".. you see, power .. real power doesn't come to those who were born strongest, or fastest, or smartest. No. It comes to those who will do anything to achieve it .. "
- from Arcane
.. I sold out my lovers & my friends; my friends & my lovers, & everyone else .. to find out the truth of this world .. & no matter how many times you tell me it was all for no thing, I'm not listening ..
.. cuz I gnow it exists ..
the flaw in how science is done is distrust..I want you to think about this
.. Shades (thus named because he existed in a multiverse before it was cool, & there are shades of him still there to prove it 🧐) somberly con templated an impasse, & as he did so he heard a voice crying in the wilderness..
.. the voice spoke of an impending electromagnetic apocalypse, an inevitable & gradual demise of so-called "reality" as we know it; indeed a necessary one, if something better is to supplant it. .
.. in fact, it may have @LLready(?) started ..
.. the voice explained that the proliferation of electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere was disrupting the very rhythm of the world as it had heretofore been (a situation in which even pandemics & "the weather" are mere symptoms, & perhaps not even the most potent) & con tributing to the heating up of the world, to boot ..
.. & as has @LLways been the case, the future would be determined not from on high, nor from a single, central place, but by those individuals or collectives of psychonautic pirates bold enough & brash enough to map it out .. a new rhythm, a new world, a promised "land" (tho we will gladly settle for a trajectory, or a Way rather then a place per se) by means of which deliverance can be achieved .. indeed, it was his honor & privilege to be a part of one such body ..
It all seems to go back to that idea: “Everything matters, more or less, and to an unknown degree.” The butterfly effect, etc. - that way in which things seem to magnify themselves in time; building up chains of sequence where one event may have been just so in the story to cause something miraculous when the proper response is sent out into the environment.
While the environment, of necessity, extends any cause out into both the infinities of space and of time, the dominant digital-material worldview segments both people, on the one hand, and objects on the other. Sequestered away in our homes, maybe with a handful of family or friends, tuned into the latest new media spectacle, we have been cut out from the greater community of human life, we have been digitized - and like the digits on our hands we often seem to have become mere appendages to some other, greater, movement wrestling for command over a more expansive field of energy than could be had without those functional units, or us, in tow.
Escaping into a fiction of lights and sound, we forget where we actually are - and that has ramifications, as: “all politics is local”; is the interaction of real people, in real life, actually right here, while not under the shared hypnosis cast by a silver screen of dreams - and plenty of nightmares.
Our attention is even being digitalized, materialized, and ultimately commoditized - take a look at Tik Tok and you will see one of two things: either that the modern attention span lacks all continuity of flow and must be fed in discrete chunks, or that the media input formats themselves are helping to disjoint attention and memory - really, it is some feedback circuit combination of both.
….
This type casting of a natural flow into a human designed sequence of cuts and scenes is all fine and good as an art form itself - however, this discretized, or quasi-digitized, structure to experience then comes to be expected as the norm - or at least the desired, or maybe only habitualized, form that experience should be received in; and this has consequences, the ramifications of which are most evident in the North American population centers - at least maybe to just me anyways, as I reside in North America: your own mileage may vary.
This is all naturally an outcome of materialism as it developed from a logic of mechanizing life via mesoscale analogies of pulleys and levers down to the electron(ics) and quantal views, where humans came to be seen as replicable and indistinguishable entities and, in concert with relativity, reality became a matter of opinion.
In simple terms, our view of ourself and ourselves as human, and thus the lives we thus collectively live, are again a feedback circuit - and I would like to suggest an operational standpoint that favors life.
For what is the point of life, if not enjoyment of the living, the doing, the breathing, the thinking, the feeling, the drinking, the speaking - all of which may in some sense be considered the gustation of a gamut of experiences spread across types. And, from all these things that we “eat” we build out our bodies, our minds, and our social personas.
Materialism tends to be a philosophical form that downplays and denigrates the human experience and what it means to be human by downgrading us to machines or cogs. Even though there are aspects of quantum mechanics that indicate the immense power and responsibility that may inhere in consciousness, the mechanical view in large part continues to prevail.
This philosophical form has, however, now more “recently” been endowed with cybernetic control superstructures so that this machine can be adjusted - in other words we now have a computer layer on top of the gross moving mechanism of human minds and bodies.
Admittedly, there is use and truth in the pointilization of human beings, but when it comes to applying the facts and concepts revealed by such a view point, they are only really of effect if one is already in a position of power and can pull the levers of the control infrastructure.
As individuals, these sciences are relatively barren and cannot really inform us much as to what course of action we should take in any living moment. We have to fall back to our gut feelings and operate in different spaces when compared to the vantages of the heights where humans are mere motes, as has been the contemporary vogue.
There are other options, one of which might be called Epicurean Materialism, in which aesthetic delight in the experience of reality is given a first-rate place. It would be something of a return to childhood and the ability to revel in simple pleasures, the joy of having anything to do at all and an unlimited horizon for improvement.
It seems reasonable to propose that people who are happy, and thus in that measure successful, are just those people who are able to find artistic value in even the most menial of tasks. These people do not necessarily put their whole person and being into the accomplishment of those tasks, although that can bring enjoyment itself, but rather are those who find value and surprise in small (and large) things and in the infinite ramifications in the design, or order, of their own human reality.
As the more dystopic materialism found its past genesis from the high priests in the pulpits of the world’s technical institutions and all the mass production of mechanical apparatus that flood the world, perhaps an idea of epicurean materialism can help do the reverse, and a life-affirming outlook can help give birth to a new way of doing science and new forms of technology.
Such an outlook would necessarily focus first on aesthetic values and form and then be led onto function in a syntheto-logical feedback loop - but this focus on the aesthetic delight that the imbibition of the material world can bring demands a set of facts and principles for a nuanced mixing of available properties, one that had been the natural outgrowth of human personal and cultural evolution and is opposite in spirit to the reductionist paradigm.
We do not want to reduce everything to flat uniformity in law, but to realize the manifold fullness of existence and to highlight the delightful differences that reality brings to us. This outlook might be as well be called Alchemical, and with the accouterments attending to this term there is already a well grown, though obscure, science.
Prior to the ascendancy of monochromatic mathematical law on into a quasi-dictatorial role of propounding acceptable physical narratives, early scientists - the alchemist, musicians, metal and agrarian workers, had a very expansive worldview influenced in large degree not only by their closer ties to their vocations and the environments from which they arose, but also to the idea of the fullness of “God”, or of the “other” - the seeming exterior universe.
In the writings and diagrams of the early alchemists and sometimes rogue theologians we can see that the abstract picture of things which was developed through their experience of life had space for all the various properties that can come to human cognizance through all the senses. In fact there exists a treatise, though the name an author escape me, on the moral and physical world revealed by the sensations we can receive through the experience of taste.
The apparatus that these early scientists had available to them in their exploration of reality had not yet been extended much by the investigatory mechanisms of, say, microscopes and telescopes, and they accordingly developed their sciences based on mesoscale features directly perceptible and cognizable, whose logic was in some degree self-evident - at least to those with clearer vision than most.
These mesoscale sciences live in a space where everyday people actually have a chance of using them, and don’t require unnatural expenditures on equipment. One example of worthy note is the process of cooking, which is without doubt the earliest form of “chemistry” with which humanity became acquainted and which goes to serve ends in both the aesthetics of taste and culture as well as in many cases the furtherance of health: “Let thy food be thy medicine.”
For the ideas which they described, these proto-sciences often lacked any real idea of atomicity, and were instead holistic practices. When you focus on human scale phenomena and their interactions, the idea of indivisible and indistinguishable units is obvious nonsense - instead there are innumerable entities of widely different states and descriptions; even within a single class there is no identity of entities.
We can divide the world we are familiar with in many different ways, with no apparent end - while modern science, with one of its founding bases in atomic philosophy, constantly strives for a terminal event: some grand theory of everything, which elevates and subsumes those elements of commonality, or identity, that are shared amongst the objects of existence as revealed through instrumentation and that are not otherwise available to perception.
This one-sided focus tends to completely ignore the manifold variety that is manifestly present in, and as, the space(s) in which we live, move, and have our being.
This rejection of difference, is part and parcel of the materialist philosophy that we have inherited - indeed, in all the social sciences, as they have been mathematized, identical and atomic human "units" are used to explain phenomena, and the actual lived experience is usually ignored, or at least of secondary importance.
To get back to an understanding of ourselves apart from these notions of sameness and of being a "number", we should inculcate a sensitivity of perception that highlights the aesthetic differences attending the objects of our experience.
For, just as official scientific philosophy has led to and decries the idea of identity amongst people and in matter, and mass production turns out unending replication of items, an Epicurean Materialism would help foster an artistic re:imagining of what it means to be a unique human in a diverse environment of goods and services for trade - just as all times, and places, and things are in fact unique.
This new form of materialism would not lead to a theory of everything, but a slew of theories for any thing (in particular). All of the differences we have before us would be studied and organized, without undue or at least unconscious homogenization, in an unending adventure for the intellect, and the whole panoply of cause and effect would not be leading to some terminal, death-like, event in the end of the need or desire for further search into the hidden things of nature. This multiplicity of theories will each conform to their own logic and would result in a greater number of choices available to humans as both personal and economic agents.
It appears evident to me that we can see that such a process, or transformation of worldview and “world fact”, has already been in progress for quite some time - and has benefitted from the mass of relatively unrelated facts that the forerunning science has previously collected. We can look at the large number of "artisan" products that are being more-and-more sold in various venues for evidence of the reaction to the mass produced lifestyle. Beer, bread, booze, clothing, cookware, chocolate, music. This is not a new movement, but perhaps a new name may provide added impetus.
I think we all can agree that the life we envisioned as children was not to run ragged in a rat race, collecting baubles and trinkets as status symbols to flash. So why have we seemed to end up in just such a state? As individuals we may have no care for philosophy, but we really can’t afford to.
Like it or not, we all harbor “cultures” (like on agar mats), and philosophies are very interested in us, as our collective minds are the ecosystems in which they live, move, and have their being. If we don’t take care of the philosophies and cultures that we support and nurture in our own lives and communities, they will rise haphazard like weeds under the law of the jungle.
We cannot be careless about the thought systems that we feed; and to do so we need to have some human, truly human, me-in-this-chair, type values and goals to direct our pruning of the accidental forms that have led not only to the gross injustices of the world, but also to the day-to-day drudgery and misery that afflict an untold many.
To that end, I suggest: “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry!”
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