I wrote something about this subject thirteen years ago; my personal statute of restraint prevents my citing it here. I'm only doing this to recapitulate and ramble on. In spite of my criticisms that follow, these are nevertheless the ramblings of an uninitiated ignoramus.
The shelves are full of people full of it, which doesn't mean their wares haven't sold out, even if they had in reaching their fulfillment sold out themselves. I'd be late to the game in referring to them as 'grifters', and there are many kinds and many brands. I have two in mind.
First, I'm thinking of the Deepak Oprah variety, by which I mean both namesakes and all they have spawned, plus parallel thinkers and all those from whom they stole their wee earth shattering ideas.
Take, for instance, "what quantum physics tells us", which one should, of course, for the sake of honesty, amend to what quantum physics does not tell us, or, at best, what it doesn't necessarily rule in or out.
To set it up before I dig too deep, I'll briefly mention the second, more qualified grifter class, who, if you're algorithm has allowed, have appeared on every podcast hawking the primacy of the deterministic universe. I wanted to adverbialize the previous sentence with "for some reason" because their exposure gives off psyop-y vibes, as in, like, conspookuousness. But since there are so many grifting off the concept of the psyop, I forwent. My choice of verb should suffice.
I just want to make conspicuous that their opting for the free-will destroying brand of determinism incorporates the same "what something tells us" claim when the opposite is true, i.e. our observations of the reliable laws of physics do not preclude the truth of our observation of having very real choices, and until you can run an experiment that proves you "could not have done otherwise", you'll never be able to prove otherwise.
The primacy of a theory includes its utility. The utility of free will has determined (if you will) the entirety of human existence. Maybe the problem is that the questions of the origin & nature of what may have emerged from all that is fundamental has made for so much mythology that it seems it should follow that all the emergent stuff is just illusory bunk. Wouldn't it be ironic if the planet became an earth sized data center filled with our translations of that same bunk?
I'm sure some human-proclaimed tech genius has used the baby and bathwater metaphor on behalf of the expansion of data centers. The first thing I think of whenever I hear that analogy is how it has been used to argue for the utility of the servitude of slavery (read Thomas Carlyle); I cannot think of a positive example, though I am not looking too hard.
Anyway, amusing is the idea that a super intelligent machine could somehow render human life superfluous while also stripping itself of the resources necessary for its own survival. I predict they won't be able to do otherwise.
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To drill down or zoom in to the allusions of the equal & opposite grifters — the likes of whom are keen to amalgamate science and spiritualism, e.g. a quantum mechanics they understand far less than those who understand it the most (which is already too little for practical applications (according to me, the uninitiated)) and the vaguely esoteric concepts of Carl G. Jung and the wonderful world of a equally bastardized Buddha — I'd like to zoom in literally figuratively to our substance as such. In other words, I'll just ignore any claims about what quantum physics tells us.
Not only are we said to be part of a universe with more space than substance, but we, or any object within this vast space is comprised of more space than substance. Or, I suppose another way to put it would be that there is more space between our molecules than their collective size. To the uninitiated like myself, this seems like we can only see each other and all these objects around us because of our size.
If I were the size of the smallest particle, I would only be able to see particles of comparable scale. If I were an atom, I'd see atoms. I wonder if there's an eye of a size that would see nothing at all. Like, too small to see the distant stars, yet too big to see the distant stars. What would I see if I were the size of the universe?
I
think I got distracted. What time is it? Time was you could find a
clock in the public square. Less so now. You can still find them at the base of a steeple. Maybe providing that service uses a subliminal psychology that fills the pews when the show is less entertaining than it used to be.
I think about how difficult it is to maintain attendance in a theater vs. the same for a church.
Speaking of building attachments to unfalsifiable ideas, this guy called Jung walked the woo line that put butts in the seats. Or maybe his business thrived in spite of it.
His essay on synchronicity seems to me, the non-initiate, to be, on the one hand, a claim that mind blowing coincidences are as central to the makeup of the universe as the determinism of physics, yet, on the other hand weaselly enough to be but a meditation on the psychological effect such coincidences have on us.
To begin with, his qualification of "meaningful coincidences" strikes me as redundant: an unmeaningful coincidence would be a simple concurrence of events, not a coincidence.
Anyway, without projecting any of my ideas on to his, I'd say that in an infinite universe of infinite time, coincidences of the most mind blowing capacity are bound to happen eventually.
To you lesser initiated, the idea of synchronicity came to Carl G. Jung while he was treating a patient. She was describing a dream she had had that featured a golden scarab at which point Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him. He went to the window to investigate and saw a gold-green beetle.
More significant from the perspective of his psychology, he says that he was having trouble treating this patient due to her extreme rationality, and that when presenting the beetle to her it poked the hole necessary for her to recognize the symbolic nature of her dream. Or something.
What if it hadn't? What if she'd decided to discontinue her treatment. What if no one'd bought what he was selling?
