Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Much ado is made about living in the present as if this is our natural state of bliss (I'm looking at you Eckhart Tolle! lol). But when you think about it, such is obviously impossible and pointless. Everything around us that is existing in the present is just physical things and people and places in themselves with no apparent meaning or value. We cannot satisfactorily live in such a deadened wasteland. We need to fast forward just a few seconds into the future---to that ever anticipating lunge into whatever we can do next with the things around us or the people we can meet or the places we can go. This is our true natural state--- dwelling on that tintillating precipice where we hold onto the reins of sheer future possibility. We are grounded in presence that is true—in what is real and never changes. But it is in the adjacency of the nascent future—that next upcoming moment,— that we are oriented and find the lucid experience of our authentic being.

“Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.”― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

The Real imparts selfness and agency by contradiction and contrast to our mode of approaching it. If that is thru language, it takes the form of the unspeakable and ineffable. If it is thru vision, it takes the form of the unseen and concealed. If it is thru touch and movement, it appears as immobility and intangibility. If it is thru ethical judgment, it assumes the mask of the insane and inhuman. If it be thru art, then it is as soulless mechanization and utter banality. If it's thru spirituality, it is as nihilism and meaninglessness. And if it is thru consciously thinking, it becomes the paradoxical and unthinkable.

In each case the Real dialectically generates within our mode of being towards it the very subject and identity that makes possible our liberation into a higher state of being. IOW, a total transformation of being. In Jung's alchemical terms, the impossible yet miraculous conjunction of opposites. Or in Heraclitus's terms, enantiodromia:

“Old Heraclitus, who was indeed a very great sage, discovered the most marvelous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite.” –Carl Jung

What if we have it all backwards with love and human relationships? What if the point is NOT to increasingly familiarize ourselves with them to the point that they are a walking manikin of all our wishes and dreams and plans for the future? What if loving and coming to know someone is really about learning about their differences and quirks and the many ways they DON'T fit into our nice neat little boxes? To learn to accept and respect them in themselves without evaluating them as a means of fulfilling our own agenda of personal happiness and success.

With that in mind, it is no wonder so many romantic relationships and marriages seem doomed to failure. The more we get to know someone in fact the farther from us they become, as real and unique beings in themselves irreducible to any traits we personally find attractive and admirable. Ironic is it not that the very things that initially attracted us to our companion become those very things that over the years get stripped away revealing a whole non-objective and only immediately-present subject inside.

When we wake up from sleep we instantly become a world as our life. When we go to sleep we become another world as our dreams. When we take psilocybin we become another even stranger world. And we spend our days becoming many worlds by watching films and reading books. What about this are we not getting?

This whole human experiment with AI that we are only just beginning to face raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is how far can something be imitated before it actually becomes the thing it is imitating? Can a machine SEEM to be conscious so well that we can no longer distinguish it from actually BEING conscious? What is the role of imitation itself in becoming conscious and thinking? Is that not how all babies do it, mimicking the behavior of adults around them until they are playing the same game of having a private internal representation of the world around them? As Turing asked, how well can consciousness and personhood be totally imitated by a machine without actually possessing it?

Can the human soul be so easily decoyed? What if consciousness and subjectivity itself are just the art of imitating something so well that neither we nor anyone else can tell the difference from actually being it? Everyone just going along playing this consensually believed-in charade. Perhaps this explains why no matter where we look inside ourselves we can never really find a conscious experiencing self. Where indeed is this self-same "who" behind all our sensations and feelings and speech? The more we peer into the amorphous shape-shifting face of AI the more we realize we are gazing into a funhouse mirror.

The novice's test upon entering the field of magick:

1) Are you ready to forgo certainty for surprise?

2) Are you willing to give up belief for astonishment?

3) Are you prepared to sacrifice understanding for curiosity?

What if this state or property we call consciousness or the mind, whether embodied or disembodied, whether introspectively experienced or objectively observed in another, is itself alive and intelligent in some sense---conjuring up forms and patterns that impart meaning where there wasn't any before. Think of it. An animate and sapient energy flowing all around us and thru us and beyond us, weaving together the unraveled strands of an otherwise dead and disrelated world and making new sense and poetry from atoms up out of the randomly-strewn detritus of the aftermath of chance happenstance. A God or Goddess? The World Soul of Emerson? The Hindu being known as Brahman? A new 5th force of physics? Or a necessary metaphysical reagent unifying all discrete things and events? You decide.

Physical matter as a form of condensed non-conscious knowing. Of being made up of encoded and latent information that actively coheres and energizes itself as 3 dimensional bodies and events. Matter/energy as the compressed and hierarchally-archived knowledge of the entire universe--the potent carrier of all the text for all possible sapience and sense-making. It's why scientists look inside of it for the answers to the questions posed from outside it. It's why philosophers and artists and poets look within themselves for the truths missing outside themselves. Trillions upon trillions of relationally-defined morphemes all quantum entangled together and instantaneously teleporting/tele-receiving their information nonlocally to/from all the universe.

"At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splash of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."---Jung

"Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation."---David Bohm

Speech and music could not exist if they were only composed of sound. It is the intervals of silence--the punctuating pauses-- in between the sounds that parse and re-integrate them into a distinctive and semiotically-experienced sequence of structures.

Our so-called past is as much constructed out of forgetting as it is out of remembering. There is a hidden semantics of forgetting and of things skipped over, of the repressed and the traumatic, just as the film editor influences the meaning of the movie's final cut as much as the cinematographer does. Add to that the years and years of repeated splicings and transpositions and reimaginings and it is no wonder our past ends up as much a customized story that accommodates our present needs as our imagined future is.