The insanity of manKind.

Driving down the freeway, I witness first hand the insanity. Traffic jams, piled and piled as high as the eye can see. I go to beaches, littered with more ciggarettes than sand. What is man’s end? What has he accomplished? This kind of social experiment, a kind of slow death of the spirit?

For what reason, does he slave through traffic, to go to his slave job, perhaps work at a factory all day. For what progress? For where, is the quality of life? What has mankind achieved? Has he gained any further understanding of his consciousness? Has he invented a time machine, to actually prove the big bang is real? Or just, numbers and equations, guestimations, so he can feel good about himself on paper, validated by peers who want to believe they figured out the truth, but have never and will never witness or verify any truth from their own eyes.

You’re talking about mundanity.
Persuing not mind, not soul, and not body.
Persuit of items, objects, money, addictions.

Dude what beaches are you going to? More cigarettes than sand?

People say the 21st century is an age of decadence and downfall, but, essentially, every age, throughout time, has been degenerate in one way or another.

Most people simply do no care about higher pursuits, such as philosophy; they just care about satiating immediate desires.

It’s always been a select group of people who attain mastery and accomplish great deeds.

But this modern age we live in is not merely degeneracy. There are great things being done in the field of technology.

Artificial intelligence is on the horizon.

There is still hope for the future of mankind.

Technology is the hope for robots to replace humanity.

Many people hold to that view.

However, I believe it’s largely based in paranoia.

A.I. would not replace humanity, but rather augment it.

Jobs that people do not enjoy, but must be done would be taken care of by A.I.
and also super-minds that can compute/create great innovations would exist.

A.I. is our friend.

The mistake here is to base expectations about human worth on an inversion of where we came from with what we now deem to be higher pursuits. We didn’t get here because we were pursuing the heights of what we can achieve, we got here because we rose up from the depths.

The fact that it’s now possible to climb so high as to be able to look down and see such distance to the mundane is testament to our success in itself. Taking the heights for granted doesn’t appreciate this. We may very well continue to climb, and soon the mundane on which we look down with disdain may be seem from even greater heights than anyone yet knows today. It may be an even greater insanity to dare to attempt to conceive of such a future.

So Darwin was right, and life is based on natural selection.
That is a over-simplification. We didn’t exist due to a blind and cruel nutty idea.
Many people bought into darwinism. It’s self fulfilling in that it states survival is what all life forms persue.
There are lots of things that have nothing to do with survival that exist anyway.

One good example is the ability to understand, appreciate, make and enjoy music.
Also our sight doesn’t descent from light sensitive spots on a flatworm.
Do worms have fossils even? Maybe they do, but still, we’re not flatworm based, yet we have sight.

Sight is good. Music is good.
Goods don’t appear from a neutral maker.
Neutral makers make neutral things.

What more can i say?

Read Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” (2018)for a good report on human progress. Pinker shows how technology and science have improved the human condition over the past few hundred years since the beginnings of the enlightenment. Beware–Pinker writes fat books! This one is not without his critique of religion and nationalism. I’ve only just begun the book and find it fascinating.

The thing about natural selection is that it only works if there is variation to select from, which means there have to be other lesser factors at play that cause apparent deviations away from a rigid conception of the survival of the fittest and nothing else besides.

More than genetic mutations, variations between generations due to sexual reproduction and environmental changes, I want to emphasise the role of accidents that emerge due to natural selection. There is such a concept named “spandrels” that was taken from architecture to describe a certain way in which seemingly strange features have emerged due to other prominent evolutionary features actually being selected for. They’re basically features that emerge by accident that only appear to have significance.

In short, this and other elements and consequences of what you might call Darwinism might lead you to presume the presence of counter-evidence, when in fact it all makes sense in a bigger picture. So it’s not that “Darwinism” is an over-simplification, it’s that an over-simplified understanding of Darwinism can lead you to think it doesn’t hold up.

Natural Selection is far from blind. Nutty? Sure, why not. It’s not that life forms are constantly only pursuing survival - as Nietzsche pointed out in one of his critiques of Schopenhauer’s “will to life”, situations where survival is threatened are the exception. The rest of it is pursuing actions might remove you even further from situations where one’s survival is at threat.

It’s not really a mystery how an attraction to some sounds over others might get selected for. Music is just structured sound. The Western diatonic scale is simply based around the relationship between the ratio of 2 to 3 (the closest possible distinct soundwave phases outside of octaves). Our modern day notes of e.g. A and E came from a relationship between 2 different frequencies that were twice and thrice the frequencies of the A that’s an octave below. If you continue this pattern from E, you very closely cycle through all 12 notes of the modern Western diatonic scale. This was then tempered such that each note is exactly the ratio of the 12th root of 2 from the next - which almost exactly approximates the pattern I previously described - yet provides equal octave relationships all the way up from lower frequencies to higher. Generally more emotion comes from soundwaves in less phase, in much the same way as more extreme and dissonant sounds in nature and from humans have become associated with more emotion.

Pretty much anything you can think of fits the theory of evolution - what more can I say?

Yes but it doesn’t fully explain why dissonance and harmony feels so good or bad. It doesn’t explain why it feels so right just to survive and be healthy. I have a theory, that our spirits are vibration based, thus harmony feels harmonious. Maybe positive and negative vibrations are simply inherent components of being and we can never comprehend their depths, simply because we are them and good and bad is simply the essence of all things, it cannot be understood or related to any cause or parallel.

Also, AI could be good or bad, it could be or doom or it could be our paradise.