http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/14/biocentrism-demystified-a-response-to-deepak-chopra-and-robert-lanzas-notion-of-a-conscious-universe/
Some time back I posted on the ideas of Robert Lanza, Deepak Chopra and Peter Russell. Here there ideas are debunked. At the time I recognised that the scientific materialist orthodoxy was wrong and could identify various flaws and examples the paradigm concept couldn't contain. These ideas offered an alternative view, something I was hungry for. But the hungry man will eat a discarded half eaten burger cast aside by last nights drunks. As my more recent postings show, the obsession with human consciousness is anthropocentric. In looking for 'intelligent' alien life, in looking for a higher power, we seek out only that which has our speciality, so proud are we of this. As I have joked, elephants believe all matter has trunk. Even rocks and humans have a basic trunk. Any information system sufficiently advanced will develop a trunk. Elephants worry about computers in the future developing AT, artificial trunk. Consciousness, our supposed self awareness that delivers 'free will' and the hope of a transcendent soul looks to me to be a kind of illusion. We act like other animals in all other ways. We act to our instincts then write explanatory narratives for ourselves and court room judges, excusing our actions. In other senses, the sensate creatures we are have awareness like all animals and most probably plants. Much like comparing mycelial mass to a human brain. They certainly have awareness at least as developed as our own but like our forms, this differs greatly. The recent obsession with consciousness that has been the most exciting area of science due to our cluelessness on how that grey meat matter can think and feel could be asking all the wrong questions. As the lens swivels the human yearning for a conscious universe and a conscious God will fade. For most certainly their are numerous higher powers, but to suppose they share our self consciousness is to assume a god can only qualify as such if he where's a suit and clean underpants. Whilst the superstitious notion of an interventionist creator is an infantile projection, so too is the scientific communities delusion of man as a god. We are steered to believe that humans just about know everything, 98% and soon these little gaps will be filled. I doubt we know 2% of what there is to know. Much less, if my intuition is right. We don't know what causes gravity nor where house martins disappear to in the winter, that's before bringing up dark matter or any cosmic confusion. The delusions of science are equal to those of religion. Humanism dismisses the divine yet continues with the Abrahamic subconscious assumption of a transcendent soul or at least our self deification over other animals and dominion over nature. Superstitious ideas common today include a delusion that we can arrest climate change through ingenuity, the delusion of not being subject to animal laws, and the delusion of having control of our own evolution. The fact our stupidity has tipped the planets climate self regulating systems over through our communal ignorance does not imply our communal conscious power to reverse the situation. Green projects, whilst noble and sometimes leading to minor localised successes are futile. Reintroducing red kites looks pretty for the dull witted car drivers unable to detect more subtle looking birds but it does nothing to address the complex biodiversity of the ecosystems now in depletion. The sixth great extinction is underway. We can't stop it. Our number will be greatly reduced in the next few hundred years as the planet heats up. Mass migrations and the fight for food will see some 90% reduction. But humanity will continue. At least for a while and in different circumstances. How the world will look once deforestation is complete and the ice caps and perma frost melt is hard to picture. Yet these higher powers that form the planets self regulating systems are much like the pagan gods our ancestors worshipped. Each year our secular culture experiences the emergence of storms, hurricanes, tsunamis like we have never known. In but a few hundred years, science and technology has unleashed pagan gods that will destroy us. We name them Hurricane Katrina now has numerous fellow gods and goddesses, higher powers, destructive and beyond our control. The quest for knowledge, our promethean journey away from our animal origins assumed our unique nature permitted our use of the environment and other soul free life forms as we saw fit. As resources, insensate and dumb. Only now as science reveals an ecosystem of such interconnected sophistication do we see our error. Only now as we grasp we can only ever see a subjective illusionary world view, never the real thing. Forever cut off from reality in a universe uncaring and vast. Science led us into our current despair and dissolution. Depression, psychosis, delusions of grandeur, an insane inability to grasp the speed of species extinction, drug addiction, narcissism, all natural responses to the failure of the failed promethean quest. Now in our naming of higher powers we revert to pagan gods. I am no pessimist as some have said, but I'm not in denial. Politicians offer a psychotic drive toward further growth. It is all they have to sell. Lanza and Chopra will be okay. They'll merely create a different reality with their mighty human consciousness. There is still fun to be had. We overcome the depression caused by our species failure in the knowing we are only a perverse diversion of nature, as out of personal control of what we are as any animal. We can choose better metaphors, live helpful lives, treat all life with respect, stop consuming so much, stop greedily breeding, steer away from isolated nuclear families growing into unchecked psychosis and explore once more the tribal variance of friends, aunties and uncles, odd shamans that can offer differing views to the seclusion and isolation of the family home. The metaphors of science proved no more real than did our religious mythology. This is a great time to be alive.
Sent from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment