I'm a bit further down that road of "life experience" & I still mess up, still have a catalogue of things I don't know... but have come to realize that it's the people who think they know it all who are a danger to society! (like 28-year-old me).
On top of that I've realized that I like to learn, and what can you be learning if there isn't stuff you don't know...
But stepping back to the big picture of humanity as a self-sustaining system, it's the urge to both reproduce and ensure that fellow humans are sufficiently developed to not do totally daft things all the time that keeps "humanity" going as a thing (yes some slip through the cracks; so humanity invented politics to keep the nutters occupied, and democracy so that no one bunch of nutters gets to run things for too long).
So investing yourself in your family is really what "the system" wants you to do - and you are probably wired to be fulfilled by that. And to be honest your family are probably the only lives you will really be able to influence, unless you also happen to be a mass murderer.
An idea that I keep coming back to (but that I haven’t yet articulated well) is that “meaning is dependent on scale.” This essay is a great addition to that intuition, so thanks for that.
I’m 62 and have finally realized that “I’ll figure all this out when I’m grown up” is almost certainly NOT going to happen. So I very much like this emergent system paradigm. Not ever knowing my individual purpose is not only inevitable, it’s okay.
Carl Sagan said that we are the universe's way of knowing itself. That's about as One Million Ants as I am prepared to go in that direction. On the emergence hypothesis and genes, I would point out that humanity changed a lot during the Neolithic, and that the primary changes were (a) agriculture and (b) animal husbandry, which amount to human selection of which plants and animals get to pass on their genes. It makes sense that humans applied the new thinking to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective Genghis Khan was in fact a great success, and probably not the first such success. The period of the Yamnaya expansion was accompanied by a culling of 95 percent of patrilineages in the Old World, for example. Nature does not really care what we do with our time on earth, whether we change the world or not. It just cares about gene transmission, full stop. If we are the universe's way of knowing itself then we had to kill and fuck our way to knowing it. This realization is why I became a conflcit historian.
I'm a bit further down that road of "life experience" & I still mess up, still have a catalogue of things I don't know... but have come to realize that it's the people who think they know it all who are a danger to society! (like 28-year-old me).
On top of that I've realized that I like to learn, and what can you be learning if there isn't stuff you don't know...
But stepping back to the big picture of humanity as a self-sustaining system, it's the urge to both reproduce and ensure that fellow humans are sufficiently developed to not do totally daft things all the time that keeps "humanity" going as a thing (yes some slip through the cracks; so humanity invented politics to keep the nutters occupied, and democracy so that no one bunch of nutters gets to run things for too long).
So investing yourself in your family is really what "the system" wants you to do - and you are probably wired to be fulfilled by that. And to be honest your family are probably the only lives you will really be able to influence, unless you also happen to be a mass murderer.
An idea that I keep coming back to (but that I haven’t yet articulated well) is that “meaning is dependent on scale.” This essay is a great addition to that intuition, so thanks for that.
I’m 62 and have finally realized that “I’ll figure all this out when I’m grown up” is almost certainly NOT going to happen. So I very much like this emergent system paradigm. Not ever knowing my individual purpose is not only inevitable, it’s okay.
This was essentially a Buddhist text. I'm adding the tale of Walton Goggins to my meditations.
Admitting you don’t know anything is the beginning of wisdom.
At 80 years old, I've concluded that Don McLean was right, that a human's highest calling is to play in a bar band.
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music
Used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
Whatever you do, please keep writing articles that make us laugh!!!
The older I get, the more I realize Operation Ivy had it right; All I know is that I don't know nothing.
And that's fine.
"It’s not a stretch to think that there might be an additional emergent layer beyond personhood"
If there is I feel confident saying it'd be no less absurd than this layer
Sounds like you are suggesting that AI is really Antificial Intelligence, which makes sense because I think; therefore I am not an ant.
Carl Sagan said that we are the universe's way of knowing itself. That's about as One Million Ants as I am prepared to go in that direction. On the emergence hypothesis and genes, I would point out that humanity changed a lot during the Neolithic, and that the primary changes were (a) agriculture and (b) animal husbandry, which amount to human selection of which plants and animals get to pass on their genes. It makes sense that humans applied the new thinking to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective Genghis Khan was in fact a great success, and probably not the first such success. The period of the Yamnaya expansion was accompanied by a culling of 95 percent of patrilineages in the Old World, for example. Nature does not really care what we do with our time on earth, whether we change the world or not. It just cares about gene transmission, full stop. If we are the universe's way of knowing itself then we had to kill and fuck our way to knowing it. This realization is why I became a conflcit historian.