The Knack of Time
A habitual feeling of packaged emptiness when it comes to art, and the repetition of personal extravagances to decor and prize nominations is a thing of the past. The next stage of human evolution is tied to the integration of technology and human intelligence into a unique biological system. The enhancement of human capacity is in the verge of a breakthrough and this provokes questioning. Mainly because we are living disparate times and becoming used to the flooring of access to information. Ultimately, as a mass of connected humans, we know little and believe we know everything.
Many have appreciate the fact that mainstream media finally accepts that we are not living in truth, but in post- truth. The benefit to this being applied to 2016 as a year of change leaves us with a lacking feeling, as the entire 20th century has been a construction of false expectations jested by the few. Post - truth simply states reality: institutionalises what we all now into a sense of acceptance. Such as with everything that we’ve come to know over the last decades. Including the loss of privacy, the dirty tricks of wars, corporate and financial interests that jeopardise entire civilisations, and the sustained fruitlessness of politicians. It also allows us to be complacent.
Most of us are living in some way or another as enhanced human being, our cel phones being the most immediate form of prothesis. The verge of injecting technology into our systems, to enhance intelligence, instinct, thought process, physical capacity, is certainly a further crevice in the stratification of society. So is Raymond Kurzweil’s (google’s engineering director) dreams of immortality and prophesy of man and machine merger into A.I., singularity overcoming, the creation of synthetic neocortex to upgrade our brains.
By now the outcome of social division is beyond George Orwell’s reach or Fritz Lang’s perfect elaboration of science fiction. It is quite the real thing: we are proposing and accepting the existence of two human beings: those who rule, and those who are ruled. In between those who don’t care to fall one way or another. In the surface we seem to be rushing head first into our most elaborate dystopian dreams. But this is a very lineal and shallow forecast.
Real change is not attached to the economically driven - resource fueled lobby driven world. It is in the capacity of every human being to leap into a new way of living life. And in order to do so, the circumstance of seeing things differently. Anybody can tell you that the way we are living today is very different to what is was say 20 years ago. So why keep thinking in the same terms? Going by the same means of business. We are, in substance, living in a different world, and we have to adjust our view to it.
Our human nature has a knack for experiencing the end of time. And this creates a psychological game we project into the bigger frame of life. We tag Nature's final pulse in the near future; Celebrate to correspond scientific research to facts; Accept ecological disaster and human displacement for economic profit, and see those who deny it all beyond their masks.
What may sound apocalyptic is instead the level of game into our next evolutionary step in the long ladder towards dematerialisation. We are still 3 minutes away from the midnight of our doomsday and as much as we try, mainly through negligence and greed, we haven’t yet managed to kill our planet entirely. Our globe might still breathe for us and give us time to solve the flimsy equation of human stupidity (very much at disposal and abuse of our world’s political class today) and finally pierce into the plateau of higher consciousness.
The way we relate to time is at the core of our existential leap. We have simplified the elaborate mechanisms of cognition and thus provided for new forms of communication and understanding: more subtle, more powerful. Our means of associating ideas is extraordinary developed and abstract. We have the chance of appreciating reality not necessarily as a sequence of events in a lineal way but as a whole system in which our past and our present converges in an impending and constant future.
This open way of relating to time generates creative responses to circumstances, actions, and our own persona. And it is the most ancient of our capacities: one of relating to the infinite universe, through faith, spirituality or fully pledged rationalisation: beyond myth or tradition. Ultimately we close the sphere: a profound elaboration of activity we call the miracle of life. Yes, life has meaning, and this is our last treasure as beings, not to be depleted by consumerism and factual nihilism.
Beauty is our ultimately design. Our algorithms profess the answer to our quantitative dreams. But Euclides, the mathematician himself, could not withdraw from the illogical magic of our human existence. As G. H. Hardy writes in his A Mathematician's Apology (1941), "Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
This is ultimately the stuff we are made of: death and rebirth. For there cannot be a spring without a winter, nor anew without expiration. We contend to the fact that what will come about will not necessarily be entirely human. Nevertheless, in the organic stance of the wild that nurtures and makes us, our very first mirror in actions, we approach the absolute to dive into complete subtlety.
We are living the consciousness of what will come. Our actions, all our actions, count. From the most intimate of thoughts to the most public of cycles.
Life is grand and mysterious, beautiful, extravagant, an extraordinary gift. We must welcome this future, now, and take a good look at it from a completely different perspective: beyond the limits of reality as we know it. We can imagine our life and create it. Let us not forget to LIVE.
Images: Fribourg 01.01.2017