On the Importance of Understanding the First Delphic Maxim [part 2]

CT: People like Benjamin and I (not the scientists or the astrophysicists) could save the heirs of Ancient Hellas, if only they would listen to us.

To paraphrase Kubrick’s magnum opus, I would say our autobiographies are odysseys into inner space (anyone who undertakes that journey is transformed, much like David Bowman).

Benjamin Power: I had one of those impetuous young zoomers I seem to have influenced a little write to me recently out of the blue, saying (I’ll quote small segments of the email; I don’t think he’ll care):

“….time is relative. The fact time is relative could mean it has a physical presence in the universe. In knowing this that means time can maybe one day be travelled or harnessed. Now what science says about time is not completely accurate in my eyes. I am currently writing a thesis about it. I am so passionate I stopped writing my biography for the time being.”

I was almost annoyed and rather disappointed when I read these lines (+ I’m not sure how he comes to that conclusion over time, let alone his reasoning subsequent). I wrote back to him, using our usual anecdote:

“…one would have to account for the difference between subjective perception-sensation and an objective world… Have you read Edmund Husserl at all? Try The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.

Science says a lot of different things about time – there’s no one perspective, and the different positions compete. Personally, I like a theoretical physicist named Ilya Prigogine (I’m not actually that fond of Roger Penrose in this area).

As consequence of your view on time, what’s your view on hard determinism vs. free will?

One might have to account for Henri Bergson’s concept of ‘duration’ for internal-time measurement.

Bergson argues that duration is unextended yet heterogeneous (i.e. can’t be juxtaposed as a series of distinct parts in a causal relationship, rather like what Husserl says about melody – if we perceived that way, a piece of music would make no sense). For this reason Bergson defines determinism as an impossibility, and free will arising from that mobility, with reality composed of change.

It’s a multiplicity that can’t be grasped through immobile concepts. Here Bergson’s metaphysics relies on his vital concept of intuition (more than abstract rationalism/science). Famously, he had an argument with Einstein over this matter, where Einstein, typical for his ‘God does not play dice’ mentality, failed to grasp his point.

I hope you get back to your biography. I love science. I prefer even more finding out about people’s lives though. Take the example of Thales of Miletus (world’s first acknowledged scientist). Brilliant guy; calculated a lot of things. He was out walking, looking up at the sky intently to study something, and he didn’t see the ground in front of his feet, and fell down a well, embarrassing himself very much in aftermath (according to Plato). Ironic considering he’s meant to have composed the first Delphic Maxim carved into the entrance to the Temple of Apollo: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

It’s often translated as ‘know thyself’ but it actually translates as ‘know thyself!’, i.e. [you are commanded to] know every last detail of your life and your inner psychological workings and do not cease until that knowledge is complete. I actually prefer reading amateur (i.e. ‘amateur’ only in the sense of ‘not those empty-headed self-promotion ones by pop stars or politicians’) autobiographies to anything academic.

The Hellenic Greeks used to say in folklore that that Maxim came straight from Apollo himself. Either way, I think it’s ironic that Thales didn’t listen to his own advice. In fact, if you think about it, his hubris is guilty of violating the Second Maxim also. I like this as an analogy.”

I was hoping to logically – politely yet firmly – nip his (to me, nonsensical) hypothesis in the bud with him (though I’m not sure if he’ll notice – he’s very independent when it comes to the validity of his own ideas).

This obsessive drive to physics seems very popular with the human mind (I think it’s for the same reason non-empirical idealism – i.e. ideologies – and metaphysics also is enticing: a bit like escapism; one can come up with any old self-justifying bullshit over it).

I really do hope more people attempt their biographies. You were right to present Zweig to me before, and his observations on how late into our aesthetic maturity as a race they seem to have evolved; the level we had to reach to ‘discover’ them. It’s a shame in the literate world it’s just always seen as ‘uncool’, unlike the glamour of this effective magical-thinking toss on the universe, or the god, or Gods, or whatever (perhaps, to concede though, in the latter case, that I am not so pessimistic in my realism as Gaedhal over the presence of a type of ‘schematic of divinity’ in observable Nature – albeit completely outside of the moral realm; that’s not what I’d mean by it, and certainly no revealed religion).

First we should study our self. Then ourselves. Then Nature.

I think that’s all we’d ever need to do. Maybe one day those in future who are no longer us [anymore] will have the means to address one or more facets of their gloomy – in the long-term – cosmic predicament; we certainly can’t. Obviously they will have to be here to do so. Autobiographies would help with that necessary survival process, as written about many times in your work, and in my TNR.

P.S. my implication was that I feel ‘time travel’ would only make sense in a strictly Newtonian (Laplacian) universe, whereas Prigogine writes – convincing in my eyes – on irreversibility and spontaneous order (self-organisation). We are already travelling with time (or indeed placed against it in essence).

CT: This obsession with physics is just as toxic as being devoted to chess. As you know, I’m acquainted with many chess players, and, frankly, they leave much to be desired.

The cosmogony held by friends like yours is akin to an obsession with chess. The anecdote about Thales—who, while gazing at the stars, failed to notice the ground beneath his feet—perfectly illustrates the fate of those who study the exact sciences: they remain blind to the fact that the Christian narrative and the conventional wisdom surrounding World War II are precisely what is causing the entire West to tumble into a pit.

Physics, when approached in this manner, can be every bit as alienating as chess. Only by coming to know ourselves can we hope to save ourselves. To prioritise the study of the empirical world is to put the cart before the horse.

The Austrian author you mentioned above:

“Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could [my emphasis!] turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts…

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.”

A whole universe…

Benjamin Power: Yeah, modern physics is a sandbox for time-wasters. I’ll just hope he is young enough to get that, and not too set in his ways. I find dealing with zoomer arrogance very challenging. All his friends are like that too. Don’t get me started on what they think of ‘A.I.’…

CT: They also don’t know that so-called A.I. is prolefeed; that it will never be conscious (cf. Penrose’s book on consciousness), and that it is part of the System’s distraction designed to keep them from seeing reality.

Benjamin Power: I’ve just started listening to the video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz4SuUbqDNA] (I follow your example, and ignore the tasteless visuals). You know… I get that feeling quite a lot: that we’ve kind of ‘done’ physics.

I think biology is still open (especially theoretical biology & naturalism), i.e. I’ve never had an interest in genetics and that sort of thing. Cognitive ethology maybe. Studying animals a bit more (and on their own terms).

I think human mind-brain consciousness research has entered a sort of terminal stage close to having to give up (sadly), although in this case I think it’s something that could be resurrected much later, provided we’ve filled in other areas.

But technology, and physics, by which I include particle physics as much as astrophysics and cosmology, is just spent. You could pick in little pet-project irrelevancies, but it’s just crap after a certain point (and we have certainly reached that point). Honestly, I wish they’d devoted more time to radical complexity/chaos theory, dynamical systems theory and cybernetics, and thermodynamics, and I have a kind of ‘soft spot’ for quantum electrodynamics, courtesy of Richard Feynman. Still, much as that’s rarer as a study interest, it’s still fundamentally making that mistake.

Mathematics is a very great tool (but I gather from observing my father’s pure maths work past a certain point, also inevitably a sandbox - although at least now and again you can drag some new discovery out of that into the applied realm, something I don’t see in modern physics, which is, if anything, now even more abstract and self-indulgent: I think pure mathematicians who pursue it for something like aesthetic reasons are akin to solipsistic onanists. That the best they can increasingly think to do is to use it to feed ‘A.I.’ is criminal to me, to a degree that I’d like those academics expelled, as traitors to mathematical scholarship (and racial survival), and in an impulse of genuine aesthetics. They have thrown away their best tools in the heat of battle, or handed them to their enemy.

I want ‘A.I.’ and such to crash and burn, in complete moratorium (as legal public cover, maybe, to facilitate the process, as I doubt they’d be willing to relinquish it - particularly in the overlap with the robotics industry - but then closed in on ruthlessly behind the scenes and irrevocably dismantled), a dead, nonsensical project carried on by vacant midwit geeks and their thanatophobic billionaire sympathisers, and am just waiting for the markets to facilitate the public absorption of this obvious statement.

21st Century academia in general totally bores me (odd, given quite a lot of my library in here, but honest). Some Victorian scientists are interesting, but it’s hard to find those utilised in the orthodoxy.

So it’s time instead to get down to it, and self-analyse the self. And yet we never do… I don’t understand why, bar considering people quite lazy. It’s like being lost in a sweetshop of addictive possibilities, where all ultimately will rot your teeth if sunk into. Why not go home and write a book on yourself instead?

I’ll keep listening to it. Whatever makes it through that Fermi paradox (if it ever does, which it seems theoretically it doesn’t have to – although one could admit, ‘it would be nice’) certainly feels like a heavily whittled down and massively selected-against potential. I have absolutely no interest in considering it these days to be honest… I mean, it’s akin to a Christian dwelling on heaven (as opposed to noting death as a universal phenomenon, but just getting on with life instead).

It would be better to complete step 1 I noted above, and then make tentative logical inferences from your step 1 analysis into step 2, rather than fantasising a total knowledge availability with regard to step ≥3. And all this in case it is real that, only upon total completion of step 1 can it become apparent that there’s a multiplicative array of stacked, higher-order possibilities to step 2, otherwise unavailable from those observing a mere linear step 2 progression from within a partially completed or skimmed over step 1, as if the two steps were more relatable in the same direct terms: step 2 is knowing the race, and what is its genuine potential, and what is outside it (and – worryingly – may always be), at least in contemporary analysis of its thus far-existing members.

CT: It alarms me that there are so many channels of this kind on YouTube, featuring the same distracting imagery—aimed at people who think these escapes from reality are “cool.”

When post-peak-oil energy devolution forces millions of these types of whites to behave like Ed after Louis was left incapacitated (in Deliverance), it will become clear just how futile it was to keep staring at the sky while falling into a pit.

What I liked about the video is that—precisely because of the levels of energy needed in the next frontier science—there is an upper limit to scientific knowledge: a limit we appear to have already reached (which, incidentally, resolves the Fermi paradox).

Benjamin Power: Also, when it came to aliens, given our racial perspective, I think it would very much depend whether we perceived them – accurately – as other ‘races’ or whether we saw them in actuality as non-European non-Earth animals, as to how we would behave from then on.

I’ve always thought the animal debate is somehow linked to the Fermi paradox. Even were it possible, I have no interest whatsoever in encountering aliens (rather like visiting a non-European country these days as an enraptured tourist, in the manner of Ali, or, conversely, breaking into a nature reserve or undisturbed habitat – either way, it’s not necessary). The thought of heat death is more of my (mild) interest zone. It seems prudent not to rule out that worst case scenario. Surely it would be better to win at our pragmatic ambitions first!

CT: The modern era of UFO sightings began on June 24, 1947, when American pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine bright, high-speed flying objects over the state of Washington: an event that gave rise to the term “flying saucers.”

Note that in that same year, the Hellstorm against disarmed Germans was still being perpetrated!

It is abundantly clear that all of this serves only to ensure that the European normie never takes the red pill.

AS: So many people these days are jumping on the “consciousness is fundamental” bandwagon. As with all the silly “simulation” talk, I think it’s motivated entirely by the fear of eternal oblivion. It reeks of desperation.

Benjamin Power: Yes, I can’t say I’m a fan of that total (philosophical) idealism position. The worst offender currently is probably Federico Faggin (Bernardo Kastrup’s up there). I thought Robert Pepperell’s What Matter Feels was a bit too much also, and have always considered that approach to panexperientialism somewhat binary, as if one couldn’t accept that yes, certain things can be inert, and there are more than two types of category out there.

I think consciousness (especially in terms of hard rationality) is a bit of a hindrance to active existence, actually (and perhaps thermodynamically, much as it imposes – perhaps – the micro-conditions necessary for further order, by heightening the external disorder). I’ve written a few amateurish little papers in the background trying to put that into proper scientific terms, but I’m not prepared to release those for a good long while, if ever.

And yes, all simulation ideas annoy me very much (just as string theory, and its derivatives, and all post-quantum theories annoy me very much).

Would you ever consider writing a few of those painful memories you noted to us not too long ago down in a book or journal, just for review by others later, strictly after you were gone?

AS: I feel like the bad memories I have are too painful to share. I don’t want to traumatise myself any more than I already am. Eventually it will all be over. Not just for me, but for all of us. I just wish none of this had ever happened in the first place. None of it was necessary. Nobody can come up with a reason why “something” is better than “nothing”, and I think that’s because no such reason exists.

Benjamin Power: I couldn’t speak for anyone else. I don’t know what it feels like to appreciate a like or dislike of dreamless sleep. I think I (very slightly) prefer being awake. I prefer my interactions from my body with the world, and the idea (however nonsensical and invalid to your eyes) of evaluation and of attempting a task. The physicality persuades me.

For equally selfish reasons (perhaps more so in fact), I would keep the world alive for myself to appreciate (although I would try to strip as much of the suffering from it as I could in practice, just as the only concession I feel would render that selfishness paid off in return).

There wouldn’t necessarily have to be a single other human on it (although I think – for sanity purposes – it would be nice if there were a few).

I think that’s why I’m not an antinatalist (or whatever the other term is), basically. I have acclimatised to a Hell world, and I’d like to hack it down in large measure. I can be ‘asleep’ when I’m ‘asleep’, anyway. It’s a sort of scramble of attrition, in waves of lifetimes.

So just as a final point, I can’t justify it objectively, but, subjectively, something is better than nothing for me so there is at least one instance of that mentality in the universe.

Were I to find others who have genuinely come to this conclusion by their own minds, irrespective of my existence, I would be quite pleased (but, for our initial conditions, I would not need them to exist).

If there are those with your perspective, I could estimate on probability that there is a chance there might be those with my perspective: that – ghastly as it is – they enjoy life.

Not in itself, just because it can be enjoyed, as opposed to nothing ever, ever.

I don’t know if that’s Master morality, or whatever, but quite simply, I like it because I like it, and exist as an instance of something that does, same as with my not so distant comments on my hatred.

If I am here (as a life-enjoyer) and can – and have – simultaneously within that lifetime healed myself (well, quite a lot!), [then] I know suffering can be reduced in one individual.

This would open up the logical wonder if it could be reduced in others. I know from experienced observation (and from his words) that CT has followed a similar – identical one could say – path. With help from him, as from myself, I have healed. That seems to suggest – to a QED level – that healing from suffering is a gift that one can apply to another provided that other is open-minded and will put the legwork in.

Given these facts, I think the impetus is upon me to try it on as many people/systems/ecologies as possible, though obviously the methodology would vary slightly (or significantly). It is at least, empirically, not a priori bound to failure, although there may be scaling issues, and, in this case also, a less accommodating ‘ceiling’ than one could accept.

Hence my casual – and it is very casual – interest in heat-death only, as a single cosmological physics problem to retain.

It’s a shame you don’t feel able to write it down.

If you know something likes to be alive, and you would, for your own convictions and will-to-universal-oblivion, wish them put down anyway, every last drop, would that not be a form of abstract murder on your part? 

I think, ultimately, the selfish-for-life will win out. I can’t help but feel sorry you don’t feel the way I feel over it (not that I’d ever wish to change you; that certainly would be taking liberties), but I’m thoroughly shaken to know you’ve had such a resoundingly and consistently awful life.

The best I could consider I think, given my limited appreciation, would be to avenge you (and those who have reached your position via similar experiences). Anyhow, good night.

AS: I don’t know where you got that idea. But it doesn’t matter about me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that I don’t matter. It took me many years to understand that, but it finally sank in. I just wish I’d realised it sooner. It’s not an easy thing to accept. I have done nothing with my life. Nothing at all. Oh well. I guess having no attachments will make it easier to leave.

Benjamin Power: Oh I see. Yes, that was indeed a total assumption on my part. Thanks for your feedback. It wasn’t a Christian moral judgement, by the way – after all, I can see a great many undesirables out there who seem happy to be alive.

I’ve never actually researched antinatalism (I think the word I’m actually looking for is ‘efilism’) properly, and don’t know the ins and outs of it, or how many sub-positions there are within in. I’ll probably do that, one of these weeks, just out of curiosity. I think it is, one could say, very unlikely that I will agree.

I appreciate your honesty and self-analysis; painfully accurate. I gather – somehow – that the very sensation of thought itself is painful for you phenomenologically (or can be at times).

Anyway, I don’t want to traumatise you further with blunt words, so I’ll terminate this conversation here from my end.

AS: You can always read that Substack essay, An Indictment of Life, that I wrote. I also published another one last month, Kastrup’s Foil: The Equilateral Logic Vise and the Impossibility of Post-Mortem Consciousness, which is about NDEs. I don’t get much attention on there, and I’m holding back one of the essays I was going to publish, because it simply isn’t safe to publish controversial material on there anymore. Not if you’re British, anyways.