Order vs Disorder, Jordan Peterson’s Yin Yang analogy, & Stephen Wolfram’s 4 classes of cellular automata are explored. The edge of chaos is the phase transition zone between order and disorder which is found across a broad range of complex systems. We discuss Norman Packard, Christopher Langton, John Beggs, Stuart Kauffman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and M. Mitchell Waldrop. Wolfram’s Rule 110 and John Conway’s Game of Life, both Turing complete, make appearances.

0:00 Intro.
0:59 Lambda & Wolfram’s 4 Classes.
3:32 Criticality, Avalanches, & John Beggs.
4:44 Homework? More like FUNwork!
5:08 Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
5:35 Jordan Peterson (Yin-Yang)
9:39 M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity.

Play with cellular automata here:
https://math.hws.edu/eck/js/edge-of-chaos/CA.html.
David J. Eck, Hobart and William Smith Colleges flow state by MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI ► The Secret to Happiness & Psychology of Optimal Experience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e31Tdvz_FU&list=PLyQeeNuuRL…sWGsWQOG6H

Works Cited.
Jeremy Avnet (brainsik); Senior Thesis, Mathematics; University California, Santa Cruz; 6th June 2000 https://theory.org/complexity/cdpt/html/node5.html#foot561

Jfromm (2009) http://wiki.cas-group.net/index.php?title=File: Edge_of_Chaos.png.

Hill, Sean. (2017). Toward Conceptualizing Race and Racial Identity Development Within an Attractor Landscape. SAGE Open. 7. 10.1177/2158244017719310.

In my new Newsweek Op-Ed, I tackle a primary issue many people have with trying to stop aging and death via science. Hopefully this philosophical argument will allow more resources & support into the life extension field:

Philosophers often say if humans didn’t die, we’d be bored out of our minds. This idea, called temporal scarcity, argues the finitude of death is what makes life worth living. Transhumanists, whose most urgent goal is to use science to overcome biological death, emphatically disagree.

For decades, the question of temporal scarcity has been debated and analyzed in essays and books. But an original idea transhumanists are putting forth is reinvigorating the debate. It doesn’t discount temporal scarcity in biological humans; it discounts it in what humans will likely become in the future—cyborgs and digitized consciousnesses.

The traditional temporal scarcity argument against immortality imagines the human being remaining biologically the same as it has for tens of thousands of years. Yet the human race is already augmenting the human body with radical technology. Globally, over 200,000 people already have brain implants, and Silicon Valley companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are working on trying to get millions of us to become cyborgs.

A growing number of experts even believe by the end of the century, humans will likely have the ability to upload the brain and its consciousness into a computer. In the process, digitized people will overcome biological death and engage in far more complex ways of being, including grand new designs of consciousness and selfhood.

“The inevitability of death is what makes life worth living.” — Henry.

“Would we need to extend the years everyone should continue to be in the workforce, in order to pay for those not contributing?” — Marianne.

“Imagine you have people with all the prejudices they grew up with and they never die. Or you have someone who is a dictator and they get to live forever and be dictator forever. Or you have Congress where you have 80 and 90 year olds holding office forever but now they never die so nobody new can take over.” — Avram.

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

Throughout most of human history, the goal was to establish a better life for people. Whether proponents of change admit to it or not, they hope to make everything perfect. However, this very impulse to improve security against everything bad and eliminate all physical ills could precipitate just another kind of doom.

To borrow the words of a Jeff Goldblum character, those of us who did the most to uplift humanity may have been “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, he pointed out that the modern world is complicated. Everything we don’t understand is something to fear (unless you are a specialist in it), and it is a thing that can be ignorantly speculated about in a vacuum, as vaccines are by many on social media.

Rather than give up on humanity’s ability to come to correct judgments, Sagan offers the tools of critical thinking, taking the form of the famous Baloney Detection Kit. The rules are things you can always try to offer someone if they believe nonsensical conspiracy theories.

For example, Occam’s Razor: we must default to the candidate explanation that requires the fewest assumptions. To claim all the word’s governments are in cahoots to push a hoax or poison everybody, and that their opposition to each other is false, requires innumerable assumptions about innumerable people and organizations. Any suggestion that sources of information refute you because they are in a conspiracy is bunk, because the claim relies on violating Occam’s Razor, which requires that we concede these sources agree most likely because they are all correct and succumbed to reality.

Unfortunately, offering such help is often a nonstarter for an avowed disbeliever in authority or science. They regard any intelligent challenge as simply proof you work for the elite they despise.

What makes the above even worse is that intelligence is no guarantee that you won’t believe and defend utter nonsense to the death. Many are not aware of basic logical fallacies and signs of poor reasoning. Education is usually restricted to one field of study, allowing no knowledge of the other fields. This is why false experts usually come from a different field of study than what they are being cited on. That of course is the argument from authority, where authority in general or in a different field of study is cited rather than the authority of data and consensus within the correct field.

Strong distrust in authority figures seems to arise regardless of society’s overall affluence or success. Paranoid impulses and attempts to denigrate authority figures are as vicious as ever. Perhaps due to our evolution as predators in resource-scarce environments, we may just be hardwired to think we need to fight over things. For some, this means whoever is in charge is evil and must be overthrown.

Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, maintains that things have been improving and violence has declined. However, if there is something primitive and defective in people, preventing their minds from accepting such improvements, and in fact compelling them hallucinate even worse injustices to fill in the blanks where they can’t find anything, we are going to encounter a lot of trouble. People could fight over different fictions, while burning down what could have become a resource-abundant utopia. We see the rejection of technological improvements almost every time they happen and the resistance seems like it is getting more violent, the more advanced the technology. Note the arson against 5G towers and assaults on telecommunication workers a while back.

You could literally create a machine that solves humanity’s problems or cures cancer, and there would be groups trying to destroy it. It suggests something very much wrong with either the current zeitgeist or with human nature as a whole, which will perpetually obstruct technological progress and compel us to descend back into a world of disease and poverty.

The reach of many conspiracy theories on social media seems unprecedented. The mobilization of people, whose paranoid and idiosyncratic views don’t even match one another, to march in the real world to protest what they really claim to be a medical genocide suggests something troubling. In the absence of true injustices and faults in society, many people are willing to make them up, even if they can’t agree with each other about which hallucinated injustice or threat is real. It is almost as if protest, revolt and riot just originate from being human, even in the face of nothing being wrong or things in fact getting better for all.

What is described here could ultimately suggest that the social betterment and ease of life brought about by modernity is in some ways backfiring due to the innate human paranoia not finding anything real to latch onto, and inventing fictional evils instead. It may be worse than Sagan suggested. With a substantial percentage of people rejecting authority with insufficient reason, we could see a kind of mass delusion in the era of the least violence, in which many people imagine they are suffering grave oppression and start acting on their belief even though they are not suffering at all.

The lack of severe injustices and easy access to food and modern conveniences is unnatural and might be akin to sensory deprivation, which rapidly causes vivid hallucinations, because humans did not evolve for it and their brains aren’t adapted to the situation. Not only would this explain random citizens hallucinating about medical conspiracies and protesting against them, it may even be prevalent on university campuses where academics and students probe each other, construct convoluted theories of oppression, and work towards hallucinating new injustices they can protest among themselves. Humanity seems to need bad things to talk about and rally people to do something about, even if previous generations would have laughed at us for how petty it is.

If Carl Sagan’s assessment that a complicated technological world leads to more people biting the hooks of false claims as they try to satisfy their need for explanations, a truly futuristic society for all may eventually prove too difficult to establish. Maybe the people refusing modernity should somehow be given their wish and allowed to opt out of it all, although how to do this unclear. If we try to drag everybody along with us into the future, we may end up forming a utopia only for it to be destroyed by some, convinced that it was all an evil plan in disguise. The human psyche has not evolved alongside our technology. Paranoia and pointless protest will remain, even if all the material causes of conflict are resolved.

It is our duty to get this job done. “[N]othing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration for independance.” The Declaration of Independence was written after Common Sense, mainly by Thomas Jefferson. A life extension version of it might look something like this:

Declaration of Independence from Death

We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by life with certain unalienable rights, that chief among them is life itself, that is, freedom from incurring the injustice of a defined lifespan. To secure this right, science is practiced among people, deriving its just power from the purest form of the pursuit for answers, for the lifting of the veils of ignorance that hold us back from true freedom. Whenever anything becomes destructive of this end, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new practices, laying its foundation on principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their survival. The history of death is a history of repeated horrors and atrocities. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world.

Every person who dies misses out on what very well may be an infinity of incredible wonders and opportunities. This is stiflingly enormous opportunity cost. People lose their freedom, memories, goals, thoughts, themselves; others lose them; all of humanity and the universe loses them, and nothing in the universe compares to a human. The all-around suffering that death causes to the individuals it kills and the people around them is staggering and endlessly traumatic, causing stress and damage on countless levels of every part of life and society. The death process is degrading and undignified, humiliating people for decades as it reduces them to feebleness, senility and dust. Death deprives people of the ability to know what is going on in this mysterious dimension we all find ourselves in here, what we ultimately are and why we are here. It steals away our chance to know what marvels and wonders exist in the expanses of the great unknown, our ability to experience pleasures we haven’t yet, our ability to know what it’s like to experience the fulfillment of all of our goals, and the chance to work for and live in an existence of negligible or perhaps even non-existent fallacy.

We, the freedom loving members of humanity, from all around the globe, of all cultures and creeds, solemnly declare, that we are, and of right ought to be free from death in the form of defined lifespans. To this end we mutually pledge to each other our fortunes and our sacred honor.

The customs of conventions, our current mainstream traditions, are against us, and will be so, until, by a thorough awakening for independence from death, our oldest and most sacred right, takes its rightful and long overdue place among the ranks of other indispensable rights. “The custom of all courts is against us, and will be so, until, by an independance, we take rank with other nations.”

“Wherefore, if they have not virtue enough to be Whigs, they ought to have prudence enough to wish for Independance.” People do not need to want to live for thousands of years in order to want independence from death, they need only want their own freedom to choose what course they may, and the same for their friends and families. Some people don’t want to be forced to live for thousands of years, and some people don’t want to be forced to die before the age of 125. Currently, however, only the people who might choose to die at the age of 50 have the freedom to make that choice. With unlimited lifespans, we can all be free. This is about eradicating deaths tyranny, not death, in the same way that the American revolutionaries worked to break the stranglehold of tyranny that Great Britain held over them, not stop every slight and fight they might have post-independence.

“We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; […] we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder.” Our war is even more dignified. It is removal of a tyranny and the installation of one of the greatest freedoms of all, all without a shedding of blood.

“[L]et a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The ‘law as King’ is superior to ‘humans as Kings’ because people collectively form laws with some amount of oversight of each other’s input. “Law” as the foundation, however, can still tend to be quite arbitrary. Life is what rules us, living, the chance to do people things in a universe of endless opportunities. Let life wear the crown and guide us along our path to true freedom. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” The cause of expanding our frontiers and abilities, of expanding life, is in great measure the greatest cause of them all.

“Suppose now I say ‘I’m incapable of being wrong about this: that is a book’ while I point to an object. What would a mistake here be like? And have I any clear idea of it?” There are fake books, tricks are played, there are mind altering substances, coincidences happen, there could be a secret society of magicians controlling public perceptions, or our world could be some kind of solipsistic melting pot of dreams and hallucinations. We could list things like these all day. There are simpler examples for common situations as well, like, somebody might be unquestionably convinced they are seeing a magazine when it is a zine, or a cow when it is in fact a bull. It’s also pretty common for people to think that they know a person made a mistake that they did not actually make. Consider that the way the future is headed, there is a good chance we will all have 3d printers that run on practically free energy and make everything out of basic materials like sand and vegetation, be free to travel around the universe with access to trillions of planets, and so forth. In that reality, theme planets are all but inevitable. There will be planets for specific ecological niches and time periods. People will be able to set up Plato’s Cave, Truman Show style planets, and countless other scenarios. Being that this seems so inevitable (read The Singularity is Near if you are not convinced), why would we assume that we are not in a scenario like that right now?

What happens though, is if we were to take the groundlessness of surety into account in our day to day communication, we wouldn’t be able to say anything. It seems we might almost be cornered into adopting language games. “This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground.” The temptation to stay locked into them is almost irresistible, especially the hereditary ones. “[W]ould it be unthinkable that I should stay in the saddle however much the facts bucked?” It isn’t unthinkable because the entire purpose of the game is to ride unreasonable broncos and we have been training since we were born. Wittgenstein goes on to ponder, “Certain events would [put] me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game. Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?” It’s possible but usually very difficult because safeguards and defense mechanisms are built into them too. When a person does something detrimental, “it is what it is” — when evidence bucks, faith grips tighter — another team might have won the super bowl, but their quarterback threw for more yards in the season.

There are a lot of incompatible language games being played around the world. If you tell a person embedded in another one that they are wrong, it’s almost as if they cannot know it because if they were to consider that they should doubt parts of it, it would open the door to the slippery slope leading to the “annihilation of all yardsticks”, and it is difficult, maybe nearly impossible, to live in a world without them. “If something happened calculated to make me doubtful of my own name, there would certainly also be something that made the grounds of these doubts themselves seem doubtful, and I could therefore decide to retain my old belief.” In order to take action, you have to make decisions, and in order to make decisions, some of the patterns in your mind need to win out over the others. If there aren’t any execute commands in the code, then the code is lifeless and goes nowhere.

Does this mean that we have to permit some unsubstantiated assertions? All of them? Do we have the right to dismiss any of them? If it turns out to be true that there is no foundation for knowledge or contemplation, then how could we draw such a line? I think a lot of it comes down to what I talk about in terms of how much we are willing to bet at a given time, and the use of words like “seems”. “We just do not see how very specialized the use of ‘I know’ is. For ‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression ‘I thought I knew’ “.
It’s not that we know, it’s that certain things look very likely to us from our current perspective, and we all know that our perspectives have changed, and therefore that more of them will likely change as well. We should learn to expect this, and if we are honest with ourselves, be proactive about it. I believe that is the common language game we can all play. It is like we are trying to play blackjack with people who are trying to play poker, war, concentration and rummy with us. If we all played poker, our individual bets would still range in scale depending on our hands at any given time but we would all be playing a compatible game.

When it comes to the concept of “seems”, I have found that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of alternatives, which sometimes makes it difficult to talk in terms of it in a stylistically appropriate way. Being that people are prone to asserting the uncertain so pervasively, it makes sense that we might end up with so few words for expressing variations and shades of doubt. Wittgenstein uses a variety of phrasing throughout the book that give us some ideas on how we might expand it. I pulled many of them together and summed them up:

“Suppose I replaced Moore’s ‘I know’ by ‘I am of the unshakeable conviction’?”
“It stands fast for me and many others…”
‘That’s how it is — rely upon it.’
“I learned it years and years ago”
“I am sure it is so.“
“is an irreversible belief.“
“it gives us a right to assume it.”
“Suppose it were forbidden to say ‘I know’ and only allowed to say ‘I believe I know’?”
“excludes a certain kind of failure”
“I can hardly be mistaken”
“That is the truth — so far as a human being can know it.“

That is not to say that every communication should necessarily be tentative. One of the main conclusions that Wittgenstein reaches is that our beliefs can be justified, but not certain. “[…] I find it quite correct for someone to say ‘Rubbish!’ and so brush aside the attempt to confuse him with doubts at bedrock, — nevertheless, I hold it to be incorrect if he seeks to defend himself (using, e.g., the words ‘I know’).” I think of that in terms of calculated risk. Sometimes you have to remove the language of doubt in order to favor the patterns in life that seem most important. That, though, is less like certainty and more like leadership. All confidence is either bluff or ignorance. If we have calculated the potential value in bluffing our certainty, that is one thing, but to do it blindly, unknowingly, is another.

Wittgenstein talks about how if existential certainty is there to be found, it would probably be in a form similar to a mathematical proposition and proof. “If the proposition 12x12=144 is exempt from doubt, then so too must non-mathematical propositions be.” “If” being a key word there. He reminds us that it seems as though they cannot be certain either but goes out on a short limb to humor that they are. In that process he makes what I find to be one of the most profound and rather Godel-esque insights of the book: ”there ought to be a proposition that is just as certain, and deals with the process of this calculation, but isn’t itself mathematical. I am thinking of such a proposition as: ‘The multiplication 12x12, when carried out by people who know how to calculate, will in the great majority of cases give the result 144.’ Nobody will contest this proposition, and naturally it is not a mathematical one.” That might be a key to extinguishing existential angst and establishing the foundation of common meaning.

It is true that the universe might be infinite and that even if it isn’t, the work to reach certainty might still end up being like trying to reach zero by continuously dividing by half, always inching closer, impossible to reach. In the meantime, we wait in suspense as patterns wind their way through the chaos like armies meandering through mine fields. Certainty is no more than the soldiers out ahead who haven’t been blown up yet, standing in the middle of the field with a universe of unknown mines ahead. Some evolutionary lineages successfully walk on for hundreds of millions of years before they are blown up and consumed by the blur. What choice do we have, what else might we do, use patterns we don’t understand or that are wrong more of the time? We don’t know if we will make it or not. Maybe it is too difficult. Maybe it will take a hundred million additional years. Maybe we are in the home stretch and artificial intelligence of the near future is the calculator of existential proofs. We just don’t know.

We don’t know how long it might take to get a better grip on the nature of certainty, and death is barreling down on us, hence the movement for indefinite life extension. It is tragic to be uncertain about everything, which includes our own wants and needs, when the stakes are so high. It is tragic to live and die as a captive in a dark basement. Earth is that basement and our lifespans are the walls. Some people don’t see that, like captives of Plato’s cave.

As things stand, the best we can do is be willing to make educated bets at any given time. The only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything for sure. We don’t even know if we don’t know. That is good news though, therein sneaks the foundation that begins to unravel the absurd. If the only thing we know is that nothing makes sense until we know, and that by working to figure stuff out, we could end up knowing, that small patch of philosophical ground in the quicksands of uncertainty becomes the launchpad upon which we begin stringing lines of certainty together. Anything else would be illogical, against our nature, detrimental to our fitness. Standing on this platform is a stage in our evolutionary trajectory.

“We all believe that it isn’t possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief — they are wrong and we know it. If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.”

Together with my fellow member of the World Futures Studies Federation, Dr. Thomas Lombardo, we have begun a YouTube video series of ongoing dialogues on topics pertaining to the future. In this first dialogue we focus on the book Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future and discuss the nature and value of science fiction in the modern world. We discuss the historical evolution of science fiction and the nature of mythology and why science fiction is the modern mythology. In future dialogues we will delve more deeply into books on science fiction and more broadly on futures studies and future consciousness.

CERN boffins are already conducting a mega experiment at the LHC, a 27km circular particle collider, at the cost of several billion Euros to study conditions of matter as it existed fractions of a second after the big bang and to find the smallest particle possible – but the question is how could they ever know? Now, they pretend to be a little bit upset because they could not find any particles beyond the standard model, which means something they would not expect. To achieve that, particle physicists would like to build an even larger “Future Circular Collider” (FCC) near Geneva, where CERN enjoys extraterritorial status, with a ring of 100km – for about 24 billion Euros.

Experts point out that this research could be as limitless as the universe itself. The UK’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Sir David King told BBC: “We have to draw a line somewhere otherwise we end up with a collider that is so large that it goes around the equator. And if it doesn’t end there perhaps there will be a request for one that goes to the Moon and back.”

“There is always going to be more deep physics to be conducted with larger and larger colliders. My question is to what extent will the knowledge that we already have be extended to benefit humanity?”

There have been broad discussions about whether high energy nuclear experiments could pose an existential risk sooner or later, for example by producing micro black holes (mBH) or strange matter (strangelets) that could convert ordinary matter into strange matter and that eventually could start an infinite chain reaction from the moment it was stable – theoretically at a mass of around 1000 protons.

CERN has argued that micro black holes eventually could be produced, but they would not be stable and evaporate immediately due to „Hawking radiation“, a theoretical process that has never been observed.

Furthermore, CERN argues that similar high energy particle collisions occur naturally in the universe and in the Earth’s atmosphere, so they could not be dangerous. However, such natural high energy collisions are seldom and they have only been measured rather indirectly. Basically, nature does not set up LHC experiments: For example, the density of such artificial particle collisions never occurs in Earth’s atmosphere. Even if the cosmic ray argument was legitimate: CERN produces as many high energy collisions in an artificial narrow space as occur naturally in more than hundred thousand years in the atmosphere. Physicists look quite puzzled when they recalculate it.

Others argue that a particle collider ring would have to be bigger than the Earth to be dangerous.

A study on “Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes” was provided by Lifeboat member Prof Raffaela Hillerbrand et al. Prof Eric Johnson submitted a paper discussing juridical difficulties (lawsuits were not successful or were not accepted respectively) but also the problem of groupthink within scientific communities. More of important contributions to the existential risk debate came from risk assessment experts Wolfgang Kromp and Mark Leggett, from R. Plaga, Eric Penrose, Walter Wagner, Otto Roessler, James Blodgett, Tom Kerwick and many more.

Since these discussions can become very sophisticated, there is also a more general approach (see video): According to present research, there are around 10 billion Earth-like planets alone in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Intelligent life might send radio waves, because they are extremely long lasting, though we have not received any (“Fermi paradox”). Theory postulates that there could be a ”great filter“, something that wipes out intelligent civilizations at a rather early state of their technical development. Let that sink in.

All technical civilizations would start to build particle smashers to find out how the universe works, to get as close as possible to the big bang and to hunt for the smallest particle at bigger and bigger machines. But maybe there is a very unexpected effect lurking at a certain threshold that nobody would ever think of and that theory does not provide. Indeed, this could be a logical candidate for the “great filter”, an explanation for the Fermi paradox. If it was, a disastrous big bang machine eventually is not that big at all. Because if civilizations were to construct a collider of epic dimensions, a lack of resources would have stopped them in most cases.

Finally, the CERN member states will have to decide on the budget and the future course.

The political question behind is: How far are the ordinary citizens paying for that willing to go?

LHC-Critique / LHC-Kritik

Network to discuss the risks at experimental subnuclear particle accelerators

www.lhc-concern.info

LHC-Critique[at]gmx.com

Particle collider safety newsgroup at Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/particle.collider/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LHC.Critique/

Calorie vacuums playing in the mud, isn’t that what we are when it comes down to it?  We guess our way through much of life, trying not to spend too much time thinking about how trivial it all may or may not be so as to see about keeping the levels of despair down, waiting for our turn on the chopping block… We try to make sense of this life but in the end, can never fully convince ourselves that we have because we never fully do. That challenge is a mountain whose top hasn’t been seen yet.

People are drawn to understand what the most sensible things to do with life are, or as Albert Camus writes “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions”. It’s a ballpark question. People thirst to make sense of their being, to understand what’s going on, for meaning, to track down and engage the most profound implication. Is thirst proof that water exists, as Gaston Bachelard says? Even rocks mean profound things, and we are self-aware supercomputers in a space filled with variables and has no known walls. It is very improbable that there is not a fundamentally profound implication within such circumstances.

How might we ever make sense of our existence? Masses of people are desperate with this “hope of another life one must ‘deserve’” and often take an irrational “leap”, as Camus says, to “some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.” Many rest on the hope that they’ll land a job they really love and can shine in someday but don’t put serious effort into figuring out what that would specifically be let alone work to make it happen.

People routinely try to correct each other on that issue by saying that work, not hope, builds dreams, yet when they hope that reincarnation, or living a good life, or an evolutionarily consequential life will save them in the eyes of the hypothetical eternal chroniclers, nobody is out there correcting them. You must think it all the way through, work to figure it out and achieve an understanding of it. Hoping and leaping is a distraction from this duty.

Camus explains the leap to us:

“I shall merely analyze here as examples a few themes dear to Chestov and Kierkegaard. But Jaspers will provide us, in caricatural form, a typical example of this attitude. […] He is left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the depth of experience, and conscious of that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or at least draw the conclusions from that failure? He contributes nothing new. He has found nothing in experience but the confession of his own impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory principle. Yet without justification, as he says to himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when he writes: ‘Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?’ That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ […]. Nothing logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap.”

” ‘The sacrifice of the intellect’ [-] this effect of the ‘leap’ “

“Husserl aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he leaps by this expedient to eternal Reason.”

“In truth the way [of leaping] matters but little; the will to arrive suffices.”

People develop a lot of pet coping techniques, leaps. There are some positives in them in that they generate a lot of insight and dig up a lot of leads in the process. A lot of them have come back with invaluable reconnaissance notebooks. Ultimately, we want to go all the way and finish the job though, we want actual realities.

When Friedrich Nietzsche warns us of the revolts of the “mediocre” that tend to take place in the unrestrained and anarchical “tropical tempo in the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary decay and self-destruction” as he says, the climate of the absurd, in other words, he is warning of being fooled by the communal leap. Can we manage our lives in the absurd jungle without leaping?

“Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me. I do not want to get out of my depth.”

Camus sets off to figure out whether people can live without needing to know or think they know what is going on. It’s a great question. 

“I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links them.”

Those are hope/nostalgia, absurdity, and irrationality/the brevity of time individuals have.

“And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts,”

“what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”

We describe and archive the world around us in a lot of ways. At the end of the day though we can’t explain things with surety. Our foundation still eludes us. We still don’t know what is at the bottom of the atoms, at the edge of the universe, in the spark of consciousness, written on the gate that unleashed time, what matters, what’s real or illusion, what’s agreed upon or forced, where we are, who we are, what’s going on, why it’s happening, and all the nuances around, in between and in the realities we can’t even conceive of.

“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.”

He’s saying that the mentality to have among the absurd is “That apparent modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain,” How silent is the world and which limits are definitely not surpassable?

”[Absurd is b]eing able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.”

That’s right. It’s very important that we stand there. He’s talking about agnosticism, we don’t know what ultimate realities reside in the landscapes of ignorance.

“Now if the absurd cancels all my chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability.”

In other words, anarchy within the obstacles of the absurd is the only course we can justify because we don’t know what is going on and have no concrete fundamentals. That is our starting point, lost in a labyrinth, “thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism”. Does that justify playing in the mud and chasing our tails?

“To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man ‘in whom existence is concentrated’ “, and to whom he is “forever a stranger”.

People who are captives of anarchy and absurdity want to plan escape but are afraid of the consequences and so excuse their captors. They will never know a full life, never know what is going on, forever strangers to their existence.

Why do they do that? To what degree does the desperation and despair found in nothingness and absurdity stem from death? Isn’t the whole problem not lack of meaning or ability to get it, but truncation of time? If humans were biologically immortal then what existential crisis might there be, what leaps might anyone desperately try to make in a world that gets to perpetually reveal the answers to its riddles?

Infinite regress, Descartes’ methods of systematic doubt, Derrida’s door blocks the answer to the question of all questions: ‘How can I make sense of anything without a foundation to start from?’; General Death backed by the Army of Oblivion guards the door. Camus thinks we have to protest the door and shout over the top of the death army at it while at the same time being content to know that this will never accomplish anything. He tells us to appreciate the absurdity for what it’s worth and engage “permanent revolution” against the door without desiring the need to be successful lest we go too far and get our hopes up for nothing.

“That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

“The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue.”

“what is one to conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?”

He cannot even conceive of the notion of taking General Death on. We don’t know if death can be beaten but we do know that it can’t be beaten if we don’t engage it. The movement for indefinite life extension reminds us that, “We don’t have to know we can get there to go there, but we do have to go there to get there.”

“I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.”

“He seeks his way amid these ruins.”

Since everything can be negated, no sense can be made of anything except for the sense in wanting everything to make sense, and it is impossible to make sense of it with death standing in the way. What should we do then? Find deaths Achilles heel and attack it, that’s your way out of this absurd thicket.

“[They have] not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that [they are] losing immortal life”

They are distracted by excuses and don’t know why, bowing to the bossy kid’s demands to build a fort out of sticks, just like they spend years bowing to deaths demands to arrange their own burial.

“To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience.”

Camus is so close to the path out, if he would have sought the alpha obstacle to the expansion of humanity’s horizons with honesty and courage and engaged it in battle, if he would have turned the power of that revolution on it. He doesn’t elude the door but he does elude the gatekeeper.

The worst of pains that come with winning or failing for a great cause feel better than the best joys accrued in slavery. Facing them comprises the key to happiness, the self-actualization that comes from engaging them makes even the worst kinds of suffering negligible. That fear of death must be used as a catalyst to take it on with fury, not to flee from it into comforting leaps and rationalizations. Personal perfection can only be pursued by eliminating your limitations and as Immanuel Kant tells us, the pursuit of our individual perfection is a duty.

When Camus wrote that the absurd is composed in large part of “the unreasonable silence of the world” to our attempts to understand it, he was confusing a 500 trillion trillion piece puzzle whose pieces have been scattered far and wide with a puzzle whose pieces cannot be found because he didn’t even recognize death as an alpha obstacle. It’s a part of the puzzles whose urgency is priority. He like so many makes the mistake of thinking death is an absolute given, doesn’t even consider it, can’t even see the obstacle when it’s the main one, the Allied invasion we have been putting off, he gave up before he even began. Imagine if Eric the Red, Magellan and Alexander Graham Bell had decided to devote their lives to mud wrestling instead – that’s us.

Camus is right that any riddle we find ourselves submerged in must end with all the logic with which existence is capable and we are capable of a lot more than screaming at the door over the head of death. Once we find the honesty and courage to apply logic to death, realize that it’s a vulnerable target, and turn that revolt on it too, the path that can get us out of the tangles and fogs of absurdity and to the big picture of existence become clearer.

Understanding the big picture requires pioneering everything, the stuff in the atoms, the parts of the universe and what might be beyond, the jungles of the mind, all the things we can’t even conceive of yet, and as much of time as possible, past, present and future, and that practically and inherently takes a lot of time. With success, we would then have a chance to know the totality of what is going on so we can make informed decisions about what we ultimately need and want, or as Ray Keyes calls it, the philosophy of existrophy. To know what we ultimately need and want is the most profound implication of our existence, the place that the Camus’s and leapers of the world would head if they could gain enough bearing in the mazes of the absurd.

Unlike Camus’s absurdist, the existrophist isn’t content to remain on that “dizzying crest” until their time is gone, they agnostically dig through the richness and burn through the glitches, slammed into the back of their drag racing Army of Oblivion slaying, retrofitted universe pioneering F-22 Raptor. If “the theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentialists, is reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself” and “the absurd is lucid reason noting its limits”, existrophy is the conjuring of the optimal to light with imagination, tracking down its alpha obstacles, and boring through those bedrocks of potential to reach it whether it makes it or not. Death is the next alpha obstacle between us and escaping absurdity and understanding the big picture.

One cannot draw the conclusion that a riddle is unsolvable because a riddle is unsolved. One must mount up, powered with the vitality of purpose, and meet darkness head-on in immortal combat. It’s not guarantee of victory that a person requires to make it worthwhile, it’s the chance that is there in the thrill of the fight, the fulfillment in rising to the challenge. Enough focus and determination make the bullseye look like 99% of the board, naturally attracting people-power, resources, electric charge and momentum from all around.

Cellular engineering is General Death’s Achilles heel. Death is the effects of the damage that accumulates in and around our cells, and people engineer cells in all kinds of ways every day. Our knowledge, insights, and skills in doing it keep getting better, the number of kinds of ways we can do it continue to increase, and our toolbox for working on it constantly grows and expands at an accelerating rate. What are we going to do, get worse at it over time? We will become the master mechanics of our biology.

That happens sooner than later with your participation, and all you have to do is help beat the drum. The bigger this parade of support, the faster people will come to contribute to it in all the ways it takes to get this done. So, if you can’t do experiments, beat the drum, it’s just as important. If you need help then all the information, organizations, projects and everything is on Facebook at /movementforindefinitelifeextension. Send us a message on the page there if you need anything.

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent [when his boulder rolls down the mountain and he is returning to it to roll it back up]. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.”

It is only tragic when people are NOT conscious of it. When they do think about it and it causes them grief, that is a healthy process telling them that there is something there that needs changing. One only ignores it if they think they are powerless and give up, but they are not powerless. Again, an unsolved mystery does not make a mystery unsolvable, and hard work is not an excuse to run away, even if it is constantly worked at for 10,000 years by 10 billion people and still not solved. There is not a lot of time for chasing our tails when there is so much work to get done. Like Tim Ferriss says, “Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” It cannot be concluded that ‘all of our hopes of eternal freedom are canceled’.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Happiness is what the freshmen of life think we should pursue – self-actualization, from working for a transcendent cause, is happiness on steroids. One must hope that Sisyphus never gives up working for a way through to understanding of it all or dies in the process.

“If one could only say just once: ‘This is clear,’ all would be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.”

I agree, existrophy is clear: We need to want to know what we ultimately need and want because it’s a contradiction to not need and want what we need and want, and we can’t get that unless we beat death and pioneer the big picture. Traveling the path to it is worth it whether anybody makes it or not.

“If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation.”

And that principle is existrophy.