Angels vs. Aliens—it sounds reasonable to me.
I am a fan of Eric Lee’s train of thought, and I like the work he references. There is wisdom in it. Eric’s recent post on Medium, “Is Human Rationality a Myth? inspired the musings below.
There are many ways of viewing a predicament; these perspectives don’t all smell like elephants. (Please excuse my synesthesia.)
“When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.” — Byron Katie
Stories can lead to questions that lead to constructing telescopes, and Kuhnsian paradigm shifts lead to new stories that, in part, reflect reality as it is.
I’m not LESSWRONG, but I can infer the presence of water from living green things. How do the extraterrestrial machines we’ve constructed do it on Mars? How will sentient humanoid, generally artificially intelligent, construct their reality? We didn’t have Nash Equilibriums before Nash, but Homo Storyteller still played the game. We are what we are and part and parcel of Nature and willy-nilly and willfully.
When we fall to the graceful tribal number 150 and stand on our clothes like little children, where fruit is sweet and edible, will we forget where we’ve been? Perhaps. Hopefully? Will ALEXA be a myth, like ancient giants and Atlantis? Will the data we generate be meaningful? Will there even be data anymore? What “technology” did Plato imagine Atlantis had? We are talking about Angels vs. Aliens. Now, that would be a fun movie franchise.
We don’t need Bayesian reasoning to know those mushrooms are deadly or that we don’t want to get in the lion’s way and become its prey. But we feel safer when the nuclear warheads are on hypersonic missiles pointed at a Marvel supervillain. And CO2, can you smell it, can you see it, well can you, punk?
We can be Homo storytellers, Homo hubris, Homo firestarters, and Homo dypshyte and be taken in by what we are motivated to believe by our group’s thinkers. Homo Kant, Homo Zarathustra, Homo scientist, Homo true believer, Homo flea-market-demockassie-fossil-fueled-neoliberal-global-financialized-capitalist-deus are the originators of the predicament and therefore want to own it, more precisely wish to control it. The scale of the predicament is an outgrowth of the imagination and will to power inherent to this animal. ‘The Greatest Story Ever Bold’ has its imagined teleology stochastically going nowhere in particular, always arriving while trying to explain away the destination we cannot comprehend.
And if the clown is lucky, the prince will make good use of him, and he will rise up the ranks.
“I fight for the status quo for the people! I support business as usual because I just want to fit in. I am good for something. I belong.”
Our epistemic arrogance reflects what we create and our baked-in empiricism. Would we be cats and dogs and not to blame for the destruction of our habitat, pigs, chickens, and cows, innocent prey haplessly playing our role in stasis and unapologetic for being liked by Homo hubris for our companionship and tasty dishes — sometimes that’s all it takes to survive and rise to the status of abundant mammalian biomass.
But goodness gracious, we evolved to be something different from Bonobos and Chimps and come what may, panic or grace, we will conform to reality as we must until, in this part of the Universe, all the stories stop and storytellers and their audience is no more.
There is nothing to believe in without true believers.
The frog doesn’t hate the scorpion, and the scorpion doesn’t hate itself.
The deaf, dumb, and blind Players will continue their destructive games, and the plebs and proles will do what they are trained to do and buy into The Great Game and place their bets if they can afford to, and it will all be so stimulating.
It is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be by virtue of having been.
Still, some look for stories that motivate reasoning in the group’s thinkers that might produce a healthier, happier, and peaceful world where life gets on with it and thrives.
I don’t have to believe it because, in my experience, it seems true. Still, extinction is the rule, and there will probably be life after humans.
