The End of Option 1: ...You will be made anathema and driven into outer darkness, where you will form a new world on the verge of non-entity and make a Heaven of what was stolen from the abyss.
Interesting piece. Looking forward to when you pull all the stops out, as you hinted you will.
I was intrigued by this bit and thought it could use some unpacking: "The spread of the British Empire, the rise of the Third Reich, the American space program: for better or worse, time and again, the presence of a few commited metaphysicians led to some of the biggest global transformations in human history." Who were the metaphysicians behind the British Empire? (My knowledge of the BE is very limited.) Obviously the Nazis had their quasi-paganism. Was it von Braun and maybe Willy Ley who brought that to the American space program? (I don't remember much about von Braun's metaphysical beliefs from the one book I read about him.) And all of this makes me wonder if you've read Gravity's Rainbow yet? I think I recommended it before.
On the Extelligence piece, I kept thinking, why "Him"? Boundaries of time and space and the laws of physics were broken down, but gender is still firmly in place? Especially if the face of this "Him" is made up of the faces of everyone who has ever lived (which seems a little polytheistic to me). Is this because when the Ground of All Being presents itself to us, it does so in a form we can recognize? If I had that type of experience, I'd hope to experience a genderless Brahman. But my more rationalist side, having never had one of these experiences, other than a feeling of mystical oneness, is that the human mind puts a familiar face on a hallucination when driven into an extreme state. (People I know and trust have had some of these out-of-body experiences, so I'm not completely closed to their possibility either.)
I think there's some openness to metaphysics among scientists. I've got a Young Earth Creationist in my next book, and the arguments of the person who debates him come from a group of Old Earth Creationist geologists who published a book about the Grand Canyon. They're certainly open to some sort of metaphysics behind the everyday processes they observe. (There's also a YEC astronomer who's written a book debunking Christian flat-earthers, but that's a different story.) And maybe Robin Wall Kimmerer is another example of a person who blends the two, though I haven't read her book yet.
I don't know how much you'll like my next book, which is a satire on conspiracy theories and anti-science beliefs. I think it does maybe open up some room for there being *something else*, but leaves it open-ended.
hoo boy. buckle up. i left that paragraph underdeveloped because it could fill a whole post on its own. the expansion of the British Empire can't be separated from the influence of John Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and famous occultist, who directly advised on navigation for overseas expansion and even popularized the idea of a "British Empire" (when he wasn't talking with angels). the American space program wouldn't exist without Jack Parsons: he practically invented the solid-state fuel that powered the early rocket program; he was also a committed Thelemite, worked with Aleister Crowley, and famously performed a ritual to summon an incarnation of a goddess with the help of a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. of course, it seems like you could hardly throw a rock at the upper leadership of the Reich without hitting an occultist in some form or another, trying to invoke the power of Norse gods or hunting for Biblical artifacts. (i don't know much about their history with ritual magic, but i'm sure it's wild.) the swastika itself seems to have some black-magic power to it, as well.
as far as the Extelligence essay—i commented on the piece, wondering if the entity described was a human interface, like Jodie Foster's dad in Contact, rather than a fixed identity; the author declined to be drawn out on that question.
Thanks for the brief history. Didn’t know any of that! You might be interested in my post on our hunter-gatherer past from earlier this week. It doesn’t get into the metaphysics but more the practical advantages.
me too! i've seen it thrown around a few times in different contexts, but i haven't seen anybody make a serious run at it yet. the question would be—how do we decide what's real? who gets to be involved in that process, and what counts as evidence? this tends to get flattened into "belief systems," but that obscures the fact that there is almost always a deliberative process going on, which can be more authoritarian or more democratic in different cultures at different times. if the answer to those questions is "God decides, based on the evidence that God gives us," your applied metaphysics will look very different from saying "humans decide what's real, based on measurable physical evidence," which will be different again from "people shape what's real, not all of whom are humans (let alone corporeal), based on the evidence of dreams and divination and spirit encounters, which can be shared communally, in addition to physical evidence found in the material world."
“The fundamental flaw in authoritarian metaphysics is that it eventually becomes unconvincing. If people are prevented from independently verifying their own interactions with the non-material world, then the official doctrine becomes what it supposedly prevents: baseless superstition.” Yep.
The End of Option 1: ...You will be made anathema and driven into outer darkness, where you will form a new world on the verge of non-entity and make a Heaven of what was stolen from the abyss.
that's how it's done.
Interesting piece. Looking forward to when you pull all the stops out, as you hinted you will.
I was intrigued by this bit and thought it could use some unpacking: "The spread of the British Empire, the rise of the Third Reich, the American space program: for better or worse, time and again, the presence of a few commited metaphysicians led to some of the biggest global transformations in human history." Who were the metaphysicians behind the British Empire? (My knowledge of the BE is very limited.) Obviously the Nazis had their quasi-paganism. Was it von Braun and maybe Willy Ley who brought that to the American space program? (I don't remember much about von Braun's metaphysical beliefs from the one book I read about him.) And all of this makes me wonder if you've read Gravity's Rainbow yet? I think I recommended it before.
On the Extelligence piece, I kept thinking, why "Him"? Boundaries of time and space and the laws of physics were broken down, but gender is still firmly in place? Especially if the face of this "Him" is made up of the faces of everyone who has ever lived (which seems a little polytheistic to me). Is this because when the Ground of All Being presents itself to us, it does so in a form we can recognize? If I had that type of experience, I'd hope to experience a genderless Brahman. But my more rationalist side, having never had one of these experiences, other than a feeling of mystical oneness, is that the human mind puts a familiar face on a hallucination when driven into an extreme state. (People I know and trust have had some of these out-of-body experiences, so I'm not completely closed to their possibility either.)
I think there's some openness to metaphysics among scientists. I've got a Young Earth Creationist in my next book, and the arguments of the person who debates him come from a group of Old Earth Creationist geologists who published a book about the Grand Canyon. They're certainly open to some sort of metaphysics behind the everyday processes they observe. (There's also a YEC astronomer who's written a book debunking Christian flat-earthers, but that's a different story.) And maybe Robin Wall Kimmerer is another example of a person who blends the two, though I haven't read her book yet.
I don't know how much you'll like my next book, which is a satire on conspiracy theories and anti-science beliefs. I think it does maybe open up some room for there being *something else*, but leaves it open-ended.
hoo boy. buckle up. i left that paragraph underdeveloped because it could fill a whole post on its own. the expansion of the British Empire can't be separated from the influence of John Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and famous occultist, who directly advised on navigation for overseas expansion and even popularized the idea of a "British Empire" (when he wasn't talking with angels). the American space program wouldn't exist without Jack Parsons: he practically invented the solid-state fuel that powered the early rocket program; he was also a committed Thelemite, worked with Aleister Crowley, and famously performed a ritual to summon an incarnation of a goddess with the help of a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. of course, it seems like you could hardly throw a rock at the upper leadership of the Reich without hitting an occultist in some form or another, trying to invoke the power of Norse gods or hunting for Biblical artifacts. (i don't know much about their history with ritual magic, but i'm sure it's wild.) the swastika itself seems to have some black-magic power to it, as well.
as far as the Extelligence essay—i commented on the piece, wondering if the entity described was a human interface, like Jodie Foster's dad in Contact, rather than a fixed identity; the author declined to be drawn out on that question.
looking forward to reading more of your work!
Thanks for the brief history. Didn’t know any of that! You might be interested in my post on our hunter-gatherer past from earlier this week. It doesn’t get into the metaphysics but more the practical advantages.
Oh, and maybe I'm a bonehead, but I could use more definition of "applied metaphysics."
me too! i've seen it thrown around a few times in different contexts, but i haven't seen anybody make a serious run at it yet. the question would be—how do we decide what's real? who gets to be involved in that process, and what counts as evidence? this tends to get flattened into "belief systems," but that obscures the fact that there is almost always a deliberative process going on, which can be more authoritarian or more democratic in different cultures at different times. if the answer to those questions is "God decides, based on the evidence that God gives us," your applied metaphysics will look very different from saying "humans decide what's real, based on measurable physical evidence," which will be different again from "people shape what's real, not all of whom are humans (let alone corporeal), based on the evidence of dreams and divination and spirit encounters, which can be shared communally, in addition to physical evidence found in the material world."
“The fundamental flaw in authoritarian metaphysics is that it eventually becomes unconvincing. If people are prevented from independently verifying their own interactions with the non-material world, then the official doctrine becomes what it supposedly prevents: baseless superstition.” Yep.