FRIDAY, FEB 10, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
We Are Playing a Global Endgame
Badly, i.e. no one wins
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: PRO-ANTHROPOCENE, FROM THE WIRES, ANTI-ANTHROPOCENE, KNOW-NOTHINGS
Intro: Modern humans are an expansionist form of hominin that spread within and out of Africa as an invasive species specialist 50k to 60k years ago, a recent date in geological time. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), his invention of recent date was in the 18th century by European Man the Expansionist, and Foucault thus added a new layer of modern myth to the story of Lord Man that would change the consensus narrative of the humanities and social sciences for a time. Whether the expansionist form of human is nearing its climax in the 21st century (followed by descent) may be a best guess (of Foucault and others) to consider.
COOS BAY (A-P) — As E.O. Wilson noted in Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life 2016, "For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large...." Who wants to play? What are the rules? How ya gonna play humanity's endgame?
The fork in our worldview that confronted our ancestors 50k to 60k years ago was between a world without nature (where humans have decoupled from mere nature) and a world without humanity (a world of Nature where humans are mere animals). Expansionists bet on a world of their own making without nature (other than as externality). When things are looking scare, we look beyond the horizon and see an illimitable plane, an endless expanse, a planet for the taking. Those who would live within limits (as part of Nature) were left behind (e.g. the San).
Those who believed that growth, expansion, acquisition..., that evermore was good, better, best..., they never let it rest and moved ever on. It was a big planet, 50k years in the taking. In the end, it took a planetary larder of fossil fuel, metal and mineral ores, all fresh water, more than a few forests and the seining of all oceans to complete the taking.
In the 21st century, some expansion enthusiasts could see that soon the planet would be taken, and that to keep on keeping on, Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) humans would have to expand into space, to other solar systems for the taking until the Milky Way was taken, the first of trillions of galaxies for the taking to come.
An envisioned future without Borg-like human expansionists in it is comforting, but is a future as believed in, as hoped for. Such is to not play the game, but merely to hope that Nature will bat us down last. Given the high stakes of our endgame, perhaps we should not leave the persistence of MTI humans to their own devices.
The Players:
Anthropocene Enthusiasts (humanists and transhumanists)
- Glorifies scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason.
- Genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations such as mortality and confinement to a physical body.
- Artificial intelligence infinitely superior to our own will add to our perfection unless it decides to wipe us out completely.
- The survival of the fittest, nature's way, is now the survival of what is most useful to human beings.
- Mere nature becomes a reflection of humanity.
- Humanists, even secular ones, assume that only humans can create meaning and value in the universe, that without us, all kinds of things might continue to happen on Earth, but they would be pointless — a show without an audience.
- What worries transhumanists is the possibility that human extinction could happen too soon, before we have managed to invent our successors and as we are likely the only form of intelligent life in the universe, it may be game over for the mind.
- Just as a university can be seen as a device for transforming a monetary endowment into knowledge, so humanity’s function is to transform the cosmic endowment — all the matter and energy in the accessible universe — into “computronium”, a term for any programmable, information-bearing substance, that humans are destined to merge into.
- “Even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence”, as Ray Kurzweil prophesizes.
- Just as computers can perform all kinds of calculations and emulations by aggregating bits, so the brain generates all of our mental experiences by aggregating neurons, so if we are able to build a brain scanner that can capture the state of every synapse at a given moment – the pattern of information that neuroscientists call the connectome, a term analogous with genome – then we can upload that pattern into a brain-emulating computer, and the result will be, for all intents and purposes, a human mind.
- An uploaded mind could have experiences and adventures we can only dream of, like living in a movie or a video game.
- The neuroscientist Randal Koene refers to such patterns as Substrate-Independent Minds, or SIMs, and sees them as the key to immortality.
- The dream is one of pushing forward, using technology to achieve a complete abolition of nature and its limitations.
- The modern form of human will end, to give way to evermore God-like beings who are immortal, whose minds and such bodies as they may have will approach techno-enhanced perfection.
Anti-Anthropocene Enthusiasts (anti-humanists and systems ecologists)
- Anti-humanism is inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment because we are out of tune with Nature.
- Anti-humanism is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being (Lord Man) in creation.
- Anti-humanists foresee near-term human extinction, and serenely contemplate a universe without humans to despoil it.
- Being fruitful and multiplying is a form of killing, because it deprives future generations and other species of irreplaceable resources, i.e. the flourishing of humanity can no longer be seen as good.
- Gratification of human desires is part of a zero-sum game that pits humans against the well-being of all of Nature — not just animals and plants, but soil, stones and water.
- The accumulation of plastic on the ocean floor and the thinning of the ozone layer 10km (6 miles) above our heads is the despoiling of Earth.
- For secular humanity, Nature fills a role once played by God, that of a source of radical otherness that can humble us and lifts us out of ourselves.
- Nature is a “world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society” is a view from before the Fall of Man.
- The disappearance of humanity would not deprive the universe of anything unique or valuable, so we should take comfort in the certainty that humans will eventually disappear: “Things will someday be the way they should be – there will be no people.” —David Benatar
- Anti-humanists believe that the universe doesn’t need to include consciousness for its existence to be meaningful, while transhumanists believe the universe would be meaningless without minds to experience and understand it.
- The revolt against humanity has a great future ahead of it because it appeals to people who are at once committed to science and reason, yet yearn for the clarity and purpose of an absolute moral imperative.
- Anti-human humans long for a return to the natural equilibrium that existed on Earth before humans came along to disrupt it with our technological rapacity.
- Humans will go extinct, sooner being better, but likely soon enough. They also serve who give up and die quietly.
Know-nothing Animals (who don't know enough to have an opinion)
- As no mere animal knows, all dichotomies are false, so whether they are or not, don't ask me.
- The struggle between "for" and "against," "like" and "dislike" may be the modern human mind's worst disease... and is there a cure? I don't know.
- Recent archaeogenetic data as interpreted by usually clothed apes tells a story of an expansionist form of human that arose 50k to 60k years ago to expand within and out of Africa, but if you think the data is being misinterpreted, bring it (evidence) on, and make my day.
- The belief that the expansionist form of human will continue expanding as he must, to fill the universe with wonder (how could he not?), is a belief-based assertion that is true if it happens, or maybe when true believers trip over their hubris, they'll wake up and realize they've been sleepwalking,
- The points made by the anti-Anthropocene enthusiasts and their concerns for life on Earth may be appropriate to the expansionist form of humans such as themselves.
- Do modern expansionist humans have any better chance of renormalizing than John B. Calhoun's rats of NIMH did of becoming functional Norway rats?
- I don't know and you don't either.
- In perhaps as few as 8 to 20 generations of determined effort, could some modern humans, whose Anthropocene enthusiasm is wearing thin, seek to renormalize? (See prior point, the correct answer to all questions worth asking, as only Nature has all the answers, so ask and listen to Nature, bitches).
- The expansionist form of human selects for its own dissolution just as a metastasizing cancer does, and if any modern humans persist long term, it will be by intentionally endeavoring to renormalize over a multi-generation period in which each generation is demonstrably more functional than the last. Or not, and human become extinct or become space Borg. It is a high-stakes endgame.
