99 Comments

Anything is possible of course but I prefer Aurelius:

"If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."

–Meditations

Expand full comment
author

Aurelius is my boy.

Expand full comment

Fascinating ideas to consider. Obviously there's no real way to confirm or deny any of it definitively, but religious stories and imagery do seem to really speak to us on a level that seems impossible to make sense of under a materialist worldview. Any creative artists can attest that the Muse really is irreducibly magical and mysterious. It really does make you wonder sometimes, what is this? And what and who are we?

A metaphor that seems to capture some aspect of it: imagine a world without cameras or mirrors, where the only way to know what you look like is to have someone draw a portrait of you, but everyone that you ask to do your portrait draws it differently; so none of the drawings is literally you or even looks like you, but some patterns emerge and give you an idea of what you look like. These dreamlike stories and symbols do seem to fulfill the same roles, concerning our inner likeness, as the drawings in the metaphor do for one's outer likeness.

St Paul's letters have an interesting feature. On the one hand, he speaks of knowing God intimately and of having had visions and even having visited the heavenly realms. Yet he also declares that we can, at best, only partially know and see the things of God, and that we see through a glass darkly. There's something about his writinf that really resonates with me on a deep level, beyond words or conscious formulations, that makes me think he really knew and saw things that our religious traditions, at their best, can only clumsily point towards. It really is a magical universe we live in (even if some of that magic is wielded by evil sorcerers).

Expand full comment
author

Excellent metaphor, which I think captures the nature of consciousness, its relationship to divinity, its limitations, and perhaps even the purpose of incarnation quite beautifully.

Of course much of this is highly speculative to say the absolute least. Some however is well founded I believe, eg the scale of the cosmos, the frequency of exoplanets, and convergent evolution. I can also confirm that I absolutely did make that D&D world ;)

Expand full comment

I've long imagined the same - there is no legit reason to discount the idea that our soul transmigrates from world to world. I believe this world is a wondrous, magical garden, not a trap. I believe the moon is much the reason there is life on this earth, that the climate is as stable as it is - not a vampire.

One does wonder though, if it takes about 100,000 years for a radio signal to cross the Milky Way, why is it so silent out there?

Expand full comment
author

There are no answers that aren't terrifying, including that it isn't so silent as we think.

Expand full comment

So you're saying there's a chance I can romance a green woman? Kek.

Expand full comment
author

Finally someone gets the point.

Expand full comment

Lmao

Expand full comment

At bare minimum, there seem to be energy constraints on travel, and potential efforts to map the full region of the space and time in this universe.

Expand full comment
author

Indeed. I'm a full-throated supporter of space exploration and conquest, but not for some bugman motivation like 'filling the universe with human life'. We'll never get everywhere, physically. That isn't at all the point.

Expand full comment
Expand full comment
author

Cute name, but this is a classy joint and there's a dress code. Feel free to come back when you've shined your shoes.

Expand full comment

Don't confuse your self-loathing with the species.

Expand full comment

The pop culture nihilism of our age is perhaps best summarized by True Detective,

"Detective Rust Cohle : I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."

I get the logic, but it has nothing to do with reality. Just go lift some heavy weights in the gym, you will stop being depressed.

Expand full comment
author

See also: Blindsight by Peter Watts. Great book but the guy needs to touch grass. Or better yet iron.

Expand full comment

G. K. Chesterton has a beautiful little speech about his perspective on God, and repeated designs:

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

Expand full comment

Obviously, all of this math remains theoretical and worthless, because Earth and humanity are based on a sample size of one. We're dealing with a sort of Ptolemaic System here, where our lack of information provokes all sorts of convoluted speculations.

You probably have already read David Brin's seminal essay, "The Great Silence - the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life"

http://lunar.earth.northwestern.edu/courses/110/brin.scenarios.pdf

He walks through similar frustrations, and extrapolations, which remain fanciful. But he's fully aware that these questions devolve into sophistry.

The David Brin essay was the origin of the "Dark Forest" theory, proposing that maybe alien civilizations are silently hunting each other among the stars.

Expand full comment
author

Fermi Paradox explanations are a fruitful source of sci-fi narratives. Berserkers and Dark Forest are high on the list of cosmic horror scenarios that have emerged from it.

Expand full comment

Extremely cool! Thank you, I am googling Berserkers now, never heard of this variant of the Fermi Paradox.

Sometimes I think it would be cool to freeze time for a couple million years and read everything on the Internet.

So many thoughts to think, so little time.

Expand full comment
author

Berserkers were invented by Fred Saberhagen, but Alastair Reynolds' Absolution Gap/Revelation Space series is where they really come into their own. The latter series is metal af, like gothic horror cross-pollinated with hard scifi, space opera, and cyberpunk.

Expand full comment

I do enjoy the creative theories, though.

My favorite part of this essay was when you were talking about evolutionary pressures, and convergent evolution. Always fascinating.

Expand full comment
author

Convergent evolution is a really fascinating topic. It seems that there's generally only one optimal solution to a given problem, and that biological evolution will rediscover those solutions very reliably. That and/or there's a realm of Platonic forms that serve as templates for the forms of the matterium.

Expand full comment
Jan 22, 2023·edited Jan 22, 2023Liked by John Carter

Been planning to write about this in the context of literature, and how genres emerge as manifestations of subconscious fears and desires of an aggregate culture.

Optimized solutions. But predictable.

Genres rotate in and out of popularity.

There are really 2 kinds of genres — primal, eternal emotions, versus sales and marketing niches.

Horror, romance, mystery, thriller, myth, comedy,

Versus

Steampunk, Western, cyberpunk, etc. Really common patterns.

It's like the difference between ancient diseases, and seasonal viruses. Briefly a seasonal virus can infect a whole population, but its time must soon end.

I think Starcraft is the best example to explain this game theory. Evolution and environmental pressures are an arms race of paper-scissors-rock. Traits that are maladaptive can become adaptive when their environment changes, or their competitors adapt to the m.e.t.a. (most effective tactics available).

In Starcraft, it's a good strategy to pick an exotic blind counter to the most popular strategies that change from week to week. This is a sort of parasitic tactic.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Accepting the first 90% of analysis, which was effing impressive, there is a simpler conclusion in the cards.

The genetic potential of what homosapiens are today, and what we could be in 1000 years, is already imprinted in a one-celled creature. In other words, all life has the potential to evolve to where we might be in 1000 years. Equally logical, is the prospect of this being likewise throughout this universe.

This kinda suggests a pattern.

That all life evolves. Which is to say, has a direction. And as all other extant existence appears to be integrated, why would life be any different? It is fundamentally logical to consider that life has an integral function in the universe. Are there any niches we can think of that might fulfil that function. I can think of one, immediately.

We are aware of no mechanism by which this universe we currently occupy can link with other universes (or manifestations of 'is'). Is there any compelling reason to not speculate that life exists to eventually enable this universe to evolve into another, or to link with another. Or to link with many in the multiverse. One of the patterns to emerge as life evolves is that, eventually, life forms learn how to extend their physical powers... what we like to refer to as technology. Whether this is man using a lever and fulcrum to lift something previously beyond his physical capacity, or a chimp poking a stick inside a termite hill to enhance access to termites, this is technology. Many animals use it.

Eventually, we learned how to extend our mental powers beyond natural capacity with arithmetic, and the abacus, and then computer. The question is then posed... why? What, in terms of integral function in the universe, is the point of our eveolving technology. Where is all of this going?

Those cleverer than I may well elevate dozens of conceivable functions but I am kinda stuck on the idea of man and his technology eventually combining and manifesting as energy to enable this universe to conjoin with its peers, so to speak. If this is our destiny, it also makes the Big Bang seem unlikely. Light spectrography suggests so too.

Creationists need to consider that TIME need exist only as a dimension of this, our own little universe. And, increasingly, the concept of a Great Puppeteer out there is evidentially and logically unlikely. A more likely explanation is that early man was intuitively aware of the drive for evolution but could express this only in terms of religion. I regard creationists as representatives of our primitive past, lingering on futilely into the future. They will die out, but only kicking and screaming to the end.

I also regard the WEF disciples as their mirror opposites... primitive hangovers intuiting future human evolution in terms of their own primitve grasp of life function. They see themselves as Gods, re-arranging the planet; having control over life and death; each individual nurturing the suspicion that he or she is actually God. Yep, they are barking mad.

Should we focus on out evolutionary future? Hell no. We are just messing about in our little universal crucible and we will advance as opportunity and resources permit. In the meantime, we should dump the idea of gods and leaders and just establish a series of democratic meritocracies, and accord with informed consensus, and enjoy the ride.

Expand full comment

Speaking of physicalists, "...multiverse might instead, or also, consist of universes with entirely different laws of physics..."

What about universes which are not physical? If souls and imagination exist then might some universes exist which have a fundamental level that is something other than physical? Or no fundamamental level at all. If so, the space of existence would be exponentially larger even than you describe. Right?

Expand full comment
author

Possibly, yes. Something like the platonic realm of forms. Although I'm of the gut feeling that the physical and the nonphysical are ultimately inseparable in the sense that you can't have one without the other.

Expand full comment
Jan 21, 2023Liked by John Carter

Well, from an evolutionary standpoint, if we go beyond Neodarwinian orthodoxy, reincarnation does makes sense. Going to heaven and slack for eternity, however, does not, and neither does simply waiting till we, our civilization, and our planet just disappear without a trace.

Expand full comment
author

Indeed, the 'one and done' Christian model of the immortal soul always struck me as wasteful. Why make something so durable as an immortal soul if it will only be dipped ever so briefly into Creation? To say nothing of the questionable ethics of eternal damnation for a single lifetime's worth of bad choices.

But then this may all be a matter of perspective. In the hyperspatial realm souls return to between lives, time probably doesn't properly speaking exist. Whether you regard such a state as instantaneous or infinite may depend on where you perceive it from. So for example, from the perspective of the physical realm, souls might reincarnate after some number of years; while the soul experiences the time between incarnations as infinite; and to God it's all simultaneous. So there may be no contradiction between Christian and non-Christian views on the matter; rather it's a matter of emphasis.

Expand full comment

Wow, this perambulation into the intricacies of immortality and time-travel, and so much more beyond my comprehension, has certainly opened new vistas of consideration that my small small world and life-experience may be....just may be a lot deeper and far-flung than my imagination can comprehend. I'll be paying much closer attention to my dreamworld from now on.

Expand full comment
author

It's a very large universe, and you're in it.

Expand full comment

🙂Somewhere, we're all out there somewhere https://youtu.be/cjImFYf2Vzc

Expand full comment
Jan 21, 2023Liked by John Carter

w0w, Prof JC, manyThanks ! Here's some grist for your MDin the CD mill-

'Aerial Ships, Nuclear Weaponry & Infinite Universes in the Sanskrit Texts

VIMANAS is India’s ancient relationship with UFOs & ETs. The Sanskrit word VIMANA is defined as 'measuring out, traversing; a car or chariot of the gods, any mythical self-moving aerial car.' The ancient Sanskrit texts are full of references to these flying VIMANAS. The famous book VAIMANIKA SHASTRA, which was sold as a Sanskrit text on spaceship aeronautics, was channeled in 1918-23.

However, there are numerous examples of aerial ships in the great Sanskrit epic, The MAHABHARATA:

… they again took to their city and employing their…wizardry flew up to the sky, city and all…their celestial, divinely effulgent, airborne city, which could move about at will. Now it would go underground, then hover high in the sky, go diagonally with speed, or submerge in the ocean.

On this sun-like, divine, wonder-working chariot [Arjuna] flew joyously upward, while becoming invisible to the mortals who walked on earth, he saw wondrous airborne chariots by the thousands.

Evidence of nuclear bombs is found in a passage from The Mahabharata: At the Time of the Great Dissolution of the Universe - Excerpts from the Mahabharata :..And there rise in the sky deep masses of clouds, looking like herds of elephants and decked with wreaths of lightning that are wonderful to behold...'

ancient-origins.net /myths-legends-opinion/aerial-ships-nuclear-weaponry-infinite-universes-sanskrit-texts-00390

'The Mahabharata, also known as the great epic of the Bharata Dynasty, is divided into two books of more than 100,000 verses, each containing two lines or couplets totaling more than 1.8 million words. It is roughly 10 times as long as "The Illiad," one of the most notable Western epic poems.'

learnreligions.com/the-story-of-the-mahabharata-1770167

Expand full comment
author

There was totally a nuclear war in the ancient Indian past. I believe this implicitly.

Expand full comment
Jan 21, 2023Liked by John Carter

It's interesting (to me, at least) that the 'peak bodies' for archaeologists are intensely, implacably hostile to this sort of idea.

It's as if they have no institutional memory of their discipline having been vociferously and stridently wrong until quite recently, about a bunch of important stuff.

It's at least as embarrassing as the treatment of Semmelweiss by the "public health" authorities of the day - and make no mistake: if Twitter had been a thing, Jon Snow would've been cancelled for his stunt with the Broad Street pump handle.

I read "Gods of Air and Darkness" when I was 13 (in 1978) and thought it was plausible that there had been previous technological civilisations - it seemed to me that it was ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more likely than the drivel of the Old Nonsense, which some people still took seriously for some reason that escaped me (and still does).

Way back then, the "Mythicist Hypothesis" was tenuously applied only to the Old Nonsense - and Tommy Thompson was being put in the pillory for suggesting that Exodus and Joshua were "Shit Someone Made Up".

I was completely unaware of this at the time; I was still basking in the glory of having independently invented 'anti-splash' (several years earlier) - putting a half-dozen sheets of toilet paper in the crapper before having a shit, to prevent splashes.

Anyhow... I mention the book because it came to mind the other day in a discussion about "Ancient Apocalypse" - the latest Netflix series with Graham Hancock. I hadn't watched it, because I abhor the use of the word 'Apocalypse' as if it means 'cataclysm' (when it means something very different). I put that aside, and torrented the series.

Having mentioned the book the other day - not having laid eyes on it since 1978 - I was curious as to how it would stand up the my adult eyes.

So I investigated whether an e-book could be had - I went onto Library Genesis, and within a few minutes I had a lovely PDF of the 1976 edition, with a full clickable ToC.

I prefer e-books these days because they enable

 ▪️ navigation;

 ▪️ organised, detailed note-taking; and

 ▪️ a personal library of thousands of books that sit on my server...

 ️️️ ️ ️ ️and of course LARGE FONTS - and if the font is configurable I always use 'Quicksand, 18pt' - because of the 'a' and 'g' glyphs.

When I was a kiddie, only girls did g's that looked like a pair of glasses on its side, and a's with that weird hook on the top that look like a vertical reflection of a 'proper' g. They also had cooties - that's just SCIENCE.

Speaking of 'independently inventing' things: I did that with a few things when I was a kiddie, but only one thing after the age of 15.

That last 'insight that someone's already had' proceeded from the idea that our experience is constrained to R3+ - the 3 spatial dimensions that we can observe, plus time - but there is no clear requirement that there are ONLY 3 meaningful dimensions. So it is possible that transformations applied to projections in R3+ might have consequences in other dimensions that we don't understand yet because we can't experience or measure them.

Maybe that look our cats give us, is pity: they can make their own Vitamin C, and maybe their temporo-spatial experience is 'richer' and so they think we're retarded.

And maybe the reason that trees don't seek to avoid an axe, is because THEIR projection in R3+ is almost irrelevant - as unimportant to them as our hair colour is to us.

(Kidding: hair colour is critical because it helps identify gingers, who also have cooties).

Expand full comment
founding

Do you have any views on the hypothesis that the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley were legacies of something much older that was destroyed in a cataclysm of some kind?

Expand full comment
author

Ice Age civilization, you mean? I find that quite plausible, given sea level rise, very compelling evidence for the Younger Dryas Impact, and a number of odd archeological finds over the last several years - Gobekli Tepe not the least of them. Seems like the most parsimonious explanation to me.

Expand full comment
founding

Yes. It stands to reason that climate change and catastrophes (seismic, solar etc) need to be integrated with the historical narrative.

I was a very big Von Daniken fan as a preschooler. He was a shameless fraud, but I still believe that the most florid theories are worth something, even if only as thought experiments. The imagination (disciplined by the best available data) forms one pole of the axis around which the mind turns. Curiousity is the other. The great scientists of the past would be appalled at how timid and conformist people are today.

Expand full comment
author
Jan 21, 2023·edited Jan 21, 2023Author

It is entirely possible to reach the correct conclusion for all the wrong reasons, and indeed this has happened repeatedly in the history of science. By symmetry the reverse is also quite possible. Which is to say that Van Daniken could well prove to be such a case, as also eg Velikovsky.

The timidity of our contemporary crop of academics is a leading reason why things are in such a sorry state. Neglect of physical education has meant that our thinking is being done by cowards.

Expand full comment
Jan 21, 2023Liked by John Carter

Karahan Tepi is even more interesting. I'm old enough to remember when Catalhuyuk was thought to be the oldest organised human settlement.

And now there's mustatils to deal with - which predate Nabatea (which, it turns out isn't hard).

Civilisational history is far deeper and more interesting than has been taken as read, and it turns out that the pesky Dirt People (who are mostly brown, the swine) did a bunch of stuff when our forebears were still running around half-naked.

Egyptians were working in fractions in 4,000 years ago: the Lahun papyrus (among others) has a bunch of tables for working with 2/n - and Problem 14 from the Moscow papyrus shows that Egyptians knew how to calculate the volume of a pyramid (pyramids being important, apparently), which implies that they could do the formula for a frustum.

They had a shorthand formula for π that evaluates to 3.1609 which isn't terrible for ~1650 BCE. (For the record: they used 4×(8/9)² using only powers of 2, and the '9' is the diameter).

And don't get me started on the elegant method that they used for multiplication (and division) - ably covered by a chap at St Andrews -> https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Egyptian_papyri/

They turned multiplication and division into addition and subtraction - making it much easier and prefiguring Napier by a lazy 4000 years. (Because that's what natural logarithms do: convert multiplication to addition).

Expand full comment
author

Have you come across Martin Sweatman's work? He mostly focuses on interpretation of Gobekli Tepe in terms of a star map/observatory intended for keeping an eye on the comet swarm responsible for the YDI event, but in his book he presents evidence that the constellations of the zodiac had something like their modern form in the upper paleolithic, and that ice age man already knew about the precession of the equinoxes.

Expand full comment
Jan 22, 2023Liked by John Carter

I recall seeing a presentation by Andrew Collins about Karahan Tepe, where he included material about alignments to various constellations and it was clear from the context that there was a premise that the constellations had very similar outlines to what we have inherited as the zodiac.

My initial take was "Would the Karahan-Tepians have used the same names? Scorpio - sure. But Leo doesn't look like a lion, and Libra looks nothing like like a sanitary pad."

With the obvious exceptions they didn't have the same names (or the same associated animals) - which was good to find out.

The thing that is potentially persuasive about the 'broad brush', is if it turns out to be true that "Pillar 43" - appropriately oriented to the night sky - 'highlights' the actual, literal centre of our galaxy.

I haven't done enough reading to check whether there was a bunch of 'massaging' to get the images on Pillar 43 to 'line up'; I've done enough 'rubber-sheet' work on GIS to know how easy it is to stretch and skew things.

BUT...

The thing that we Moderns don't [seem to] fully appreciate is how easy it is to see the 'Great Rift' in the Milky Way. If there's no "light pollution", it is a pretty amazing thing to see.

That rift stands out like dog's balls (or "Cerberus' Danglies") to the naked eye - and it's also along the same line as the 'galactic plane'.

And the 'zodiac' plane - a band around the apparent path of the sun through the sky - would also have been of interest to anybody who looked up.

What's grinding my gears at the moment, though: NO WAY does a culture build stuff on that scale, with projects that take decades to complete and the rely on concepts and abstract ideas, WITHOUT a reliable mechanism for recording how to do stuff. (And it's a hard 'NO' on "word of mouth" or "oral traditions". That dog won't hunt, because people are stupid and always have been.)

Now it's obvious that they DID build it. So they were almost certainly literate; they would have had centralised repositories of documents; they would have stored documents in a suitable place.

If archaeology has shown us much (and it has, especially since it reduced "shovel in one hand, bible in the other" nonsense), it has shown us that documents survive far longer than we mght expect.

I'm quitely confident that at some point in the rest of this century, we will work out how to find the markers that signal the possible existence of such repositories.

Consider the extent to which multi-spectral satellite imagery has revolutionised site identification pretty much everywhere that anyone's bothered to look: we discovered in 2018 that Central America had hitherto undiscovered conurbations with roads etc... a civilisation much larger and more urban and 'connected' than was previously understood.

SPACE ARCHAEOLOGY, BITCHEZ!!!

Expand full comment
May 2·edited May 2Liked by John Carter

On one hand, yes the existence of the soul and the existence of human consciousness tapping into the divine Logos is something that is allured as a very old and obvious thing in many religions, philosophical schools, and traditions, this is to be expected, however, we run into a problem when the doctrine of re-reincarnation comes to be for you see: if the soul is the perfect individual essence or form of a person then it naturally follows that the only ¨image¨ or material body such an essence/soul/form could project is that of the sole individual whom she projects, in other words, your soul is tailor-made by God almighty for YOU and thus it can only project your body into material reality, and thus taking into account the genetic realities of how a body is formed by the mixing of the DNA of the father and the DNA of the mother themselves being the result of many a union of lineages across time, this makes it so that the only way YOUR soul could ¨reeincarnate¨ was if you had the same genetic make up, same body, same nature and same everything else hence the only possible form of reincarnation would be ressurection...so how do we explain, in this understanding and holding to this framework, the existence of many a phenomena as described?

Well there are two answers I can conjure and they are not mutually exclusive: the first is ¨genetic blood memory¨ which would be a person tapping into the knowledge of their ancestors present within their DNA to know things that that individual should not be capable of knowing normally such as ancient dead languages, the recent discoveries within the fields of Epigenetics have shown that actions can influence the genetic traits and behaviors of offspring into the far future although this is a fairly new field with little certainties the possibility here implicated denotes that, in oversimplified terms, your actions could influence the genetics of your descendants, an example would be a trauma experience strong enough to be passed to your descendants such as surviving a war or a genocide, the other possibility which is also valid is that an individual may tap in some way into the higher consciousness of reality and thus obtain revelations about the past or the future from such a tapping, this is in a way why so many cultures saw knowledge as something that already existed and was ¨revealed¨ by inquiry and/or faith.

fascinating essay nonetheless.

Expand full comment
author

There's a theory that DNA acts as an antenna, and not only as a recording device. If so, it may be that it resonates with the frequency of you - tuning in to your soul, as it were. In any case, I suspect you're right that there needs to be a correspondence between soul and DNA. But if the soul can change, then it can resonate with different DNA sequences throughout its incarnations.

Expand full comment

The core of the answer boils down to if one believes the soul to be perfect and individual or subject to change and thus universal.

in Christianity(my religion) and platonism(cool metaphysics I agree with) the soul is alluded to as THE perfect form of a person and thus does not change as perfect forms, being perfect, do not change.

but in Neoplatonism(which is cool and has metaphysics i partially agree with) your soul IS subject to change only after returning to ¨the one, the good, the beautiful¨ and as such it does hold some sort of doctrine of reincarnation although the specifics are rather vague as all mystical texts and doctrines are, Buddhism and Hinduism on the other hand hold the soul to be universal and subject to change as a fundamental dogma of their faiths and thus they hold to the belief in reincarnation to the point of stating that the soul of a man could re-incarnate into the soul of a beast which the Platonists and Neo-platonists, as well as the Christians, would object to on the grounds that the perfect form and essence of a human could at most only project another human if not the same human on the grounds that a perfect form of a human cannot become a perfect form of NOT a human with the core difference being that Platonists and Neo platonists believe in a single perfect human form which projects lesser individual forms which to the Platonists is still individual but to the Neo-platonists are not necessarily so while we, the Christian´s, claim that all human perfect forms/souls are inherently individual as they project different people each.

interesting conversation

btw the theory you mentioned of souls going through time and space to other worlds is similar to the view of Theosophists (whom i disagree with), i would like to know if you were aware of that or if you came to this conclusion through contemplation of religions such as Hinduism and some forms of paganism from which the concept can be drawn, if you would not mind me asking that is.

Expand full comment

Hey John, thanks for the shoutout here, I’m glad you found that piece interesting.

Expand full comment
author
Feb 24, 2023·edited Feb 24, 2023Author

It was absolutely fascinating. You did and remarkable detective work with that.

And thanks for the cross-post, that was most unexpected!

Expand full comment
Jan 25, 2023Liked by John Carter

As to the number of galaxies in the observable universe, the key here is *observable*. We don't really have any reason to believe that the "universe is round" or topologically closed. Far from it - if anything, some of the weirdness the JWST is seeing indicate there might be some kind of hyperbolic geometry going on at extremely large scales.

Which means that, as time advances, what we should see are more and more galaxies "peeling away" and condensing from the cosmic microwave background horizon as that horizon recedes from us at the speed of light. No reason that it works out to a finite extent at all.

This essay is a bit of an antidote to an attitude that I've encountered in too many other places: A sort of "closed worldview": The world can only ever be this way, this old, this big, the only things that concern mankind or ever should concern mankind are these things, etc. As a kid I had people literally tell me that the stars simply do not concern mankind, they are superfluous, they might as well be lights in the sky. The only thing we should ever do is wait for the world to end. For the religious, it was some biblical apocalypse, for the leftists it was eco-doom. To even imagine anything diverging from "the worldview" was at best woefully childish self-indulgence, and at worst sinful.

There is a hell of a lot of "elsewhere" out there.

Expand full comment
author

"This essay is a bit of an antidote to an attitude that I've encountered in too many other places: A sort of "closed worldview": The world can only ever be this way, this old, this big, the only things that concern mankind or ever should concern mankind are these things, etc."

That isn't just the point of this essay. It's the entire purpose of this substack, and you got it right away.

Expand full comment
Jan 25, 2023Liked by John Carter

These ideas are interesting, but there are things about it that bug me:

If any particular track of conscious experiences "out there" in Platonic space are as real as any other, then why do we experience what we do? Why am I me and not someone else? Why do my experiences follow some internally and externally consistent arc? (Why experience a world at all? Why not some jumbled up random mess?) How do you put a measure over this space?

Expand full comment
author

I think a lot of it comes down to the idea that we're consciousness (or God, tomato tomahto) experiencing itself in order to know itself. All of those possibilities need to be explored, and until they have been explored, they can't be known.

As to the unity or coherence of experience, without that nothing can actually be experienced, I suppose.

Expand full comment
Jan 25, 2023Liked by John Carter

One thing I don't think too many people realize about interstellar communications is that, unless you have nigh arbitrary energy to spend, it is necessarily a directional affair. That we don't see anyone sending us signals probably doesn't indicate anything other than that we aren't on anyones "point-to" list.

If earthlike worlds are extremely common, there may be even less of a reason to send signals to any particular place until you are sure there is someone there listening. Or you have a spare hundred million years of radio/laser time to burn or something.

Expand full comment
author

The other possibility of course is that they don't use light to communicate, but have figured out a way around the c barrier. Needs new physics but would explain the Great Silence.

Of course the other thing is that we've only been leaking EM for a century, and a 100 ly radius bubble is a tiny part of the Milky Way.

Then of course there's the possibility that there have been Watchers, eg Von Neumann probes, keeping tabs on us since the Pre-Cambrian.

Expand full comment
Jan 24, 2023Liked by John Carter

It was mentioned earlier in the thread, 'why have we not received signals from alien cultures', and the potentially scary reasons. My theory is called 'galactic mouse utopia'

At first technological advancement is purely beneficial, it makes life easier without interfering with biological imperatives. Eventually the pace quickens, in our case when european men began the industrial revolution and onwards, however the sentient life-form cannot keep up with unrelenting technological advancement and the drastic social changes... or rather adapt to it. A very slow process vs the tech rush. Despite living in a vastly different world to a few decades ago we are still hunter gatherers at heart, with a mentality from 30,000 years ago.

Tech becomes a yolk around the neck, denying us from indulging in our biological imperatives (war, tribalism, etc). This leads to insanity and suicidal impulses... modern european civilization being a good example. We end up in our version of mouse utopia, committing suicide by technology. Europeans, with their vast nuclear stockpiles, could easily see this world to the grave. Why not they have already lost the plot, pushing the button will become ever more tempting... I wonder if this has already happened to countless other civilizations around the galaxy, suicide by technology.

Expand full comment

The moon as the realm of the dead does strike me as well supported by the deeper mythological substata of our minds. The Moon Godess Artemis-Hekate-Selene, or Freya/Idun does rule not only the living sublunary creatures but also the souls of the dead ancestor spirits. Our lives replenishing the cup of the Gods, the eternal apple of youth of the Gods which passes from God to God with each new full moon. The Gods eating the apple one at a time. Reincarnation being the millstone around our neck, for ever drowning us in the river of time, again and again.

Til we break free from our bonds, escape the clutching embrace of the lady of the night, the Mara/Mare and find our true Soul in Sol.

This is the foundational layer of our myths, so now we only need to grasp that which is further down, below even this darkened cave and into the foundational rock itself.

We need more light.

Expand full comment