On the 18th of January of this year I attended a Zoom event off the beaten path. Not a happy birthday, but rather a happy death-day. Yes! In all seriousness. And joy.
But what’s joyous about death?!
Well, what’s joyous about moving on from a baby’s bottle?
What’s joyous about graduation?
What’s joyous about seeing your children marry and start families?
What’s joyous about looking back at ourselves and exclaiming, in embarrassed laughter,
How foolish! How childish!
I guess it’s two parts of pain for one part gain, because while there’s a lot there to make us blush, it’s monumental that at some point we gain the ability to actually bite, chew, and digest meat.
So CongracHiLashunZ! But now it’s time to move on. To where? I don’t understand even this place, other than to know that spacetime is doomed. And while that might sound funny, it is, but it is also true. How can I best explain?…Hmmmm…. You see, it’s like this.
Although you will rarely hear it in the fossilized halls of academia, it behooves us to conceive our own conceptions, think our own thoughts, and to simply know that we exist. And that wouldn’t be the case were we inanimate chunks of matter.
But We Do Know It
We are not matter existing in spacetime. We are spirits projecting spacetime. Consciousness is projecting the manifold. Not the other way around. The “hard” question of AI is not, “How does a machine become conscious?” but rather,
How Does Consciousness Invent—From Whole Cloth—This Experience of Being Alive?
(along with the attendant tables & chairs and forks & spoons)
You can listen to Dr. Hoffman from UCI tell you about it. Only eight minutes. Worth a listen. Worth a think. Because the world is undergoing a Great Awakening, and it is ideas like this—new perspectives that, alas!, acknowledge the nose on our face—that underpin this revolutionary inversion of our existence from fetid and habitual mortality to unending grace.