Conception of Cosmos
Why human life is objectively superior to all other forms of life.
The famous science popularizer Carl Sagan once said “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” He was right, but I believe that more fundamentally, we are a way for the universe to survive itself.
The universe is composed of chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order.) Jumbled up nonsense, and pattern.
The very physics of our world is based on patterns — specific behaviors tied to material properties that arise out of infinitesimal configurations. Inanimate matter, when formed into a pattern, varies in resilience. On the macroscopic level, we can see patterns forming our landscape. Giant craggy mountains fighting against the erosion of time- slowly being tossed into the wind- only to swirl into a pattern of circles, and scattered back into the mix. The universe seems to be a giant maelstrom of unthinking attempts at knitting a tapestry that is continuously torn apart and resewn.
Upon the knit of inanimate physics, a new kind of pattern emerged 3.5 billion years ago. Life. This new pattern could repeat itself — and when frayed, the patterns that were destroyed were cut from the cloth, and the patterns that fared better added to it. In this way, the pattern was a program that adjusted via a process of repetition and death. This new kind of pattern was more resilient because it was adaptive. When the environment was relatively stable- this program ran tremendously well, but when chaos stormed the prehistoric swamps- some instances of this program could not adapt fast enough. This new kind of pattern was not sufficient.
Soon, primitive sensors started to form a kind of nervous system in this new pattern. Able to respond- to external stimuli and modify themselves to suit their surroundings. In early plants, phototropism developed as a way to grow toward light. Life was moving now — and it moved toward other life, and competed for resources — operating to continue itself, hard coded to survive — and to propagate its effective individuals through time.
The primitive nervous system then gave way to life with true brains — and this revolution created patterns that organized themselves socially and could begin to contemplate perceptual stimuli with increasing accuracy. These animals started to go from pure instinct to the beginnings of learning and generational knowledge- teaching their offspring how to hunt. Forming packs that protected each other from chaos — empathy emerged as a way to conserve the pattern.
But of all of the animals, there remained one to be stitched from the trials of billions of years of successful pattern-making: modern humans. Appearing only 200 million years ago, we are the vanguard of life itself. Unique among all of the living creatures of earth in our capacity for rational thought, a pattern making software of consciousness that allows us to predict further than any other creature on the planet. It is this evolved consciousness that is essential to the survival of the pattern of life- a superpower that allows life to predict, act, and save itself from the ravaging forces of the universe. To protect itself from the whims of the environment, of other forms of life, and from its own behavior. We are oracles.
Thus, human life- rational life- must be encouraged and is necessarily more important than any other less rational form of life that cannot act in this way. Life forms that are pulled into the perceptual dirt- unable to think past the moment, cannot protect life from the swelling tides of tomorrow. This does not mean we do not have a duty to be concerned with other forms of life- on the contrary, this means that it is only us that can and must be fully aware and concerned with other forms of life in order to survive.
We are unique because we are the embodiment of the only path for life to survive, the best hope, the greatest potential. We are the most precious pattern ever stitched from the threads of chaos- and set against it from nothing, consciousness itself, imbued in the pattern we call life. And if life’s goal is to continue life, it must have evolved consciousness in order to predict and thus protect itself from the coming chaos. That is our charge.
We must recognize that the essential power of mankind lies in its ability to accurately predict the future- and the only method by which we can do this to any degree of success is to gain increasingly more knowledge of every other pattern in existence. We must know the universe, the forces operating within it, the throngs of biological passengers, and ourselves. And this knowledge is based on the conception of a knowable universe. There is, however, an increasingly dangerous trend that has spawned from our very predictive power.
The power of prediction is the power to create fiction. We contemplate a future state that does not exist in order to plan for it. This incredible feat has a dark side. The human mind that can gain a clear vision of the future, when operating on falsified data — may indeed create a believable fiction that goes against reality itself. Our conceptual model allows us to reconfigure our perception of reality. In so doing, we may start conflating this mutable playground of the future with the immutable reality of the present. Why is it that our present is real, and the future is not?
In Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, he proposes the idea of early traders who thought. Why is it that your god is real, but my god is not? What if neither is real.
In such a way, the danger of life’s greatest vanguard destroying its own ability to reason about the world instills itself. We contemplate an existence where neither present nor future is real- and our very superpower is turned against us, and in this insidious way, destroys the precise tool by which we came to most effectively deal with the facts of reality.
It is imperative that we shed light on the evil of anti-life ideology and practice — which in part, both uses and instills a view of life as subjective — of reality being mystic and unknowable- this very idea is not only wrong, but literally undermines the ability for life to deal with the natural world and thus protect itself- the conundrum is that we have formed our society in the mold of mysticism for so long that reality is now in part defined by irreality- by fictional narratives and ghosts, psychological warfare and manipulation- we do not face reality, to be effective in this context means to kowtow to irrationality- survival means poisoning our own reason — and that is the cruel joke. This feedback loop set against objective truth will render us unable to deal with truth- unable to use our evolved mind, the one tool we have to survive- and then , the feedback will eradicate us. We have already seen this play out- societies that ascribe to mysticism historically become tragedies of planned starvation, mass murder and suicide. When we set our mind against reality, invalidate our salvation, we turn that piercing Pharos light into a self-immolating chaos.
Therefore, if we wish to survive- and if we can agree that the universe has made survival our goal, that life is good in and of itself, we must respect our mind and strive heroically to strike and hone it against the forming edges of an increasingly knowable world.
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