by Reilly Jones

Introduction

The technological enhancements of consciousness that will follow in the wake of the coming neuroscientific revolution will be unequally distributed in the world population. This divergence will produce pressure in the political arena to move away from the current self-organizational forces of big money, towards the selectional forces of conflict. With enhanced consciousness and increased longevity, diverse life purposes will be created faster than tradition and social custom can assimilate their consequences. This rate of change will challenge world civilization on many fronts. The unlimited potential for historical change unleashed by the creation of new life purposes is captured by Walt Whitman in A Thought of Columbus. He describes the first time a thought entered Columbus’s brain to sail the Atlantic, “...a mortal impulse thrilling its brain cell... only a silent thought, yet toppling down of more than walls of brass or stone.” The quality of imagination in enhanced consciousness, when brought to actualization, will determine the success of leaders’ responses to this challenge. It is the dual function of high culture to simultaneously foster enhanced consciousness and virtuous actions. High culture, above all, must be protected from the world dominance of statism, autocracy and organized crime.

This essay will cover potential pathways to enhanced consciousness and increased longevity, then project the resulting changes to secular morality and political forms as we progress into a transhuman future. To do this, I will recap some of the ideas covered in Part I of the essay, and provide some definitional groundwork that will aid the analysis. The discussion of these topics draws strongly on the evolutionary role that self-organization and selection plays in life processes from Stuart Kauffman’s Origins of Order (see review in Extropy #13),1 and in thought processes from Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (see Part I in Extropy #14).2 I have essentially extended some of these concepts from biophysics and neuroscience into the realm of political processes. Once this groundwork is presented, I will highlight a hierarchy of essential concepts we have about reality, life, formation of self, stability of identity and need for science, prior to discussing some intractable conflicts within the domain of politics. This will provide the framework for projecting future effects on morality and politics of our own self-directed evolution.

Internal Teleology and Conceptual Homeorhesis

A brief description of the concepts of attractors, evolution, fitness landscapes and purpose (teleology) will aid in the understanding of my analytical framework. ‘Attractors’ describes characteristics of nonlinear mathematical solutions of dynamical equations, small changes in parameters can lead to successive dramatic changes. In Kauffman’s words:

Dynamical systems ranging from genomic cybernetic systems to immune systems, neural networks, organ systems, communities, and ecosystems all exhibit attractors.... To some great extent, evolution is a complex combinatorial optimization process in each of the coevolving species in a linked ecosystem, where the landscape of each actor deforms as the other actors move. Within each organism, conflicting constraints yield a rugged fitness landscape graced with many peaks, ridges, and valleys.

Teleology refers to the existence of purpose. I am not referring to an external teleology in a theistic sense or as the Final Cause of all, rather to internal teleology. Purpose never enters into the universe, it imbues it. Niels Hansen describes ‘internal teleology’ as, “...self-organization - the tendency or striving of concrete processes towards the highest possible degree of organization in turning the multiplicity of their universes into coherent expressions.”3 At a simple level, particles moving towards each other in coherence is extropic purpose, and moving away from each other in decoherence, is entropic purpose. Attractors are analogous to fitness peaks, they are extropic spontaneously ordered purpose, coherent on varying scales. Attractors drain basins of attraction, analogous to entropic decoherence or fitness valleys. The stronger the attractors, the larger the basins drained around them. Extropy rises to spontaneously ordered peaks by clearing out valleys of entropy around it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be derived from the concept of internal teleology, it is dependent on the constraints or boundary conditions within dynamical systems.

Internal teleology means evolution is on-going between inorganic and organic systems, non-living and living systems, biological and cultural (or memetic) systems. Homeostatic attractors are complex dynamical systems that settle down to constrained behaviors stable to perturbations. Homeostatic attractors emerge in scaled coherent systems (molecular, biological, cultural) from evolutionary selection of forms and a mechanism for amplification of purpose. A description of this mechanism follows:

Another special aspect of self-organization in living cells is the abundance of energy contained in thermal fluctuations. These strong thermal fluctuations can be employed by far-from-equilibrium subsystems inside the cells. The laws of thermodynamics prevent the directed use of thermal fluctuations. However, as shown by Feynman in his analysis of the thermal ratchet (a process allowing motion in one direction only), this does not generally apply to systems with some components that are far from thermal equilibrium (and thus, ‘Maxwell’s demon’ may operate if it receives and dissipates energy from external sources).4

This directed use of energy is the essence of the organizing principle of life. A homeostatic attractor of evolution itself may exist, which determines possible creation of new selectional systems such as the brain, the immune system and unknown others. Kauffman expresses this possibility, “The thought that selection achieves systems able to adapt leads ultimately to the question of whether there may be attractors of that selective dynamics.”

Kauffman’s major hypothesis arising out of his synthetic biological models of chaotic and ordered attractors, is that ecosystems coevolve to a poised state at the edge of chaos, what he terms, the complex or liquid realm. This poised state has been named: “Lynn Margulis calls this fluxing, dynamically persistent state ‘homeorhesis’ - the honing in on a moving point. It is the same forever almost-falling that poises the chemical pathways of the Earth’s biosphere in purposeful disequilibrium.”5 I have used internal teleology, homeorhesis and the analogy of concepts as attractors, to construct a table of hierarchical concepts that describe reality, life, thought and politics for us (see Table I ). Concepts in the chaotic realm always precede the ordered realm. Homeorhesis is the word ‘and’ between them, the liquid realm. Chaotic attractors ‘learn’ to be ordered attractors.

Learning, in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, is the conjunction of perceptual categorization and memory. Learning is how we come to discern true from false, right from wrong, good from bad. The liquid realm at the edge of chaos is an apt metaphor, it is the realm of tears. Æschylus could not have known that neuroscience would one day discover that the hard lessons of each day’s search are consolidated in our brain at night through emotional affect-linking. Yet he wrote in Agamemnon: “Zeus, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of Zeus.”

Every concept in the liquid realm forms a linked, integral part of civilization and progress. An open-ended arrow representing extropy can be drawn through all the concepts in the liquid realm (see Figure 1). The entropic falloff on either side of the extropic arrow is analogous to what Kauffman termed “complexity catastrophes” in fitness landscapes that prevent species from becoming more complex. If individuals drift towards nihilism, civilization falls from fitness peaks into valleys. If they relax into unquestioning dogma, it becomes trapped in a region of lesser peaks, unable to progress. It’s a narrow upward path, precariously poised over the abyss of barbarism and the stagnant sink of dogma. John Milton in Paradise Lost, expressed our need to progress, “That in our proper motion we ascend up to our native seat; descent and fall to us is adverse.”

Liquid Realm Conceptual Hierarchy

The advance of civilization requires that the concepts of eternity, infinity, existence, future, meaning and design, have validity in the belief systems of its leaders. Theories resulting in the invalidation of these concepts lead to nihilism or dogma: post-modernist idealism, multicultural relativism, radical reductionist materialism, big bang, big crunch, heat death, eternal recurrence, omega point, and far too many more. These theories eliminate at least one or more of the concepts in the ordered or chaotic realm required in order to make the valid conjunction in the liquid realm. We sense that if no memory of us remains eternally, if our impact doesn’t extend infinitely, if existence is no more than a blip between two voids, if there is no indefinite future towards which our actions are directed, if life is meaningless, or if we are simply background noise without design, then why not live for the day and embrace entropy? Why not beat the rush and try to transcend existence now? All things are permitted, why care about the consequences of our actions? Why care about tomorrow at all? The reason such profoundly destructive theories are put forth was stated clearly by David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals, “Thus skeptics in one age, dogmatists in another; whichever system best suits the purpose of these reverend gentlemen, in giving them an ascendent over mankind, they are sure to make it their favorite principle and established tenet.”

Essential attributes of life are: catalysis, metabolism, recognition, perspective, information, vitality, judgment, motivation, communication and adaptability. The material substrate of life is self-constructing, or self-extending, in the direction of increasing energy flows through exploration of new spaces, or increasing the energy recycling efficiency within existing spaces. Life is at war with time, with matter, with necessity, and with equality. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Will To Power, “That which we call our ‘consciousness’ is innocent of any of the essential processes of our preservation and our growth; and no head is so subtle that it could construe more than a machine - to which every organic process is far superior.” We think mechanistically, we can only map the true complexity involved and attempt an interpretation.
Emotions, adventure, context and prediction help form a core of selfhood during early growth; centering and certainty help maintain stable identity over time. Edelman comments on adventure and emotions: “When, in society, linguistic and semantic capabilities arise and sentences involving metaphor are linked to thought, the capability to create new models of the world grows at an explosive rate. But one must remember that, because of its linkage to value and to the concept of self, this system of meaning is almost never free of affect; it is charged with emotions.” Thinking may be most proficient in context generation. Memory mappings are kept fresh by reflections on past experience, a constant recontextualization occurs merging past into present, this diachronicity expands the core of selfhood. Memories help establish basic prediction skills which continuously reinforce rationality.

The brain and body, which work together to produce the system property of consciousness, establish conceptual and molecular boundaries between the self and the nonself. These boundaries persist, giving us temporal integrity of identity. William Blake in A Vision of the Last Judgment, referring to his corporeal eye, illustrated the conjunction of self and nonself with this gem, “I look thro’ it & not with it.” It is one of the most penetrating expressions of any liquid realm concepts I am aware of, the concept of centering. Centering makes the self into a point called “I” and places this point at the center of the universe. From this point, the self quests outward in all directions without the sensation of crossing any boundary between the self and the nonself. We achieve internal certainty through awareness that our subjective thoughts are objective truth to others. We embody truth, we alone can be certain of our purposes because we can decide them instant by instant. We cast aside doubt of existence, we know we cannot doubt doubt itself. Doubt exists, it is a thought, thought exists. Thoughts are about things, things from outside ourselves, these things exist.

We need science in order to extend our certainty externally. The development of science relies on understanding, experiment and knowledge. One of the key conclusions drawn from biological epistemology (described in Part I), is that radical separation of value from fact in scientific endeavors is pure charade. Edelman explains that, “Any assignment of boundaries made by an animal is relative, not absolute, and depends on its adaptive or intended needs.” The subjective mind cannot be placed outside of science, there are no objective scientists, no objective peer reviews and no objective funding requests. The aim of science is at objective truth, but the actual content cannot comprise more than consensual agreements (which often pass as ‘objective’). We do not know if, as a species, we all bring the same subjective presuppositions to bear on the objective truth. Science, above all, is utterly dependent on politics and the support of a civilized populace because it is a vocation. To paraphrase José Ortega y Gasset, the whole of science is only a chapter in certain biographies, it’s what scientists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.

Ordered Realm Conceptual Conflicts in the Political Domain

Throughout Table I, no beginning-state concepts in the chaotic realm are ever in conflict with each other because they are formless and open-ended. Up until now - that is, through the conceptual groups of reality, life and thought - none of the end-state concepts in the ordered realm have been in significant conflict. However, in the political domain, there are several pairs of end-state concepts that sharply conflict. Since the corresponding chaotic realm concepts do not conflict, this means the liquid realm concepts mesh uneasily with other, usually in a state of tension, but subject to unpredictable bursts of conflict.

The sharpest conflict is between the concepts of preservation and destruction. A high degree of permanent political tension is present between their corresponding concepts of aesthetics and capitalism. We are presently in the midst of political leadership turmoil dealing with aesthetic issues of decaying ecosystem integrity and vanishing cultural traditions. Here, capitalism’s destructive effects are tragically felt inter-generationally, but desired preservation will choke off the creation of economic vigor. The challenge to political leadership is always to focus on the search for new cultural forms while mourning the passage of the old forms. Aesthetics, politics and economic markets are all pushed by this inescapable tension to the ground of homeorhesis. The conflict between preservation and destruction is a major source of the undecidability problems in Kauffman’s bionomic models. The models show that markets don’t clear, discontinuities in the form of cascading bankruptcies or institutional instability are unavoidable. Cultural aesthetic values often aren’t quantifiable. When they are quantified through arbitrary property boundaries backed by temporary force, markets do not protect them over time.

Next is the conflict between the concept of equality and the ability to obey (i.e., follow with dignity). Accepting direction is unambiguously hierarchical, not egalitarian. The corresponding concepts of respect and self-control mutually influence each other because the chaotic realm concept of excellence and the ability to command (i.e., lead while leaving those who follow with dignity) are so closely linked. Respect, being the conjunction of excellence and equality, is earned amongst true equals in top condition. Individuals, considered to be equal as an abstract ideal, incur unearned respect, a weakened form. Self-control, being the conjunction of commanding and obeying, is weakened when individuals stop accepting direction from their, in theory, ‘equals’. Weakened self-control, coupled with weakened respect for others, eventually leads individuals to refuse to follow any direction or meet any standard. A self-organized hierarchy in society arises out of the necessity for leadership, higher abilities rise to the top where self-control and earned respect, are reinforced through pursuit of common goals. The erosion of these occurs below this highest level in society, when those of less ability and lower levels of effort, believe themselves to be the equal of those above, without earning the distinction. José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses follows this process to its conclusion, “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”

Religion solves this conflict between equality and obedience by positing equality before, and obedience to, higher authority than human leaders. This allows self-control in the followers as well as the leaders to be developed. Respect between followers and leaders then is founded on the dignity of humanity because all are obedient to higher authority. Political leadership in the past has been bonded to higher authority to forge a continuous chain of command linked by dignity. Examples are the Egyptian Pharaohs, Divine Emperors of Rome and Japan, the Chinese Mandate of Heaven and the European Divine Right of Kings. When the Enlightenment destroyed higher authority, all notion of authority went with it. The social bond of dignity between leaders and followers went also. The followers have been in continuous revolt against the notion of excellence, standards of behavior, high culture and leadership authority since then. Statism is the end result, a mass of ‘equals’ expressing themselves as ‘public opinion’ swaying to and fro to the tune of the media piper, demanding direct action to meet their needs. Government responds by imposing the burden of meeting these needs on the backs of those individuals too weak to resist. In the absence of higher authority, the way out of this is to produce individuals with the strength to resist government.
The final conflict is between the concepts of coerced consent and inherited custom. Coercing consent involves a disruption of cultural tradition, or coercion would not be needed. The corresponding concepts of power and law are so interrelated, that I must necessarily expand on all the concepts above, in addition to the chaotic realm concepts of self-determination and spontaneous contract. Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West forcefully expresses how much these concepts permeate our lives: “From the feeling of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money.... One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty.”

Irreducible first-person subjectivity, with its private inner life and moral autonomy, is central to the concept of an individual. This individual uniqueness, what Max Stirner referred to as the “unique I,” carries with it an epistemological indeterminacy; namely, that the consequences of even tiny changes to immunological, genomic or neuronic systems are uncertain. This is the primary argument for self-determination, we must ‘own’ ourselves. Our actual thoughts are too richly textured and unique (the existence of qualia) to fully share with anyone else. This leaves us isolated in full view, with a sense of loneliness that can only be assuaged by reaching out to others. Reaching out to others, in ever expanding groups, leads to coerced consent as leaders within the groups vie through the political technology of worldview warfare (‘Weltanschauungskrieg’), to steer the group’s purpose in their direction. This is the origin of power politics (see Figure 2). The dominance of power politics in human affairs is due to the tremendous increase in a strong-willed individual’s self-determination that comes with increases in abilities on the social scale. Dante in De Monarchia connects the maximum self-determination with the maximum consensual purpose in a civilization: “The human race when best disposed is a concord. For as a single man when best disposed both as to mind and body is a concord, and so also a house, a city, and a kingdom, so likewise is the whole human race. Therefore the human race when best disposed depends upon a unity in wills.”

Power politics is personal, the determinant is strength of individual will. Nietzsche reminded us, “To expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength, as the desire to overcome, to appropriate, to have enemies, obstacles, and triumphs, is every bit as absurd as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strength.” When language is used as a weapon to destroy or isolate context, understanding between individuals breaks down. This is why battles over changing language rage so furiously; the image of the old worldview must be tarnished and de-legitimized by breaking the old meanings, to make room for the new worldview. The language that political elites use is shaped, then the new worldview is filtered downward through imposition of educational standards. Politics are played as zero-sum games when there is no consensual purpose, deception and treachery are the rule. Politics are played as non-zero sum games when there is consensual purpose, maximum payoff occurs when strategies are revealed openly and honestly. The classical scam of the left is to hold out equality of opportunity to individuals (the promise of social ascent), while gutting their willpower to do so through nihilism (teach them to ‘be proud, selfish and dull’). The classical scam of the right is to hold out the potential of developing the greatest willpower to individuals, while gutting their ability to utilize it through dogma (social rigidity).

Context creation between individuals diverges due to differences in perspective and underlying private purposes. This limits the utility of the concepts of consent and contract. Hume said it this way in Morals, “These words too, inheritance and contract, stand for ideas infinitely complicated; and to define them exactly, a hundred volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators, have not been found sufficient.” Contracts rely on inherited tradition and common moral language to fill in the incomplete contractual descriptions. The determination of which entities are qualified to be included in the human community, which are entitled to the benefits of citizenship and which are capable of giving consent; in fact, law itself, is always made by stronger individuals for weaker individuals. Any form of consent is an expression of power politics and nothing else. All rights are granted through power politics; a right not enforced, is not a right. All responsibilities are assigned through power politics; a responsibility not enforced (primarily through social pressure), is not a responsibility.

Rule by law may be an abstract ideal, but rule by individuals is the actuality. Laws are ambiguous, rights are not mutually exclusive, juries have divergent conceptions of what justice is, judges pursue legislative agendas, and enforcement of laws and regulations is at the caprice of funding levels and the shifting priorities of individuals. James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana advised that, “You will be told, that where the laws be few, they leave much to arbitrary power; but where they be many, they leave more, the laws in this case, according to Justinian and the best lawyers, being as litigious as the suitors.” New life purposes form within existing law, they are either accepted within society and law is wrapped around them, or rejected and criminalized. Since life purposes conflict, laws will conflict, becoming too numerous and complex for consistent enforcement. The juridical system’s legitimacy will decline after protracted periods of arbitrary and capricious use of laws by political factions. The creation of new purposes of life is facilitated by removing obstacles in the form of regulations and laws that cannot be enforced without significant exceptions. Substantial enforcement of all enacted laws is the meaning of the abstract ideal ‘equity in law.’

Enhancements of Consciousness

Coherency of purposes and values coupled with certainty is the desired condition prior to action. This is the biggest enhancement of consciousness we can achieve immediately. We must develop and maintain an understanding of our dynamic world civilization. The accelerating rate of changes forces us to design and invent the future, this maximizes our vitality. Our perspective must be broadened in order to find simplified contexts, by placing the tangled particulars of life against a universal background. This is aided by the development of, and participation in, high culture. Its exceedingly fine discrimination and standards of rectitude increase the fine structure of neuronic ensembles.7 This enriches consciousness. High culture fine-tunes emotional acuity through the practice of evaluating diverse individual moral decisions that had great historical consequences. William Wordsworth in Preface to Lyrical Ballads lauds this sensitization, “For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability.”

Within biological evolution, a perceptual bootstrap led to concept formation in primary consciousness. Then, a semantic bootstrap led to the cultural evolution of higher-order consciousness. These bootstraps increase the sophistication of pattern formation within our mind. Edelman emphasizes that “Thinking occurs in terms of synthesized patterns, not logic, and for this reason, it may always exceed in its reach syntactical, or mechanical, relationships.” Now, within cultural evolution, a technological bootstrap is developing. Our increasingly intimate connection to the communications and information capabilities, of the computer networks being embedded into social structures and the environment, coupled with advancing genetic engineering capabilities, will enable us to think in terms of kinetic living patterns. Such patterns have been inaccessible to us previously, they reveal the evolution of structure on varying spatio-temporal scales. They are nonlinear and counterintuitive to us now, they lead to organic logic as opposed to systematic logic. This bootstrap presents us with the breadth of description and the immensity of particulars that will facilitate wisdom and sublimity in individuals on a massive scale, leading to unknown emergent phenomenon.

Edelman elucidates the main biological paths to enhanced consciousness, “Increasing the size of the primary repertoires or the reentrant connectivity between repertoires, or enhancing the means of synaptic change by adding new chemical mechanisms during evolution, increases the number of categorical responses that may enhance learning.” With the caution that the adaptive consequences of polygenic design alterations are speculative at best, two areas of technological enhancement appear promising: emotions and aging processes. Emotional breadth and control might be improved by expanding the neuronal pathways between primary and higher-order consciousness as Arthur Koestler recommended in Janus.8 We may boost volitional power over our spectrum of focus (from high-focus analytical reasoning down through low-focus associative creativity) and our inborn temperament, if the genomic system governing attention is discovered. To increase longevity, we could pursue expanding neural connections and/or mechanical systems, in two directions: First, to our internal organs for improved control over homeostatic processes, internal levels of hormonal systems and responses to stress; and Second, between the immune system and brain for more robust recognition of nonself molecules, better control of disease and more flexibility regarding acceptance of biological or mechanical introductions to the self.

The Transformation of Secular Morality as Longevity Increases Indefinitely

Enhancing consciousness cannot be accomplished by reducing the self to nothing, as the radical reductionist materialists are attempting to do, but by making the self more complex, and more long-lived, in a boundless expansion. Homeorhesis, where progress occurs amidst civilizing forces, is the infinite frontier, a flowing realm of potentially limitless life. Frontiers are never safe, easy, or tidy; but their wildness is exhilarating in the eternal quest for opportunity. The tip of the arrow of extropy is the preservation and enhancement of life, or as Nietzsche referred to it, “Life at it’s highest potency.” When we attempt to conceive of this tip, by plunging into it, seeking the wellsprings of extropy, we see that it is the conjunction of the infinitely divisible and the indivisible. What is this concept? It is here that life is directed towards, an eternal search with consolidations along the way conserving all previous levels of complexity.

We are free to turn from this strenuously vital liquid realm of tears, but our destination will be the abyss of nihilism, or the stagnant domain of dogma. Following Augustine in The City of God and Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil , extropy is not intrinsically good nor is the chaos of the abyss and the order of necessity evil. For us, it is our volitional turning towards extropy that constitutes absolute good; just as it is the turning away itself, the “tension of the bow” of the soul being relaxed, that constitutes evil. The arch-defender of rationality and objectivity Ayn Rand, pronounced in The Virtue of Selfishness, “There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible.” The aesthetic standard of civilized life is the sufferance of the tragic failure to preserve beauty, and the sustenance of the joyous promotion of artistic mutability; the promise of the surprising new is partial recompense for the cherished old passing away. The political standard of civilized life is the rational promotion of good and the moral confrontation with evil.

Relativism, the moral philosophy that no absolutes exist, no purpose, no truth, and no meaning, is deadly to civilization. When practiced widely, courage appears as stupidity, temperance as needless denial of desire, justice as avoidance of hurt feelings, the sense that high aims are worthwhile seems incomprehensible, and the will to live in common is weakened, devolving to tribalism. The relativist’s mantra of ‘Don’t judge,’ and ‘Accept people as they are,’ are axioms of barbarism. The salient feature of a relativist is intellectual slackness, the rational will to construct or accept a construction, of an absolute worldview is absent. A relativist cannot say that a person who is a genius, inquisitive, literate, tough-minded, conscientious, exquisite, decisive, and resolute; is better than a person who is envious, hateful, malevolent, traitorous, craven, cowardly, violent and jealous. One cannot be better than the other because the existence of the concept ‘good’ would be acknowledged. ‘Good’ is a moral absolute, it leads inexorably to a concept of the highest or greatest good. Thus, the relativist must either be conceptually incoherent, or else hold relativistic positions dogmatically.

There are four distinct worldviews possible, depending on whether we adopt an extropic or entropic purpose in life, and whether we believe in the immortality of the soul in a spiritual sense or as longevity increases indefinitely (see Figure 3). Adopting an entropic purpose draws our attention to the pain and incomprehensibility of existence. Life appears to be a mere spark between two voids if believed to be mortal, and extended suffering if believed to be immortal. Both conditions encourage a retreat to irrationality and mysticism. The mortal condition leads to a Sordid life of reanimalized mediocrity, where the immortal condition leads to an Ascetic life of patient suffering, or attempts to transcend existence. Adopting an extropic purpose places us in a vital drama of ascending life of cosmic proportions. Humanity is seen to be excellent and dignified. The mortal condition produces a Tragic view, because we experience the waste of invaluable human thought unguided or misdirected, with unbearable pain. We are acutely sensitive to how unequal, alone and subject to Fate we are. The immortal condition produces a Joyous view, there is time to achieve the visions of our ever-fruitful imagination.

 

Political Considerations Under Conditions of Divergent Enhancement of Consciousness

Individuals achieving enhanced consciousness stretch the distribution of the consciousness bell curve, because the bottom end is fixed at death. This stretching is fundamental to progress yet for those at the high end, the injunction of Byron in Childe Harold must not be forgotten, “He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.” They will need protection that emotive statism will not provide. Edmund Burke in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent offered this sage advice, “When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Protection is needed because high culture, associated with enhanced consciousness, is invaluable to all; to those at the high end so they can achieve excellence and to those below to have aspirations to the high. There is no escape from the charge of elitism that will be brought by political opponents. Spengler defended high culture from this charge: “Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first to last, at something which only the few could comprehend.... To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s.” Political structures designed around a secular morality that attempt to span both extropic and entropic metaphysical, aesthetic and religious systems are unworkable. Entropic worldviews, where tolerated, tend to prevail over time because they are easier.

In the near future, these protective associations will evolve in an intermediate stage, less than a nation but more than an institution. Polycentric consensual purpose, standards of civilized behavior, law and markets are the shape of this intermediate stage. The view is of a web, a flux of connecting pockets of consensus with contractual bonds inside each core, and power politics between cores. This polycentric complex adaptive system is described by Kauffman: “At the boundary between order and chaos, the frozen regime is melting and the functionally isolated unfrozen islands are in tenuous shifting contact with one another. It seems plausible that the most complex, most integrated, and most evolvable behavior might occur in this boundary region.” Arnold Toynbee labels this the “diasporás” model, what we envision as cybernexus and autonomous regions with limited sovereignty.9 Cybernexus is a synthesis of virtual communities on computer networks and the physical social connections individuals make to support these. Emphasis is placed on privacy and independence through techniques such as encrypted communication, digital cash and privately produced law (PPL). Cybernexus is de facto secession from existing states and institutions, if not de jure. The surrounding environment must support the technological structure though, these connections and alliances are permanent.

Divergence of life purposes leads to divergence of meaning. Literate society becomes fragmented into more or less coherent spheres of politically sympathetic writings to the exclusion of other, often considered illegitimate, spheres. This fragmentation becomes stronger as technology, through communication customizability, permits individuals more choice of association. How can overarching commonalities be discussed if there is no crossover meaning left? At the ridges of the interconnecting web there is a tremendous richness of complex meaning where commonalities between cores touch the underlying objective truth. Iris Murdoch points to how we can pull together disparate pockets, “We must indeed preserve and cherish a strong truth-bearing everyday language, not marred or corrupted by technical discourse or scientific codes; and thereby promote the clarified objective knowledge of man and society of which we are in need as citizens, and as moral agents.”10


Notes:

1. Kauffman, S. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

2. Edelman, G. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: BasicBooks, 1992.

3. Hansen, Niels V. Process Thought, Teleology and Thermodynamics: A Reinterpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I found this paper in Feb. 1995 from anonymous ftp, Phil-Preprints.L.Chiba-U.ac.jp/pub/preprints /Phil_of_Science. It is a well-reasoned derivation of the second law, emphasizing the role of constraints and boundary conditions between extropic and entropic processes, beginning from A.N. Whitehead’s essentially Extropian metaphysics within his process philosophy.

4. Hess, B. & Mikhailov, A. “Self-Organization in Living Cells.” Science 8 April 1994: 223.

5. Kelly, K. Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994. ‘Homeorhesis’ was previously used by the biologist C.H. Waddington in another context.

6. Undecidability because I haven’t decided what to name it yet - perhaps the Transcendent Realm. A wide range of concepts have been proposed for this, the current concept is ‘Deterministic Chaos,’ but this is not a conjunction, it is merely a restatement that no more facilitates comprehension than earlier attempts; Sartre conceived of it as ‘Nothingness,’ Newton as the ‘Sensorium of God,’ Leibniz as ‘God,’ Anselm as ‘Perfection,’ Lucretius as the ‘Void,’ Plato as the ‘Receptacle,’ Empedocles as the ‘Vortex,’ Heraclitus as ‘Strife,’ and Lao Tzu as the ‘Tao.’

7. Zohary, E., Celebrini, S., Britten, K. & Newsome, W. “Neuronal Plasticity That Underlies Improvement in Perceptual Performance.” Science 4 March 1994: 1289-92.

8. Koestler, A. Janus: A Summing Up. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

9. On autonomous regionalism and limited sovereignty, see: Kennan, G. Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.

10. Murdoch, I. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1992.

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