democracy or China-style surveillance dictatorship, it has no problem with us going extinct either because it’s just doing what it does.
So that’s an area where I take Sam Harris truth over Jordan Peterson truth, ie. it can be completely and utterly anti-human and anti-progress, and true, simultaneously. Then again to accept it as immutable or incorrigible is to accept a consigned fate along those lines, and that’s the part I don’t think we should be up for or okay with.
I agree 100%, and it’s the stagnation factor. And where chaos theory comes into play is in environmental circumstances having swift changes that act as a catalyst to cause a distillation of the higher functioning in survival and reproduction.
For example it doesn’t matter how great a habitat specialist T Rex is when a meteor hits and reduces the oxygen levels 25% causing only mammals with a diaphragm capable of surviving in less oxygen to skyrocket to the top of the food chain.
So the scary question in line with your last thought - is the universe actively conscious, in such a way that something in the background gains from rigging the system to resolve imbalances, or is it passively conscious in the sense that the majority of the relevant feedback loops exist in a physicalist framework and ‘the rest of the universe’ is just something we rejoin when we die.
My guess - if it’s not the later it’s somewhere in between and it’s a place inbetween that seems to err strongly toward non-intervention. Nukes are an interesting case, something more may be at work to prevent further bombs going off (at least from recent telling of history you’d think the odds are a bit long to not have had a nuclear bomb go off in a civilian space since 1945) and it could be that something like 2nd law of thermodynamics keeps such intervention exceedingly subtle or rare if ever bold.
The universe is indeed conscious but not in the way we as humans are familiar with consciousness. We see consciousness through the lens of observation. Our consciousness is based on the observation of our environment and our actions and reaction to it. The universe has a consciousness based in being and does not require observation. I think H. P. Lovecraft explained it perfectly when he described the old ones. For we humans our consciousness is held together by our form but for the old ones their form is held together by their consciousness.
I’ve probably said it too much lately but my occult practices and mystical / veridical experiences made me a functionalist when it came to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness because it’s the best explanation I could find of both top down and bottom up communication happening simultaneously, the existence of thoughtforms and egregores, etc., and I’ve really been getting into Donald Hoffman’s interviews lately because he’s been reifying all of that with a plausible theory for the interaction of conscious agents that attempts to explain things like the gradient of communication going from human ‘down’ to the level of rock or how the world could behave as this sort of fused stack of information contracts nearly as much as our cells do.
It seems to follow some very particular rules and I can’t help but think that dream states are pretty close to what the universe is doing most of the time when not embodied as biological life, albeit I get the sense from near death experience that said dream is much more vivid than waking life, sort of edifying further that space-time is a sort of user interface that helps us track fitness payouts in this context. I’m not entirely certain why we’d willingly subject ourselves to this much doom and gloom unless it’s the only place in the universe that it exists and perhaps a great many conscious agents are trying to test their own mettle and/or shave off within themselves what doesn’t stand of it’s own structural integrity.
I’m just going to throw this out there. What’s the meaning of it all, asked every philosophy, religion and scientist since they were capable of asking it.
The answer is plain and simple to a being with some semblance of intelligence and the ability to observe.
To understand what the purpose of existence is one only needs to observe what existence does, and that’s exist.
To understand the meaning of life one only needs to observe what life does and that’s evolve.
The meaning of it all is evolution. In the words of confederate General Albert Pike “humanity is a bridge to something greater than it’s self”.
We are in a position where our consciousness our form and our being is evolving into something through which the form held together by consciousness can observe it’s self. We have come to a crossroads in our evolutionary process, a pivotal point in which we have the capacity to actually become participants in our own evolution rather than simply the casual observers we have been or the unaware recipients of evolution we were before that.
To work with this evolutionary process is to be part of it and set ones self above the rest bridging the gap between and becoming that which we are the bridge to by conscious choice. The rest is self explanatory, evolve or go extinct.
We individually may succeed, have better or worse luck in finding an environment that works with who and what we are, and it’s tough to say whether this train will blast off into other systems and go level I, II, or III civilization or whether it will collapse before we can ever leave.
It will collapse no doubt and it will be that collapse that we are waiting for to have our catalyst like the tree shrew, ready for honeymustard. The most brilliant minds of our era have no idea of what you and I are discussing today. Nor will they ever remove themselves from their place in the grand scheme and therefore a collapse is necessary and inevitable. We will be the mammals with diaphragms capable of surviving on less oxygen while the t Rexes of this world all suffocate under their own dependency yet us living by the illumination of the lamp of Diogenes will be self sufficient.
@MagickAndBreakz@anon59886753 The human species is hopelessly lost in its own Dunning Kruger syndrome. Their existence in their perpetual idiocracy will always be a hindrance to the greater evolutionary process and only until removed by chaos to make way for evolution can it be achieved. A meteor had to wipe out the dinosaurs for mammals to evolve. The Georgia guidestones are not about a plan to be put into action but more waiting for the inevitable. And some ideas about what to do afterwards.
If I remember correctly AMORC sort of shyly raised their hand and admitted that was them. It didn’t go as expected in terms of the publicity but yeah, that was the late 70’s and early 80’s where, a bit like now, environmental apocalypse was thick in the air.