11-01-2018, 03:43 PM
(10-26-2018, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-26-2018, 02:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?
For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.
When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.
I don't know where brower's post is that asks this, but this is a question for a philosophical thread of some sort. As I see it, spirit is synonymous with consciousness, which cannot be accounted for with mechanistic or physicalist theories, and is called the "hard problem" because physicalist scientists try to solve it in their terms, which cannot be done. As I see it too, it is an ethical or moral issue. Although it has been well pointed out to me by Dr. The Rani that physical things are valuable, when we respect living beings as spirits, including humans and all possible higher beings beyond humans as well, then we treat them better than if we consider them as physical objects without sentience. That of course does not extent to "transhumans" who have become machines.
The machine age and the industrial age (same thing, virtually) were built on the model of mechanical cause and effect physicalism. We have transformed the world into our own mechanistic model of reality. That has been useful to us, but it is idolatry to conceive the world in the image of our own machine model. Machines cannot substitute for conscious organic beings, and real progress is to extend our natural human potential through expanded consciousness. The endless progress of machines has its own momentum now, and its impact may not be positive unless subordinated to real life.
The consciousness revolution of the 2T, which reminded us of these facts about consciousness and machines quite clearly, has been put on the back burner in the 4T by younger generations who are overly enamoured with recent high tech progress, and who live in virtual realities. This trend has accelerated just in these 4T years since 2008 with the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile tech. It would be good to take stock of this trend at halftime.
I wish you well on your Orion adventures, Bill. There are exciting frontiers unfolding, as there have been in many fields for centuries now, and perhaps never more than today. Bon voyage and safe flight, spacefan.
I recognize that when humans first ventured into space and went to the moon, they could look at our blue planet from above and from afar, and marvel at its uniqueness and special value. The ecology movement to preserve life here on Earth never got a bigger boost than when we were all able to see it from the point of view of the Moon, in 1968-69. That is the frontier I most value today. That picture was even chosen by the publisher of my book for its cover. The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?