"We hope to help each other be good ancestors. We hope to preserve possibilities for the future." — 'Long Now' Foundation Motto
With all our hearts, we hope we can become like Sumerians for some future.
Death is expected, collapse is highly probable, and from our point of view transmission is randomized. Pessimistic meta-induction & straightaway complexity do not allow us to believe we can choose what will survive, what will be buried or archived, what will be understood or become irreversibly opaque, what will be revered or ridiculed. Future things will not retain what we want or expect: it is a certainty.
We are would-be Sumerians at most. There is obviously a deep tension at the heart of this ideal: it requires that we have enough confidence in our capacity to know what must be done to preserve some futures over others, plus enough confidence that our values do have value for these futures, and simultaneously demands we acknowledge our deep inability to predict and ordain these futures, way past any short-term continuity or disruption. Such tension should be conceived as a feature, not a bug. We need to find ways to harness its contradiction to sharpen nihilism into a renewed rational History– corrosive, decentered, prospective.
And then– even for that small, unflattering, stochastic contribution– we would need– we need to work incessantly. So much work. We first need to determine why continuity seems to be in the broad interests of the most singular, shocking or negentropic futures. We would then need ecological downsizing, social & geopolitical revolutions, monitoring public trends, corporate concentration & state abuse, &tc., &tc.
"Saving" this civilisation with deep reforms? In diagnostic and ideal, you be a judge among others: enter the arena. "Saving" ourselves to continue this "line of horizons" of animal consciousness, rationality, hedonistic self-modification? Or the transvaluation of human perspectives into less anthropocentric forms? Or knowledge, simply knowledge– aiming for the Mirror of the Real– its sentient, universal archive? Preserve, extend & weirdify lifeforms at different scales? Refine & continue the search for non-terrestrial, exotic phenomena? A truly ambitious, yet especially weak ideal. There is a drive for that– I'm not the only one to think– and it is unlikely to be enough...We're very weak. Full of lethal contradictions & denial. Utterly ill equipped, both cognitively & emotionally. We produce a quantity of specialized knowledge that we are unable to synthesize, integrate and digest in a meaningful way. To say the least, there are conflicts of interests, conflicts of affective identification, conflict of ideals, psychosocial inertia, short-sightedness, oversimplification, and a plethora of sad passions. "Don't Let Them Immanentize the Eschaton", and so on. We exploit, we despise and we kill each other for a plethora of questionable reasons and questionable results. Rational compassion is needed here and now. And thinking about death, not unfruitful. Chemically, physically, and culturally, our imprint is volatile: our hard-drives will soon get corroded, and our reliance on some technologies are putting certain futures at risk.
At most, we will be nothing, but will have worked for the rest. We need to work so that things around us continue to drift away from what we are.This is not spirituality. This is our madness, our sweet in/significant revenge in the only world we know of – and still know precious little about.
#values #futures #UR #Chaldea
