man, i'm impressed at how much i filled up my Normie Bingo Card with this one: i somehow managed to reference Muse, Pirates of the Carribean, Mad Max, *The Fast and the Furious*, and Darren Aronofsky in the same post.
does being pathologically suburban help or hurt my credibility? on the one hand, it speaks to the idea that these are universal concerns; even though they sound esoteric, they affect even whitebread yokels like me. on the other hand... Tokyo Drift might be a bridge too far.
thanks man! there's some wild stuff happening with quantum physics, as you probably know... if reality is not locally real, then the space where all hyperobjects are co-emergent is something like a cosmic Mind, dreaming the multiverse into being. that would be the scientific explanation. people want this to be God—but i think that drastically undersells how utterly incomprehensible a Mind like that would be, without a robust symbolic interface for protection.
God is not the ultimate hyperobject; God is the psychic blast shield we built to protect ourselves from it.
Fascinating read. Thanks for putting it out there.
I appreciate Joseph Campbell’s approach to similar ideas. This is all to do with mythology, belief, spirituality in the face of the unknowable and mysterious.
I’ve never heard the term hyperobject, but it might be substituted for “aspects of the universe so mysterious and complex they are outside of human comprehension” Mythology attempts to make sense of that. Just like symbolic interpretations of hyperobjects do.
Campbell (and Jung before him) believed in the importance of individuals discovering ‘their myth.’ That is finding the enchantment that speaks to you and brings your world to life and fills it with meaning.
It strikes me the ultimate mystery (or hyper-object) is the universe itself, the whatness, the Brahman, eternity aka what many call God
thanks for reading, and i'm glad you found it interesting. i haven't read enough Campbell or Jung; my impression is that they were somewhat constrained by intellectual propriety—couldn't get published otherwise, at the time—and weren't able to go as far in print as they might have privately. i like hyperobjects because they use the language of materialism to deconstruct what might have been left to vague mysticism by philosophers in decades past.
you're dead right that the ground of Beingness is the ultimate hyperobject. i think Para Brahmam (especially nirguna vs. saguna) has some definite advantages over the Abrahamic God as a symbolic interface, which is part of what led me this way.
Came via Sam Kriss and extremely happy to be here. This was an excellent write up; your thought-architecture is quite robust and I'm excited to apply your metaphors. As you suggest, "improving our technology by refining our symbolic interfaces" is a possibility I've sensed but struggled to articulate and you just said it quite eloquently...so, thank you! Excited for future writings from you.
thanks so much... if i can impress someone who's used to Sam's caliber of work, i must be doing okay. i'm never sure if any of this is intelligible to other people, once i'm done scraping it out of my head, so i'm very glad you enjoyed it. i've got a few more planned on a similar theme.
Excellent! This helps because I was just trying to wrestle into words my own intersubjective experience with the Grand Canyon, which at that moment seemed to have some of the qualities of a hyper object.
If you’re operating philosophy without a license then I’m a monkey flinging sticky notes with philosophical-sounding words at the wall. My simplistic remedy for the nihilism you’re writing about: get out in nature more (while acknowledging this isn’t a practical possibility for many people).
Here’s a bone-headed question: can a nihilist experience awe and wonder at the universe? I would say not, because those feelings seem to pull one out of a nihilist mindset. But maybe I just don’t understand nihilism.
thanks Larry! i'm still working out the participatory consciousness bit, but my intuition says that nihilism tends to be a symptom of getting too locked in to that subject-object divide—an attempt to valorize that fundamental alienation by masking it as a courageous ethos. Rust Cohle's transformation throughout Season 1 of True Detective would be a good illustration. You could bring Episode 1 Rust out to the Grand Canyon and he would refuse to be awed by it. Just another aesthetic object, from which he's entirely separate, that people are meant to find inspiring to cover up their existential fears. he would refuse to believe that anyone could have a genuinely transcendental experience, and only he is clear-eyed enough to see through the charade. Season Finale Rust has had a moment of undeniable participatory consciousness, and it completely transforms his whole relationship to reality: the subject-object divide evaporates, and Rust discovers that he *is* connected to the cosmos in a way that transcends his phyiscality. that's my read at the moment, anyway.
looking forward to catching up on your story soon! it's been a hell of a week and i'm behind on my reading.
man, i'm impressed at how much i filled up my Normie Bingo Card with this one: i somehow managed to reference Muse, Pirates of the Carribean, Mad Max, *The Fast and the Furious*, and Darren Aronofsky in the same post.
does being pathologically suburban help or hurt my credibility? on the one hand, it speaks to the idea that these are universal concerns; even though they sound esoteric, they affect even whitebread yokels like me. on the other hand... Tokyo Drift might be a bridge too far.
mea maxima culpa.
Perhaps reality/existence is the phenomenon that occurs where all hyperobjects overlap.
(I think about this stuff all the time and never went to college, so hello!)
I occasionally read Sam Kriss too, but somehow he finds a way to annoy me as I'm enjoying his writing and it makes for a strange experience!
thanks man! there's some wild stuff happening with quantum physics, as you probably know... if reality is not locally real, then the space where all hyperobjects are co-emergent is something like a cosmic Mind, dreaming the multiverse into being. that would be the scientific explanation. people want this to be God—but i think that drastically undersells how utterly incomprehensible a Mind like that would be, without a robust symbolic interface for protection.
God is not the ultimate hyperobject; God is the psychic blast shield we built to protect ourselves from it.
Fascinating read. Thanks for putting it out there.
I appreciate Joseph Campbell’s approach to similar ideas. This is all to do with mythology, belief, spirituality in the face of the unknowable and mysterious.
I’ve never heard the term hyperobject, but it might be substituted for “aspects of the universe so mysterious and complex they are outside of human comprehension” Mythology attempts to make sense of that. Just like symbolic interpretations of hyperobjects do.
Campbell (and Jung before him) believed in the importance of individuals discovering ‘their myth.’ That is finding the enchantment that speaks to you and brings your world to life and fills it with meaning.
It strikes me the ultimate mystery (or hyper-object) is the universe itself, the whatness, the Brahman, eternity aka what many call God
thanks for reading, and i'm glad you found it interesting. i haven't read enough Campbell or Jung; my impression is that they were somewhat constrained by intellectual propriety—couldn't get published otherwise, at the time—and weren't able to go as far in print as they might have privately. i like hyperobjects because they use the language of materialism to deconstruct what might have been left to vague mysticism by philosophers in decades past.
you're dead right that the ground of Beingness is the ultimate hyperobject. i think Para Brahmam (especially nirguna vs. saguna) has some definite advantages over the Abrahamic God as a symbolic interface, which is part of what led me this way.
more essays coming on a similar theme—stay tuned!
Came via Sam Kriss and extremely happy to be here. This was an excellent write up; your thought-architecture is quite robust and I'm excited to apply your metaphors. As you suggest, "improving our technology by refining our symbolic interfaces" is a possibility I've sensed but struggled to articulate and you just said it quite eloquently...so, thank you! Excited for future writings from you.
thanks so much... if i can impress someone who's used to Sam's caliber of work, i must be doing okay. i'm never sure if any of this is intelligible to other people, once i'm done scraping it out of my head, so i'm very glad you enjoyed it. i've got a few more planned on a similar theme.
Excellent! This helps because I was just trying to wrestle into words my own intersubjective experience with the Grand Canyon, which at that moment seemed to have some of the qualities of a hyper object.
If you’re operating philosophy without a license then I’m a monkey flinging sticky notes with philosophical-sounding words at the wall. My simplistic remedy for the nihilism you’re writing about: get out in nature more (while acknowledging this isn’t a practical possibility for many people).
Here’s a bone-headed question: can a nihilist experience awe and wonder at the universe? I would say not, because those feelings seem to pull one out of a nihilist mindset. But maybe I just don’t understand nihilism.
thanks Larry! i'm still working out the participatory consciousness bit, but my intuition says that nihilism tends to be a symptom of getting too locked in to that subject-object divide—an attempt to valorize that fundamental alienation by masking it as a courageous ethos. Rust Cohle's transformation throughout Season 1 of True Detective would be a good illustration. You could bring Episode 1 Rust out to the Grand Canyon and he would refuse to be awed by it. Just another aesthetic object, from which he's entirely separate, that people are meant to find inspiring to cover up their existential fears. he would refuse to believe that anyone could have a genuinely transcendental experience, and only he is clear-eyed enough to see through the charade. Season Finale Rust has had a moment of undeniable participatory consciousness, and it completely transforms his whole relationship to reality: the subject-object divide evaporates, and Rust discovers that he *is* connected to the cosmos in a way that transcends his phyiscality. that's my read at the moment, anyway.
looking forward to catching up on your story soon! it's been a hell of a week and i'm behind on my reading.