Where are you? I mean, you as in your mind. I feel like I’m about in the center of my head most of the time. I understand some people feel their consciousness in their chest.
Once on an edible I felt like I was floating around 12 inches above my right shoulder. Weird sensation. I wondered if I could fly to the corner store and back, but I was afraid I wouldn’t let me back in.
That phenomenon, along with Carl Jung’s theory of shadow projection have got me thinking about the nature of the mind. Are we all body or is part of us spirit? I know that question bugs everyone, even atheists. I think it’s both.
My current model: the brain is an extremely complex projector and consciousness is its self-aware projection. Virtual reality that thinks and interacts with itself.
Light and noise come into your eyeballs and ear holes, they get interpreted, you project your meaning on your best guess at reality. The better you are at interpreting, the closer to the real thing you get.
And some way or another, the brain projects something like a self onto a space: in your head, your chest, or in rare cases, over your left shoulder.
I don’t believe we’re in a computer simulation, but I do believe we live in that form of virtual reality. Everyone sees a slightly different Pokemon. I’ve been an atheist for a long time at this point, but I’m trying to decide how you couldn’t call my model spiritual.
I’ve come to the conclusion that all political movements are utopian, whether they think they are or not. It was a strange thought, but the more I chewed on it, the more right it seemed.
I used to associate utopianism with Marxism or hippies living in the woods. But now I realize I’ve had my own versions of utopianism, with varying degrees of commitment. I’m in between at the moment, but I’ve had at least three.
Combustible Edison – Utopia
Damien Walter, a very interesting sci fi critic, got me thinking along these lines when he stated “Space Opera is the mythos of liberal democracy.” It surprised me, but I can’t really argue. It applies to most space operas I can think of: Star Wars, Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth series.
He published a video essay about science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin’s vision, which is clearly utopian from a left-leaning direction. I avoided her books when I was young, because I suspected as much.
He made a similar essay about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is about pursuit of utopia. Asimov, my childhood hero, promoter of reason and science. I never would’ve thought of him that way. But you don’t make an empire, real or imaginary, without giving it a vision.
Without realizing it, I developed two related versions of utopianism as a young man: liberal (science reason and Enlightenment values will get us there) and libertarian (science, industry and bold men will get us there).
Both of those competed for space with the utopian visions I got from my religion, all of which amounted to Jesus comes back, gets rid of evil and fixes everything. Heaven on earth or heaven in heaven. I could go either way.
America and Utopia
America was settled by a wide variety of utopian movements, most of them religious or quasi-religious. “Yay! A blank slate where we can establish God’s kingdom on earth away from all those corrupt kings and queens and popes.” (Blank slate except for natives, of course) .
Nationalist visions like the American Dream and Manifest Destiny kept those cats in something like a herd for a while. The problem is, they depended on the frontier.
Now that the frontier is gone there’s no place to run when someone else’s utopian vision threatens to eliminate yours. Now no one can agree on what the hell America even is, least of all us Americans.
The Eagles – The Last Resort. I know we’re supposed to hate the fucking Eagles because of The Dude, but this song and in fact the entire album Hotel California is a great study of the disillusionment people are beginning to feel after “manifesting destiny” only to realize paradise never arrived.
What’s wrong with utopianism?
I’m not utopian anymore, or maybe it’s a matter of degree – I still come across ideas that make me feel hopeful and others that make me feel less so. I want to believe in a better world, but I’m not so quick to attach my identity to any of them. I’m not about cults or gurus.
What do I think about utopianism in general? There’s a positive side. They’re great at motivating people. Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves. They can give us multigenerational projects like pyramids and cathedrals and potentially, saving humanity from itself.
Utopianism’s power also makes it dangerous. That’s kind of the story of the 20th century isn’t it? Nations and empires trying to impose their utopian visions on the world. The suffering was immense.
The main problem with utopian projects is they depend on getting rid of people – or at the least, disempowering them. People are in the way and people who aren’t invited. Because you can’t make a utopia for everyone, when resources are limited.
How’s your world gonna be perfect if you let everybody in? Make your utopia small enough and you can almost pull it off. Versailles was a utopia for the people inside it – until it wasn’t.
That’s what dystopia is: being on the losing end of someone else’s utopia.
There will always be people getting in the way. Get rid of the so-called bad guys in big batches or one at a time, but sooner or later you’ll be the one in utopia’s way.
Why we need utopian thinkers
Changing the status quo involves risk. But we still need the passion that comes from those idealistic visions. There are too many problems for any of those already-failed ideas to fix without at least integrating some fresh ones.
If everyone becomes a doomer and decides to just take what he can get till the world blows up, the world will blow up. Maybe the human race can find some better stories to tell about itself, ones that will make us work together for a change.
Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.
Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.
As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?
Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.
Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.
Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.
Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.
Legendary Pink Dots – A Message From Our Sponsor. Pondering the problem of evil and the possibility that God doesn’t interfere because of his personal ethics.
How God’s punishment can feel like love: It’s an old principle. God destroyed the Israelites periodically to teach them a lesson but he still loved them and they were still his people.
Jesus loved me because he I loved everyone I’d been singing “Jesus loves me” since I was four. But God? I was not so sure. God to me meant God the Father, the vengeful angry one. but he loved us too in his way.
It seemed to make sense. Why would God bother punishing you if he’d already cut you loose? He might destroy you but he wouldn’t punish you. It’s really a kind of Stockholm Syndrome but it worked on me for a very long time.
Julian Cope – St. Julian. Another answer to the problem of evil: Maybe God doesn’t fix things because he’s oblivious or maybe incompetent?
But it is one answer to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Maybe it’s a form of discipline. Of a person or of a nation.
Bad times will come as bad things do. Maybe you know why you deserved it and maybe you don’t. But if he could do that, maybe he could do the opposite if you followed the path, send something good your way, or maybe it served some larger purpose.
God still loved David after what he did, after all. Didn’t work out too well for his baby with Bathsheba, but it was something. We got a Solomon out of it. I believed that for a while when I was a young Christian.
When I did something I knew was wrong, the next bad thing that happened to me had to be payback. If things went OK for too long I got nervous. When was the other shoe going to drop? How much trouble was I in?
So the disaster was a relief when it came. I paid a high price, but I’m still on the path. I was terrified of leaving the path.
But when you can’t see a pattern anymore, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” stops sounding like a good excuse. Sometimes there’s no possible lesson that would make sense, punishment is out of proportion or it’s indescriminate.
Then you look for reasons. You don’t want to be an atheist and piss off Mom and Dad, plus thaat would REALLY piss off God. Pascal’s Wager, you know.
God isn’t real is the theory of last resort.
Could be you settle on Deism. So there is a God who set it all in motion, but he doesn’t intervene. God makes the machine and lets it run. I could live with that, kinda. At least I didn’t have to claim the “A-word” as an identity. But it wasn’t very satisfying, plus, what the hell kind of fucked up machine is this?
It occurs to me there’s a worse possibility. Maybe there is a Supreme Being, but he’s essentially the Joker in space. Maybe he’s active in the world, but considers us play things. Maybe you had a tragedy because God just has a more complicated sense of humor than you do.
If there’s an all powerful god who makes us suffer for his own amusement, that would be the worst case scenario wouldn’t it?
What would this look like from that cruel god’s point of view? There is a song by Legendary Pink Dots singer and songwriter Edward Ka Spel that got me thinking on this topic. I’ll get into that in the next post. Good topic for Halloween season.
So when my Unitarian church said nobody was lined up to do a sermon this week, I raised my hand and went “me me me me!” I could talk about Socrates!
Only to realize I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I’ve only read a few of Plato’s Dialogues and watched a handful of videos. I had to cram and write at the same time.
It went OK. And I learned a few things.
I was surprised to learn how much of a role the Oracle of Delphi and the temple of Apollo played in his life. For another, just how rooted his rationalism was in his religious faith.
Socrates’ guiding principles were right there on that temple at Delphi. One column had inscriptions that read, “know thyself,” “nothing in excess” and “surety brings ruin.”
Socrates was shocked when he learned the Oracle had told his friend “No one is wiser than Socrates.” Seemingly a clear statement, when they were typically riddles.
Instead of gloating, Socrates’ treated it as yet another riddle to be solved. The meaning appeared obvious, and yet that warning: surety brings ruin.
Socrates was knew he wasn’t wise. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, but he believed Apollo could never lie. So he began searching for anyone wiser than himself to prove he wasn’t wise, so he could go to the Oracle and ask what Apollo meant.
But time and time again, people who claimed or were thought to be wise, revealed under Socrates’ questioning that they had no idea what they were talking about. Which we all know landed Socrates in a lot of trouble after he pricked too many tender egos.
Another thing I didn’t realize was how many chances Socrates had to get out of it. He could have chosen exile and could have escaped. Instead he drank hemlock to show his dedication to Apollo. He cared about his mission that much.
Socrates’ method outlived him and changed the world. To me that shows that it doesn’t really matter if a god is real in a material sense. If enough people think it exists, they’ll make very discernable changes to the material world on its behalf. So it might as well exist.
A couple of nights ago, I had dream where I spoke with a wise woman (same woman as in this dream?). It had something to do with loops. Loops that linger and loops that break up quickly. Eddies in life’s current.
I wrote a post a while back about loops. In that case I was thinking about fugue states, when you repeat actions or thoughts and you can’t seem to break out.
I have the impression this was about another kind of loop: habit.
There are good habits and bad habits. For some odd reason, the good ones fade away when you’re not paying attention (like healthy diets and exercise routines), while the bad ones are tenacious as hell.
If you think I’ve learned how to wisely control my habits, you’d be wrong. They start out OK, then they go off the rails. Every morning I get up planning to spend several hours writing.
First I feed the dog, microwave some oatmeal, make a pitcher of tea, practice Spanish on Duolingo, social media, check out Beau of the Fifth Column, read, mess with dishes and laundry, check social media one last time, and… doomscroll for hours.
Before I know it, I’ve barely accomplished the task I really wanted to do.
Legendary Pink Dots – Encore Une Fois. A song about loops:
The sun beats down, the world spins ’round, and repeat myself again There’s a loop inside my brain. I never learn, I never gain, I only Turn, I stay the same, repeat myself again, repeat myself again.
I used to dream of post-scarcity solar system-wide and galaxy-wide human societies, like the one in Star Trek. I wanted to be Captain Kirk as a kid. I at least wanted to be on the Starship Enterprise and not wear a red shirt. But these days I have a hard time envisioning a future that resembles a sci fi world I’d want to live in.
What happens in the future is anybody’s guess. But I mostly read “hard” science fiction, which to me just means the story seems somewhat plausible, at least for the time they wrote it. “If this goes on…” etc.
Those books got me in the habit of running scenarios – or “catastrophizing” as my wife calls it. Not that I don’t enjoy utopia stories. “And Then There Were None” about a society based on Gandhi’s philosophy, is a pretty good example of that. Gave me a chuckle.
Supposing I had a dream that felt like a prophesy and I happened to be right? (Carl Jung did that, kind of). Would it matter?
As much as I don’t want it to be, the Rapture Machine dream I had way back in college, might have been very close. That was many years before I was able to accept what it was really telling me.
If an asteroid was headed for the planet, I bet we’d pull together, figure out what to do, put some resources into it. Instead, we’re worried about zombie apocalypses and don’t trust our neighbors anymore. We’re arguing about whether climate change is real, based on team affiliation.
Meanwhile extreme weather is about to cook us or wash us away. Time for the teams to have a pow wow. Not that I see that happening soon. If I could make it happen I would.
Another reason for the “Late” in Late Boomer. Now I see things a little clearer than I used to, but man I overslept. I certainly wish I’d grok-ed the system before I got old and decrepit.
I think it’s time to get realistic and admit we’re in a pull our ass out of the fire situation on planet earth, economically, politically, culturally, and climate-ly. Trying to figure out who gets to control the future is seriously putting the cart before the horse.
We all have a lot of work to do to fix this planet and we haven’t been working together. Too busy dishing out sick burns, as if that mattered. Time to stop demonizing and start talking. Lead with what music are you into, your pets, etc. instead of your tribe sucks.
Strange dream last night. I was on a spaceship so large it had geography. It had a sky. I could look into the distance and see bluffs and trees and mountains.
I was told I was not on a planet or inside a space habitat, but a landscape on the flat surface of a gargantuan spaceship.
Suddenly I realized I had a job to do. I tried to find my work space. I opened a drawer that appeared to be in my childhood dresser. It was empty except for a smashed orange with white fuzzy tendrils coming out of it.
The seeds were beginning to sprout. I wanted to plant it.
My coworkers were talking about something we needed to do. It occurs to me it was in the newsroom at a place I used to work. They said we needed to talk to “the queen.” We needed to ask her permission to do something.
Not sure who the queen was. I just accepted it. I went outside, where I saw the sky and the mountains in the distance. I saw a lady with a contingent of people around her. I didn’t get a sense of her personality, just that she seemed confident.
I was told she had the ability to “turn off reality.” I asked her a question I can’t remember and got an answer I can’t remember. Who was she? What did it mean that she could turn off reality?
I think the dream had to do with something I read about online about Alfred Korzybski who came up with the phrase “the map is not the territory.” I posted a blog entry about that concept before. Descriptions and even the evidence of our eyes and ears don’t really capture reality. There’s always a layer of perception and always something missing.
I think my dream was about maps and models of reality. Like maybe this was the territory? If so it didn’t make sense. Outside changed to inside. Furniture changed or was forgotten. People were vague. I somehow accepted I was on a spaceship, but it didn’t seem like a spaceship at all. It seemed like earth.
Maybe it was flat because it was the map?
Anyway it occurs to me that it’s probably maps all the way down. Turn off one layer of reality and you find another. They’re all “accurate” maps, depending on the scale you want to look at. You don’t really need a globe until you pan out far enough. Flat works as long as you only care about a small area of the earth.
Maybe that’s how you your “spaceship” moves. By turning off the models that don’t fit anymore.
There are certain things that aren’t real, but it’s best to treat them as if they were. Money, for example. It’s just an idea, but it’s as real as most other things we believe are real. You can’t just say it isn’t real and get by without it.
Sometimes the actually real leaks through our projections and we can tell that some commonly accepted idea is a mass hallucination, but sometimes killing it just isn’t worth it.
Or anyway you know it would take a long time before anyone else admits it. The question is, how much pretending do you have to do to get by? For public show or for yourself?
What the hell IS real? Wouldn’t you like to know? I sure would. I’ve been struggling with that one all my life. It’s all symbol and metaphor, and meta-metaphors, and meta-meta-meta narratives etc. You don’t get to touch the real thing.
You can’t see the spot where your optic nerve meets the retina, but you can’t see the hole either. Your brain fills it in. That happens on every level. There will always be something missing, something we can’t know.
Some people don’t believe there is a bottom floor. Once you figure out how much of “reality” is made up by culture, it’s easy to just say nothing is real, or reality is whatever we say it is.
I don’t buy that. I do think there is a version of reality that is true no matter what anyone thinks, only I don’t think it will ever be nailed down. It’s beyond what can be proven by science. It’s zero divided by zero.
But it exists. Or anyway we should pretend it is.
I’ve decided it’s like the speed of light. You can never actually reach the speed of light no matter how powerful your spaceship. The best you can hope to achieve is 99.9 percent and after that keep adding 9’s after the decimal.
It’s easiest way to live is to just accept what you’re told is real by the tribe you identify with (whether they identify with you is a different matter) The tribe tends to react badly when you contradict them on important matters.
But the less real your reality, the more likely you are to trip over things. And knowing that on some level you’re pretending to believe, you’ll never be satisfied.
I’ve decided to quit putting it off and explore a little Greek philosophy. One thing I’ve already decided is I really like Socrates.
I’ve only read a few of Plato’s Dialogues, but I’m getting a sense of Socrates’ personality.
He was humble, funny and brave. I like how he stating how he doesn’t know, the way he insisted he wasn’t wise despite what the Oracle said about him.
It’s funny how time and time again, he starts out saying he doesn’t know a subject, then leads these people who claim to be experts down the primrose path, till they’re forced to reveal that they don’t know either.
He makes a good case that much of what we think we know slips away once we start to define it. You can’t have too much ego if you want to root out the ways you’re fooling yourself.
I can see why he wound up in trouble. Bruised too many puffed up egos. I find it very moving the way he refused to escape prison or knuckle under to save his own life. The way he refused to give up philosophy. He loved wisdom that much.
In your 50s is awfully late to start getting into philosophy, but I want to make sense of this thing called existence while I still have it.
Late Boomer's Den 
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