Existential Perception

&

the Dream of The Planet

Existential levels

Prologue, analogie avec l’info. Couches/micro-mondes

Monde Non-Réalisé VS. Réalité (Monde réalisé d’une certaine manière)

Chapitre 1, Chapitre 6, refnivhum

Why evolution, hormones, etc has nothing to do with what we call the “real life” ?

What is the difference between playing and a working ?

TranscendanceTranscendance

Enjoy doing your job !

La perception de chaque être vivant n’est pas « objective » et « désintéressée » : elle tourne autour de son existence (et a fortiori son existence actuelle). Ce qui est traité, ce qui est ignoré, ce qui est important, ce qui ne l’est pas : tout cela est déjà défini par le cadre perceptif, par la façon initiale de voir les chosechoses. Chez les êtres disposant de capacités cognitives évoluées, la perception existentielleperception existentielle n’a par la suite de cesse de se spécialiser et se respécialiser (tout en conservant la base initiale) : ce qui est représenté, ce qui « existe », est très spécifique à l’individu tel qu’il est actuellement (même si on ne le réalise pas en tant qu’individu). Le monde dans lequel un individu vit est une abstractionabstraction propre à lui même.

La perception existentielleperception existentielle

La perception existentielleperception existentielle est l’idée que la perception (dans le sens large) des agents naturels (tels que nous) est spécifiquement designé pour leur existence.

Or Perceptual existence ?

Parallel narratives. In a parallel perceptive worlds. Of the same Imperceptible World. There is something very different going on.

« Human perception is mythic by nature, it is its own cosmos, with its own logic »

« In parallel perceptive worlds. Of the same Imperceptible World. There is something very different going on. The narratives are not the same. »

What is the natural world if not one big complex system that runs by itself ? And what are living entities if not agents that make this complex system ? But then how can living entities be autonomous individuals if they are part of the system, and if the system is to run by itself ? In other words, the question I will try to answer here, is why things such as physics, evolution, biology, … have conceptually nothing to do with what we call the “real life” and its « romantic » aspect, even though the real life is actually related to (if not dependent of) these things.

All of this “mystery”, I propose, is a matter of perception and how perception works.

The perception of each living being is not “objective” nor “disinterested” : it revolves around its existence and the (type of) existence it is programmed to have. The perception of each living being is thus pragmatic (perception towards action) and paradigmatic (world is perceived through a specific lens). What is processed, what is ignored, what is important, what is not important : all of this is already defined by the adaptive perceptive frame, by the current way of seeing things (which is both innate and adjusted).

Among living beings carrying advanced cognitive abilities, such as human beings, perception never ceases to specialize itself (while keeping its base) : what is represented, what « exists », is very specific to each individual as it currently is in its own narrative : the identity its brain has constructed. The world in which an individual lives is an abstractionabstraction of his own.

Existential perception is the idea that natural agents’ perception (in the broad sense) is specifically designed – through the inferential power and « rules » of evolution – for their existence (or more precisely for the roles of their existence) without them being aware of it. The main purpose of this concept is to draw a formal distinction between agents’ personal perception of their life, identity, narrative and actions as individuals, and the “actual” abstract, impersonal system-wide properties (roles, goals, causes) of agents’ life and actions.

Existential perception is a large concept, which is both easy to imagine and difficult to precisely grasp. It is also a concept that can give you vertigo about your very nature and existence. (The funny thing is that existential perception explains why existential perception seems odd, unnatural – and somewhat delirious – to humans beings. Also explains why they will not care about it unless they have an indirect reason to do so. It is quite convenient for my self-esteem, really).

Associated concepts : consciousness, individuality, identity, free will, responsibility, narrative, adaptivity, multi-agent system, natural order, teleonomy, enaction, transcendence, reality levels, folk psychology, paradigms, mental tools.

Perception and existential perception : the teleological narrative of the agent in a system

In its broad sense, a perception system is a system that gives an agent a way to view the world in a meaningful way. It is a program (or interface) to operate the world. An entity that has a perception system also has a « self » : it experiences the world as a subject, it somewhat feels like existing in this world bigger than him.

An existential perception system is an advanced kind of perception system that gives an agent a way to view the world in an adaptative, meaningful way. It does « more » than making an entity exists in the world ; it does « recreate » the world for the existence of this entity. So that what the entity experiences is not the world in some abstract perception, but its own adaptative « recreation » of the world, its own narrative. But because the agent can not experience the « real » world, it does not know that what he experiences is a recreation ; he believes he experiences the one and only real world, like every other agent. Still, no matter what an agent experiences, it still lives in the true « real » world. That is each action in the agent recreated world has a consequence in the true « real » world.

The recreated world is a simpler version of the true « real » world. When you try to explain or teach something complex to a child, you will typically recreate that complex thing so as to make it simpler and fun to understand. Or else the child won’t understand and won’t bother. That is about the same idea with existential perception : the “cold” real world is recreated to almost looks like a playground for the agent.

Perception and existential perception : the teleonomical narrative of what is life and the world

In the teleonomical narrative, there is no real world of reference, unlike in the teleological narrative. That is every view of the world is as real as another : it is a perception. There is no such thing as perceptive « recreation » of an external, unrealized, Imperceptible World. Just perceptive creation. That is the world doesn’t really exists if it is not perceived. It is just « objective matter » (in fact, as I’ll discuss later, I shouldn’t even call it anything, as we humans can’t possibly apprehend what the Unrealized/Imperceptible World is with langage). Perception is realization.

So in this teleonomical narrative, we won’t use the term « agent » as reference. Because there is an agent only if there is a system in which this agent is part of. Seing the world as a system is already a very biased perception which entails a very biased narrative. So we will use the term « entity » instead. And now here we go again with the definitions.

In its broad sense, a perception system is a system that gives an entity a way to view the world in a meaningful way. An entity that has a perception system also has a « self » : it experiences the world as a subject, it somewhat feels like existing in this world bigger than him.

a “self” to an agent : a way of experiencing the world as a subject, a feeling of existing in this world.

An existential perception system is an advanced kind of perception system that gives an entity a way to view the Imperceptible World in an adaptative, meaningful way. It does « more » that making an entity exists in the Imperceptible World ; it does create (and not recreate) the Imperceptible World for the existence of this entity. So that what the entity experiences is not the Imperceptible World in some abstract perception, but its own adaptative perception of the Imperceptible World. But because the entity can not experience the perceptive world of others entities, it does not know that what he experiences is a subjective creation of its perception system ; he believes he experiences the same real world as every other entity he perceives. Still, no matter how subjective the perception and the narrative of an entity can be, its actions do have an impact in the real world and narrative of others, because every real world and narrative is based on the same Imperceptible World . That is each action in the subjective world of an entity has consequences in the world of others entities. There is no real « objective » world, but there is indeed something that link all the subjective worlds : the Imperceptible World.

In the perceptive world of an entity, what is adaptively relevant is naturally easy to process.

The teleological narrative of existential perception (~ agent in big system) is more like a very biased human view, which could be useful for conceiving artificial intelligence in multi-agent systems. Whereas the teleonomical narrative is more « natural » and philosophical. Sometimes, I will use both of these views interchangeably in this text. I let the reader interpret what the meaning would be within the other perspective in his own mind. The balance is sometimes difficult to do (and you will eventually understand why). In the next paragraph, I will continue with the teleological narrative (agent in big system).

Loosening the leash (so that it is not noticeable that there is one)

Giving a self in a recreated world to an agent is not enough. Because at this point the agent is still… an agent. More than anything else, an existential perception system is a perception system that makes agents individuals, that is makes them “believe” they live on their own, in their own narrative, while – on the contrary – their life, narrative and actions are part of a broader narrative. Agents with existential perception “believe” they like what they like, want what they want, etc, while in fact they typically like what they’re supposed to like, want what they’re supposed to want, etc. Otherwise the world as a whole could never work. There is no such thing as true individuality when considering the world and its functioning at a global level. Therefore, one of the key aspect of existential perception is to deeply bias the way agents see the world and themselves so as to create the illusion of individuality.

So there are two points of view when considering the teleological narrative of existential perception : the point of view of an individual agent with existential perception and the point of view of a complex system composed of agents with existential perception. But first, let’s talk about the other fundamental concepts linked to existential perception.

The teleological narrative… as seen within the teleonomical narrative

Keep in mind that this last description of existential perception implies a teleological narrative (~ or perception) of the world.

We humans beings are not really agents because there is no complex system, unless you think (as a human) that there is. That is, what I call the « world perspective » is not the true perception/view of the world and what I call the « individual perspective » the false perception/view. There is no design force that made us believe we live on our own, the world is mindless. It is just a metaphor within a mind created narrative. As « human » life naturally is, in my opinion by the way ; because of existential perception, human perception is metaphorical (and allegorical, teleological, …) by nature. We have a sense of purpose, of destiny, of drama… that don’t exist at all in scientific realities. Our brain narrates our own life.

So there is no real illusion here, only perception. The illusion would be to think, as human beings, that there is indeed a hidden narrative, a hidden logic behind our perception because it can make sense (if we take physics or biology as paradigms of reference for example). But really all we do with science is playing with our perception and narrative systems so that we come up with new adaptative perceptions and narratives of the world, to fix some problems than cannot be solved using the « standard » perceptions and narratives and thus evolve. Biology tries to fight teleology but in a way, it is becoming teleology, especially with « Darwinism ». Darwinism tells the story of life, its goals, etc, through a particular perspective. And that is not a bad thing if you know it is just a narrative perspective. Sometimes when we view the world from a new narrative perspective (especially a scientific perspective, but it applies to spiritual perspectives and such too), and because it makes sense, we have the tendancy to reject the old perspective (that is, swap the paradigm of reference). But we should not forget that sense… makes sense too ! That is the world naturally makes sense to us through existential perception. And that common sense and narrative is not less real than the new one, on the contrary, it is a sense and narrative that tends to prevail because it is grounded in our natural perception.

The aim of this existential perception thesis is not to claim that perception is not what it is. On the contrary, the personal message I try to convey is that perception is exactly what it is ! And that it is purely logical and to be expected that when we change perception… perception itself appears different. Because existential perception is about creating meaning and narratives (that is teleological perceptions/views about the world) we can say that, in a way, this thesis of existential perception is a fruit of existential perception. Thus, the main aim of this thesis is to use perception to provide a teleological metaphor to highlight the evolutionnary, adaptative narrative (or logic) behind our perception systems ! For I think it might be illuminating for various endeavors, and somewhat reassuring about what we are (and what we are not).

A logically layered world – The encapsulation of levels of existence

Levels of existence is the idea that things that make the world, exist differently depending on which conceptual level they are considered : on some level something can exists as a human being, on some other it can exists as a set of organic cells, on some other it can exist as a symbol, on yet another it can have no existence at all, etc. The « narrative » is not the same.

Levels of existence can be understood by analogy with how computer programming has evolved. At first, computer programming was rudimentary and really close to electronics. The entire logic was of a very low-level (basically mathematics computations) and very close to, strongly grounded in and dependent of the hardware. From the hardware to the software, everything was integrated on the same conceptual level, in the same paradigm, in the same narrative. Information was not divided nor formatted, everything was plainly put in the system. The system had one part and was thus a “monolithic”, “omniscient” whole, knowing every starting cause and every final goal. Of course, with such a paradigm, it was difficult to develop ambitious programs because programmers had to consider and handle everything (electronics, memory, computations, ideas, …) in the same “frame”. Which resulted in a pretty messy narrative, hard to process for the human mind.

So, not surprisingly, as computers power and capacity increased, software (~ programming logic) developed too, by assembling itself on multiple layers ; each additional layer further abstracting itself from hardware than the last one, more and more marking the separation between the software and the hardware. Dividing the logic makes programming a lot easier and allows to manage and build ambitious programs without requiring a godlike intelligence. Because when you are in one particular layer of such a system, a lot of information is scrapped. You are not (and don’t need to be) omniscient of the whole system, you have a simplified view of it, a simplified narrative of what’s going on.

Nowadays, the abstractionabstraction is such that the higher-logic layers revolve around concrete ideas (thanks to object-oriented programming paradigms for example) : programmers directly and “naturally” write about tangible objects (person, chair, apple, etc) and their actions – and interactions – (walk, speak, roll, etc) in the code, less and less dealing with and even mentioning technical aspects. Typical programming has nearly became like… using programs. There is a near total disconnection and abstractionabstraction from the underlying physical realities. And yet, these realities are still there (just not “perceived”, we might say). The translation (or transduction) of these narratives (things, actions, …) from the highest layer (person, chair, walk, …) to the lowest layer (basically electrical activity) is done through the successive passage of information in each of the lower layers, down to reaching the final layer (the lowest, the “true” hardware), and thus giving birth to a physical manifestation. We go from one narrative to the other.

In each layer, the way of conceptualizing what is getting in (the input) and what is getting out (the output) is different, even though it is in fact the same “essence”, the same “substance” these different layers are all dealing with. Once again, we might say that in each layer, things are “perceived” differently, each layer has its own narrative. And this is not for the sake of being different than the others. This is for the sake of better functionality. It is pragmatic. The components of a layer are on a “adapted” conceptual level, a level of their own, that allow them to properly carry out their role within their narrative.

So this basically sums up how computer programs works nowadays. And I think that this working is analogical to the working of the world. What we have done with programming (the way we made it evolve, abstracting from the technical “aspects” and putting it – as much as we could – on our human level of conception, using narratives) resembles what nature has done with all sorts of things, and with us and our perception, in particular. That is complex things of the world are on a level of their own, in their own narrative, they typically do not take care of what is below and what is above this level of them (and by “what is above” I am not referencing to some kind of Great Architect of the Universe but to what we can call biological “purposes” or “goals” that quite clearly appear when we look at things at a macroscopic level ; such as the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction). For example, in its “natural” state, if a human being fall in love with another one, he will not realize that this is because of the work of lower level processes (detection of attractive traits and features, hormonal activationactivation, etc) and that this fits into the larger process of the survival of his species. All that is not part of its narrative.

The thing is, for the natural human being, love has nothing to do with those things. One is just attracted by another, and they love each other. End of the story. We totally and naturally abstract from what is below and what is above. And despite this abstractionabstraction, things appears to us as “finished products” : one does not get the impression that there might (let alone have to) be reasons and explanations behind them. It is like you are actually working in a particular service of an organization but you have no idea there is an organization, and you have no idea that you are yourself an organization and that they are entities inside you that are making you work. Therefore, the whole world might as well have popped in its current state from nowhere (or it could just be a night dream), without any background/developmental history, without any explanations, that it would not change very much for us human beings. Our narratives would be unchanged, we would just live our human lives as we do now. By the way, this is the typical idea that we find in many religious myths (~ creation of the world and humanity), somewhat “proving” that our minds have no problems with such possibilities. It is also quite peculiar to notice that humans learn about their « origins » (evolutionnary ancestors) very late in school. That is after living in their narrative for a very long time, without any problem whatsover.

I call this abstractionabstraction phenomenon the encapsulation of levels of existence. On the human level, love is love. On a more microscopical level, love is some kind of chemical and hormonal process. On a more macroscopical level, love is some kind of bonding system allowing for reproduction. Is the human level love related to hormonal and reproduction processes ? Yes, undoubtedly. Is there a human conception of love at the hormonal level ? And at the macroscopic level ? I don’t think so. Human love exists only on the human level, as part of their narratives. The relation from one existence of love (human, hormonal, etc) to another is totally opaque, they do not fit in the same story. So is there a deep relation between each of these existences of love ? No, the relation is purely functional. It is like someone with particular technical skills helping someone else making a project exists by handling some technical aspects without knowing anything about what the project is about, some kind of utility “service”. Each conception of love stands on its own ; they are the same thing and at the same time they are something completely different. At each level of existence of the world, things are logically recreated, and encapsulated as such.

What I mean is that the world we live in is not just one big system divided into layers. Because if you zoom in one of the layer of a big system divided into layers, you are still in that same system, in the same narrative. And thus if you take one layer of such a system, it just makes a part of that system. Whereas in the type of system that the world is, if you zoom in one of the layer, it is like you are in a completely different and unrelated system and narrative (what you get is not just a zoomed-in vision of the zoomed-out world). That is if you take one layer of the world, it does not makes just a part, it makes a whole. It makes a world. This is the main idea of what a capsule is. It is a part that completely stands on its own.

Encapsulation of levels of existence is basically how to make parts with wholes. It is odd and at the same time not so odd. For if you are working on really big systems (and I heard the Universe is a big system), the idea to conceive everything as parts of parts of parts, etc… does not seem to be conceivable at all. Nor does it seems to be an adaptive solution. So what do you do then ? You create parts that are wholes themselves. You create your layered system so that each level seems complete from within, so that in one particular level you don’t need the big picture or to go into details. That way your system will be adaptive and works better. Encapsulation allows a somewhat fractal logical design. It allows ongoing complexity without increasing complexity. Because before createing a complexity of higher order, the complexity of lower order is simpified.

MIB

Different realities levels.

The encapsulation of levels of existence is a marvelous conception system. It allows the world to emerge by itself, to develop new things while remaining “consistent” with what it already is. For behind this logical recreation, isolation and “elevation” of things, remains, “masked”, what was already there before. In some way, every complex thing of the world is still just atoms. It is the same as with high level programming. High level programming allows to create classes and objects that are “humanly concrete” (people, feeling, etc) and functional, without ever actually taking care of everything else (electronics, computations, etc). But that does not mean that behind (or rather “below”), everything will not be translated into computations, electronic activity and all. Or else it would be true magic.

Because of how the world is layered, we can think that some of the things from old layers are no longer present, or do not apply on some other things, whereas in fact, they do. We just can’t perceive it. I call this « princesses don’t fart » effect.

The human level is the level of common sense.

Une belle femme qui pète.La belle femme n’existe plus.

So now that the concepts of levels and encapsulation of existence are introduced, let’s get back to existential perception. Each logical layer of the world is an encapsulated micro-world of its own, having its particular level of existence, its particular narrative, isolated from the others. And all agents that are on a particular level of existence share the same kind of existential perception system, and thus the same kind of narrative. We humans beings all see the world as humans. We are on the human level. Which is the level of common sense (our human common sense that is).

And as I was saying, there are two points of view when considering the teleological narrative of existential perception : the point of view of an individual agent with existential perception and the point of view of a system composed of agents with existential perception. First let’s dig into the latter.

Why create agents with existential perception ?

There are many reasons to create and use agents with existential perception. Most of them are functional. Evolution is a brute-force process that tries a lot of solutions and keeps the ones that work the best. What works stays, what does not is left behind and dies. Obviously, making agents with existential perception proved to be the best solution. And as I was saying, there are lot of reasons for that.

Illusory autonomy

First, the main reason is that the world needs to run itself and all its narratives without any monitoring system (because you know, there is no God, or he isn’t there anymore… or he just watches the show eating pop-corns). And if the world is to run by itself, it is better that its agents do what they are “supposed” to do. And for agents to do what they are supposed to do, either you program them precisely like dumb robots to follow a narrative (which is not adaptive, and evolution can hardly do that type of programming anyway) or you just program them to like what is going to be their « hidden » job, their intended narrative. Agents that feels nothing versus Agents that are conscious and feel like slaves forced to follow a narrative versus Agents that are conscious and feels like free individuals following their own narrative, which have better chance of survival and reproduction ? Intuitively, we can get how the later is the best adaptive solution. There is no evolutionnary reason for us not to have an « illusory » sense of individuality.

So here you have it, illusory autonomy. From a systemic perspective, illusory autonomy is a really great design choice. With it, you keep all the advantages of autonomous agents while keeping the logic centralized. That is the agent is indeed autonomous : it handles itself, no one is making it work, and no one is making sure that it works. But it does not obey its own rules, for its rules are not merely its own. They are at the same time its rules and the rules of the global system. Agents are not merely autonomous for them, they are autonomous for the global system. Hence the way they create their own narrative is very biased.

And here we are on Earth and every living agent does what it is supposed to do. Yes, even us, almighty rational humans. It is true that we built a lot of things, have complex societies, etc, seem to have thought out everything ourselves and thus seem to have left the evolutionary framework. But we should not forget that if teleological existential perception is really a thing, then it is natural for us to feel free and out of the evolutionary framework… Autonomy really is our natural religious myth. I think that as it is, every human organization and narrative is grounded in our human existential perception. And so as every human life is typically human, every human organization is typically human, works according to general human rules, and has typical human goals. Our raw intelligence is still very limited, and does not allow us to create completely independent and running organizations. Ask the typical human why he is attracted by what he is attracted, why he avoids what he avoids. Ask the typical child why does he go to school. Ask the typical student why he studies what he studies. Ask the typical adult why does he go to work, why does he want to have a mate and create a family. We do plenty of things without having deep and well thought out reasons for doing so. And that is not a coincidence. Because of our existential perception, there is so much that is pre-thought out for us. Think about the way we approach things such as cleanliness, aesthetics, hairiness, friends, family, aging, work, thought, sleep, night dreams, weather, people looks, relationships, pain, illness, body care, reputation, voices, music… And then think about them on a functional systemic level.

Agents actions and narratives are not directly programmed. So in a way, yes they have free-will. But because their drives are (programmed), they have free-will on the base of these drives. That is one of the reasons why agents seem to be in full control when you look at them acting at some point in time, but do not when you look at the big picture. And agents internally look themselves acting in the everlasting present, so they naturally feel in full control. Handy. In a coming chapter of this essay, I will present the Automaton Will Thesis, which is a proposition of how natural agents (especially humans) create and make decisions that progressively craft the narrative they are supposed to have.

So that was the first reason of existential perception : ensuring everyone follows its typical narrative and does its typycal job without any instruction.

Keeping it simple

The second reason to create and use agents with existential perception is to keep systems as simple as possible, with optimized and economical information processing/storing based on the agent level, avoiding unnecessary information (natural agents are not omniscient at all). In one agent recreated world and narrative, in between causal information is scrapped. Only fast working indirect links are present in the agents perception system. So that when an agent does something in its capsule it doesn’t know why it does it in the first place, it doesn’t know the distal cause(s) of its behavior.

That is what I call distal-to-proximal shortcut system. For example, from an evolutionary perspective humans like to hunt because hunting is a good thing for survival (which is the distal cause of hunting behavior). But as humans, in our human capsule and narrative, we just like to hunt for the sake of hunting, for it is pleasant (which is the proximal cause of hunting). And that is why humans hunt even when they don’t need to. There is the same thing with food, we tend to eat even when we don’t need too (hence obesity).

Causal chains linking all the naratives are not fully nor explicitly encoded into agents. They are encoded as shortcuts using dedicated proximal systems such as pleasure and stress. Pleasure is one of the main component of distal-to-proximal shortcut systems, as are stress and other “emotions”. To give another example, we naturally fear snakes because at the end of the typical encounter scenario with a snake, we end up beaten, suffering and feeling bad. And evolution selects traits that make us avoid the narratives where we end up suffering and feeling bad. That’s why we naturally avoid suffering and feeling bad. So instead of the emergence of an individual with the ability to coldly imagine the whole encounter scenario with a snake (which is almost impossible and very very unlikely for a blind process such as evolution to « create »), what emerges is an individual with the ability to directly feel bad upon seeing a snake. Skipping directly to the end of the scenario (feeling bad) when the scenario starts (seeing a snake) makes agents have the right behavior (avoid the snake at sight). There is a narrative hidden between every emotion.

A more refined component of distal-to-proximal shortcuts systems is beauty. For example, why do we like bodies with specific shapes ? Because we find them beautiful. And why do we find them beautiful ? Because they imply a good functioning in virtue of evolution (a protection potential for men, a fertility potential for women, that kind of things). Beauty perception is a shortcut to good functioning.

Why do humans take care of their children ? Mostly because they find them cute. And why are they cute ? Because it is vital to take care of children, our genetic heritage depends on it.

Most of natural systems are parallel mirrors to evolution.

At the end of the line, you’ll probably get this so… skip to it. Based on previous probabilities.

Individualism

We naturally see ourselves as individuals. Heck we naturally perceive as physically disconnected (I have my body, you have yours).

Especially if you are a princess or a spoiled brat (video games). You won’t realize how the world works.

Humans beings and existential perception

Distal-to-proximal shortcuts explains How come we, intelligent beings, naturally know nothing about evolution ?

We human beings, with our intelligence, can realize distal-causal-chains. We can realize that if we continue to harvest the natural resources of Earth at this rate, it will create problems. If we are smoking we can realize that it is bad to smoke and that we could end up with cancer. If we are not healthy, we can realize that it is bad to eat junk food and that it is good to exercise. But because there are no distal-to-proximal shortcuts for these things, it is unlikely that we will actively act in regard to these things. For because of our existential perception, we are made to actively act only in regard to proximal-causal-chains (that is why in addition to reasoning, one needs to create proximal-causal chains through conditionning).

Anyway, because we are made and born with a full set of distal-to-proximal shortcuts, we only know and realize the distal-causal-chains that we learn during our life. If it were not for these innate shortcuts, we could not be intelligent as we are without knowing almost everything about evolution naturally, without knowing the back story behind each of our behavior. But because of these shortcuts, information is scrapped and every distal causal chain is always brought down to (and stored as) a proximal causal chain.

Existential perception makes it theoretically possible for an individual to live and develop himself without ever realizing that his perception is existential, that is without ever questioning his existence, his goals, his actions, without ever detaching himself from his own narrative, etc. In fact, it is probably the case of most individuals.

The thing is, if you are a human being you have to be Charles Darwin and spend years studying birds and whatnot to start to realize what you are actually doing in this world from a zoomed-out perspective (to realize what all this fuss is about, if I may). If you are never told about the ins and outs of evolution, and despite your human abilities to realize things, you will probably just live your narrative without ever realizing what it was parallely about all along. (Maybe you’ll believe in some typical human religious explanation of life though, which in terms of being encapsulated in a layer is even worse that believing in nothing, because it’s just putting every natural narrative within the same bigger human narrative…). And even when you get to know the ins and outs of evolution, it does not really change how you live your life (just like knowing other distal-causal-chains – smoking and alcohol are bad for health, etc – do not change the way people live) .

Existential perception kind of forces us to stay “kids” forever. For even as matured adults, we see the world as a kid, and act on the world as a kid. A kid thinks the way he sees things is the only way to see things, he thinks the way he sees things is how things are. Furthermore, a kid does not want to get bored with things that are not directly attractive, he wants to play with things that have a direct impact on his pleasure. A kid has an “end-user” experience of the world. As adults, we start to realize that things are more complex than what they seemed to be when we were kids. We start to realize that the world is far bigger than our little life. We also realize that life is not really a playground, and that we can’t always do things that we like. But still, we don’t live under the impression that our perception is biased. We live under the impression that we see the world as it is. And we try as much as we can to do things that we like. And that is why we never really completely leave this kid perception. Worse, this maturation of perception from kid to adult might just be as programmed as every other aspect of maturation. At the end of the line, we can’t help but perceive things as humans.

So, is everything we perceive a fake illusion then ?

If you read and understood what I explained here. You might be thinking about the existence of a « true » world hidden behind our perception. You might be thinking that we live without realizing what our life is really about.

It is hard to realize that if we find someone beautiful and attractive it is because our perception system detects features that are « favorable » to evolution. Whereas someone just seems beautiful and attractive in itself. Likewise, the style of a super-hero in a dark and massive suit or the style of a super-heroine in a classy and sexy outfit do not strike us as related to powerful evolution features either. It strikes us as impressive and stylized design. So is everything we perceive just a fake illusion that hides the true nature of the world ? Let’s take another example to answer this.

Naturally, humans beings see decisions as the deliberated result of a choice. But upon studying the supposedly underlying realities of decision making, one will realize that decisions are actually nothing more than complex automatic reactions. One would then tend to conclude that choices do not exist. But I think it would be a mistake. If I force myself to perceive the face of someone as a set of parts or physical matter, am I still perceiving this someone’s face ? No, I am then perceiving the parts or physical matter that makes the face of this someone. So when I am seeing a decision as a complex automatic reaction, I am seeing what makes the human decision in a parallel logic, but not the human decision itself (the existential hardwired human level logic).

We can do the same questioning with colors, sound pitch, solidity and many others natural perceptions which appear very different through the lens of science… You can’t see colors because they don’t exist, they are some light interpretation. You can’t touch solid objects, because there is nothing to be touched but empty space, solidity is an illusion of electromagnetic forces. So people will say. Not realizing that say, light, when you don’t see it, is not the same as light when you see it. That empty space on a microscopical level (between atoms) has not the same perceptive identity has empty space on our human level (between tables in a classroom). Nowadays, quantum theory makes things even more ridiculous for those who don’t understand encapsulation, it’s like some people are questioning everything in our capsule because of that new one. Matching capsules and narratives is a good thing, but it should never meant killing one.

Heck, screw colors and whatnot, we can even see morals in the light of evolution (read Robert Wright’s « The Moral Animal » for a complete overview). And while this point of view is quite compelling, it makes this « illusion » effect of explaining one capsule from another really obvious.

Indeed, when you think about morals in the light of evolution, it seems like we are deceiving ourselves. It seems like our whole sense of self is an illusion, not to say a joke.

You don’t really hear high or deep sounds, only waves with high or low frequencies.

You see, using our mind flexibility and abstractionabstraction ability, we can quickly come to « realize » that things are not what they are (if we believe there is only one reality and one narrative). But of course, this is tricky and nonsensical. What is something that is, if not what it is ? Why the implementation would be the true nature and the thing implemented the illusion ? If anything, it should be the other way around. Plus, the supposed implementation is just one we created afterwards within our minds ! And it becomes the truth !

Additionnaly, it should be noted that underlying realities of thing X is just a trick of the mind. These underlying realities are merely parallel realities, as in parallel perceptions of the same thing X. Because it is also the product of our perception, which can’t really change level… Perception does not really go up and down, it just changes completely. There are underlying realities and narratives if you want to believe there are. That is if you link two different perceptions in a mental structure sharing the same identity. By the way I think that illusions are just conflicts between perceptions. That make us believe some perception is an illusion. Because we believe that by taking say, the scientifical physical paradigm as reference we become objective. Whereas it is still our subjective perception that takes another perspective. You get it ? We never really go out of any perception. The illusion is that we think that somehow we are. Physics is something that our collective human intelligence has created. Just as Evolution is. They do not exist more (or less) than the human level does. The whole Cosmos as we can apprehend it, is in our head. Illusion really is a nasty word, because it is itself an illusion. To me, the only usage of the word « illusion » that is not illusory is when referring to the feeling that we left any perception (whereas we just changed it) and see things clearly.

Furthermore, one should not forget that the relation between natural systems and evolution is merely causal, not ontological. Natural systems have their own nature. So it is incorrect to say « It is hard to realize that if we find someone beautiful and attractive it is because our perception system detects features that are favorable to evolution. » And correct to say : « …someone just seems beautiful and attractive in itself ».

So long story short, what we perceive is not a fake illusion because a perception can’t be true or false on its own, it is just what it is. There is no « true » world hidden behind our perception. Only different ways of perceiving the same Imperceptible World. Through parallel logics and parallel narratives. A meaning can’t be denied unless you give authority to a parallel meaning. And from an anthropologic perspective, I believe human beings implicitely agreed to give an authority to the logic of physics and science (as the true reality) because it is « inhuman » and follow (rather) exact rules. Allowing humans to study the world in « external » agreement. But now when we try to join this external logic with human logic, it doesn’t make sense. We’re trapped.

Chasing a ghost

In parallel perceptive worlds. Of the same Imperceptible World. There is something very different going on. The narratives are not the same.

The truth is that, there is no truth. Only subjective perception. Which is functional. Just as the classic metaphorical and teleologic perceptions of the theory of evolution are functional (natural selection, pressure selection, survival of the fittest… and you know even the term « evolution » is a metaphor that entails a particular narrative about life). What I previously called « illusory autonomy » is a pure teleological perception of the world for example. A pure teleological narrative of our existence. It is as much true or wrong than « God control the world » is. When humanity will get this, it won’t be trapped anymore, trying to convince itself that there is a (scientific, physical) perception of the world that is not a ghost like the others. It will understand that what should prevail, is the adaptative human created truth. Because that’s why our mind is able to make sense of the world in the first place.

Mathematics for example, might just be an abstractionabstraction of some part of our natural perception, that is something akin to a teleogical view of the world. A « scientific god » that is in our head, just as the religious gods are. Which would mean that when we study mathematics, we don’t study the Cosmos (an external truth), but our perception of the Cosmos. Sure this perception of the Cosmos certainly depends on what the Cosmos is. But how exactly, we have no way to know. Because adaptationadaptation is by nature, not objective. And that our perception, our only way to apprehend the Cosmos, is adaptive. Before we are born to life, the external Cosmos is already forever lost to us. So the specific traits of what we call mathematics (exactitude, …) might as well reflect something that is completly different in the external Cosmos. And thus the studying of mathematics might just be a very special part of the quest of knowing ourselves. Something that is very introspective. Something like losing yourself into part of your head.

If mathematics was completely relying on visual representations, it would be quite easy to see how it is grounded in our perception. Because, we kind of know how visual perception works. And more importantly, we know it is perception. What mathematics relies on, not so much.

And therefore because it is so distant and abstract from the common human level, there is no grounding to « easily » refute the teleological narrative of mathematics (that is the idea that mathematics exist outside our heads, as some kind of langage of the Universe), unlike, say, the « Intelligent Design » narrative of the world which can be refuted (or at least « damaged ») by scientifc views. While Intelligent Design might as well just be an abstractionabstraction of some part of our natural perception too, focused on « meaning », « intentionintentionality », « control » and such. The teleological narrative of mathematics is far less sensible to belief. Probably because it relies on parts of perceptions that are completly hardwired, widely shared and anterior to our humanity. It is easier to see how we actually project our own meaning, intentionintentionality and control onto the world when we reason about Intelligent Design, and realize that there are actually no such things outside our heads. Than to see how we project our own sense of mathematics onto the world when we reason about objective mathematics, and realize that there is actually no such things outside our heads.

I would tend to say that at least, there is no reason to refute mathematics as more than a shared subjective perception, unlike « Inteligent Design ». But then again, « Intelligent Design » might help some people live (or rather cope with) their life, and thus be adaptive. And to be objective, we would need to weigh the good and bad that both mathematics and intelligent design have brought to the human world, not just rely on our personal opinions about them.

All in all, I think that scientists that don’t understand religious people lack a sense of relativity and self-criticism, because they might as well just be as religious without realizing it. If mathematics was not relying on an hardwired, wide shared, part of perception (as I suspect it is) that every human can sync with, then  some scientists would be cold egocentric fanatics that think what they see in their head about mathematics is in the external world, and that everyone have to comply with this narrative.

Some people, when they study the world, their perception see god. No matter what people say, they see god. It’s here, everything matches this narrative. Others, their perception see mathematics. No matter what people say, they see mathematics. It’s here, everything matches this narrative.

Some people don’t believe in God because they can perceive the world without God. Their mind can come up with a narrative about the world that don’t imply a God. Hence they say God doesn’t exist. And never did.

If we could perceive the world without current mathematics (through a new replacing paradigm), would we say that current mathematics don’t exist and never did ?

Mathematics has such a strong universal value for us that we think it could allow us to communicate with potential alien life, by sending a sequence of prime numbers for example. But the thing is, mathematics might as well just be a tad less specific than human language. And therefore would be totally random noise for most alien life.

The idea that mathematics might just be something part of our perception seems crazy. I agree. I might be pushing the concept on this one. You’d think we would have known if it was the case. But then… how could we have ? And then again what do we really know about ourselves and our perception ? How many educated people and scholars have thought about existential perception and the idea that our minds create our own narratives ? There is so much that we took for granted without questioning it. So much irrational common sense. That I would not be surprised that monumental mindfucks like that could happen in the future of humanity. That we would have been blinded by existential perception all along, even in our most serious and rational work.

In the same way you can think that we got onto something universal and solid with physics, something that is not from our mind. I mean that shit is stable ! But maybe it appears stable because of the relatively slow pace our minds are cognizing the world. Maybe there exists entities that are cognizing at a speed far beyond our own, in which our physics stability is their quantum physics randomness.

Encapsulation, parallel narratives, and cognition

Nowadays, many of cognitive sciences’ fields and researchers are focused on the aspects of cognition that are external to the brain. We talk about “embodied”, “grounded”, “embedded”, “extended” or even “situated” cognition. The focus and growing awareness on these aspects (the importance of body and environment in the making of cognition) is such that some of the people concerned by the subject (not every one of them) tend to radically reject the idea of abstract mental representations. Then again, I think this is the typical mistake. I think it is important to distinguish two things : the implementation (how) and the thing implemented (what).

First and foremost, I think that one have to realize that behind every abstract thing (and the narrative they are part of) there is necessarily more concrete things (and associated narratives) that make it exists. The thing, in the case of cognitive science, is that we are currently realizing that the concrete that makes cognition is a lot closer and a lot bigger than what we had imagined. However, what we are currently realizing is rather logical and to be expected in regards to how natural development is done. Natural development is based on economy (recycling) and transcendence : most of the things emerge with a role and then acquire new ones as time goes on ; things that are already created are reused in order to carry out different roles than their initial role. They become part of different narratives.

Considering this, it would have been quite surprising that our organism contained mental representations, that is representations constructed using a purely abstract information system, a system “ideally” made to develop things from the ground up (rules, amodality, etc). Not very evolutionnary like. But if the implementation of our representations are “concrete”, that is using “building blocks” that are not abstract, that does not necessarily mean that there can’t be abstract representations (cf transcendence).

In a video-game, a character is an abstract representation within the narrative of the player. But when you look into the game code and see how this character is made and realized by the gaming system, how this character is “programmed”, then you realize that this character is not what he seems to be when you play, you realize that it is an « illusion » : it is computing “stratagems” that allow the making of this character in the game. This character is “simulated”.

In the case of cognition, it is the same thing. Some abstract representations are actually simulated by sensorimotor brain areas for example. But what one need to understand, is that we can go further back, “deeper”, in the implementation, in the simulation of things and embedding of narratives. On one level of narration, we can see every type of memory as plasticity. On another level, we can see cognition as a chemical-physical process, simulated by atoms and molecules.

Stepping back and looking at it from a detached perspective, one will realize that the whole reality is a simulation. There are layers, levels of reality, and thus abstractionabstraction and concreteness depend of the level of reference on which we set ourselves to conceptualize things.

Reality constructs itself in a transcendental way, every transcendence being a new simulation. That is, from the usage of concrete things (with a precise purpose, an already active role) as building blocks, “innovative” things and narratives emerge (things that will themselves potentially become “concrete building blocks” in an ulterior development).

And so, all these “new” theories of cognition explain how cognitive things are made, how cognitive things are implemented within our organism. One might say that they allow to explain the “magic” of conscious and developed life. But it is not because a magic trick can be explained that it is no longer magic. The narratives are not the same.

One thing (and the narrative it is part of) can not be reduced to its composition, and even less so to an explanation of its composition (explanation which by the way, is also a narrative, an abstract thing, a perception).

The mere fact that we can conceive – a fortiori naturally conceive – this trick as magic makes it a magic trick. And so even if magic is not what it seems to be (which by the way more or less defines it), it does exist.

In the same way, abstract representations are admittedly not what they seem to be (this is here the very principle of transcendence), but they do exist. One can not deny the existence of something on the pretext that it is – or rather that it can be seen – different than what it seems to be naturally on the human level (because in this case, nothing does exist…). Furthermore, the thing appears different only when we place ourselves on a different level of perception and narration than the human level. Yet, analogically, it is rather obvious that things will appear different depending on the level from which we look at them. Science is a particular point of view, allowing rational explanations on things. This point of view might be more useful than others, but does certainly not take into consideration everything that makes the world (which is precisely the reason why it is useful).

What is funny, is that if science did not implicitly accept transcendence (because of existential perception biases every human scientist has), it would never make that kind of mistake (which in a way, is a denial of transcendence). For in practice, science is divided into distinct and abstract fields of study. For example, in psychology (in the broad sense), we study thought and brain mechanisms without really caring of everything that is “around” (physics, matter, etc), without being concerned by everything thought and brain mechanisms imply. On the one hand because it has seemingly nothing to do with psychology, and on the other hand because it would really be too complicated and unmanageable to have to explain everything from the ground-up before tackling anything the slightest bit “elevated” that interest us ; to say the truth, we do not even consider to do it. As a result, in each field of study we abstract from a big part of the world and we naturally accept the existence of some “objects” as they appear to us intuitively, through commonsense psychology (it is here that we accept transcendence). In other words, each field of study has its own narrative, its own reality, allowing to frame and simplify the study it aims to do. Researchers are in micro-worlds. So necessarily, when we end up studying the borders of our micro-world, or even stepping out of them, we are confronted to the paradigms and narratives of the neighboring micro-worlds, and so if we think that there is but one reality of the world, we start to call into question the one we studied. Wrongly so, because it is simply another view, another level of the same thing.

It is a bit like if, fascinated by “princesses” since our earliest childhood, one day we eventually realize that princesses go to the toilet, fart, etc, just as everyone else ; and that under the disillusion, we could no longer consider their existence as princesses. On a more serious note, it’s like rejecting the intelligent design of the world upon realizing that God does not exist (at least as we thought he did).

Existential perception and « realism »

We say that someone who views things coolly and rationnaly, without ideals, is being realist. Because he sees things for what they are. But in my view, this is an incorrect denomination. This kind of perception is no more realist than naive existential perception. It is even less realist I dare say. I would rather call it being extra-realist. That is using our mind to realize things in a different way (that is, realizing things as others things, through parallel perceptive frames and narratives). Precisely in order to see them differently than what they are naturally through existential perception. So as to make of them a rational and unemotional reality. A reality that could prove to be useful. But at most, it’s being lucid. Certainly not seeing things for what they are. It’s seeing different things entirely.

On dit que quelqu’un qui voit les chosechoses froidement et rationnellement, sans idéaux, est réaliste. Parce qu’il voit les chosechoses pour ce qu’elles sont. Mais selon moi c’est une dénomination incorrecte . Ce genre de perception n’est pas plus réaliste que la perception existentielleperception existentielle naïve. C’est même moins réaliste si j’ose dire. J’appelerais plutot ça être extra réaliste. Utiliser son esprit pour réaliser les chosechoses d’une manière différente. Pour justement les voir différentes de ce qu’elles sont naturellement pour la perception existentielleperception existentielle. Pour en faire une réalité rationnelle et non émotionnelle. Qui peut permettre des chosechoses.

If you are an entrepreneur, you’ll realize that power or money is what drive the world. If you are a scientific you’ll realize that emotions, genes transmission, or whatnot drive the world. You can realize that girls don’t like you for what you are but for what you provide. All this of course is true and false at the same time. Because truth is contextual. (And because most of these are distal meta-narratives constructed from the results of multiple proximal systems. Just as religious myths are. There is no real distal intentionintentionality in all this. For example, I have a woman friend of mine… she has very non-explicit feminine manipulative behaviors towards men like me… But her meta is so weak and she is so raw that I realized she was not doing this on purpose at all – well most of the time. She is just being herself and can’t help but do what she does when interacting with men like me. And that is a reason I like her. She’s just like a cat, naturally manipulative while paradoxically not being able to be calculative. The narrative your perceive someone to be in might not be the narrative that someone perceive itself to be in).

These are just some meta-narratives people tell themselves about the world.

Even if we can derive from our natural existential perception and narration, we never really leave existential perception and narration. We merely transform it. And these new modes of perception and narration will never replace the natural existential perception. Or else you’ll become inhuman. These are additional tools. And locking your mind in one reality/narrative thinking it is the one and only reality/narrative is just about the worse thing you can do to evolve. I believe that our mind has a « truth bias » and naturally wants us to believe there is only one reality/narrative. So at many times throughout your life, you’ll be convinced that some reality is the truth. Until something breaks it or you willingly let it go.

Science is hard to break. Because it’s based on pure observations. But that does not mean it tells the one and only truth. It’s just one way (well multiple ways actually, science is not a single theory of whole) to perceive the world. It’s just models. And most of them are somewhat contradictory. But that is not an issue. Because a model exists to be useful in some context(s).

Optimism versus Pessimism

Optimism and pessimism are two cognitive sub-systems to narrate existence, depict reality and dream the world.

Each one has its functional roles. When perception is connected to optimism… more energy, towards successful action.

When perception is connected to pessimism… avoid danger.

Prediction system.

To be completed…

Existential perception and rational pessimism

When you realize certain things of the world. And especially the ones that affects you and others human beings. Like death. The selfish genes. Dementia and other troubles of consciousness (that is the « fact » that one consciousness can be partly wrecked). The « fact » that money drives the world. The teleological idea of existential perception I presented throughout this text. You start to think that the world is pretty dumb. You start to think that life is pretty dumb. You start to think that human beings are pretty dumb.

In other words, you think you unveiled something global. Whereas you just changed your current veil. For the veil of pessimism and reductionnism. Which is a desease. A desease that has plagued even the brighest minds.

Because then you believe you are handling « facts », you believe you finally have the truth… and it is a truth that often makes your life harder to cope with. You did not realize what life is all about. You changed what life is all about for you. You changed the story you tell yourself about the world.

I’ll say it again : it’s not because it makes sense that it is the global truth. It is a contextual truth. And expanding this contextual truth to others contexts (especially the common human contexts) will probably make your life worse. And it is normal and to be expected. Because you’ll use unadaptative percpetive frames to narrate the world. Whereas the mind has ben developed to be adaptive. So yes, some authors (like Arthur Schopenhauer) have developed great insightful perceptions by applying unadaptive perceptive frames to the whole life. These people… they probably had a brain difference that made their contextual perceptive adaptationadaptation not working as usual. Some frame never left them. And hence they thought they saw the truth. Without realizing how it affected their life. Because perception is never a mere perception. It frames how you manage your life. It frames your own narrative.

People really need to get that multiple contradictory truths is a thing. Because they are not really contradictory as they have not the same contexts.

The subject that perceives all what the theory of evolution means for us human beings. The subject that perceives itself as controlled by genes. Is you. Not an external, objective observer. So your view, especially its emotional dimensions, is biased by common sense. It’s still a fuckin mind-created narrative. If you feel unconfortable about yourself in regard with what you think theory of evolution narrates about you, then congratulations: you just trapped yourself ! We’re basically made to believe we control ourselves, so thinking that we don’t makes us unconfortable.

Some guy (Theodosius Dobzhansky) once wrote : « Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution ». I really like this statement. Even if it is somewhat false, because well, plenty of things make sense in biology without having to talk about evolution. Evolutionnary biology is not biology, these are two related but still distinct capsules of narration. But still I like this statement because it shows how contextual sense is. Because he did not simply write « Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. ». Evolution created our adaptive human common sense which is not akin to evolution sense. It makes no sense to seek human sense in evolution. But it makes sense to see how human sense (something that already makes sense on its own, a capsule) makes sense in the light of evolution. In my view, sense problems occur when two or more different contextual senses identify with one another. When we don’t see multiple capsules and narratives where they actually are. In other words, when human beings try to find a single truth.

As you may have realized, I’m not the common Darwinist. Because for one, I firmly believe in intelligent design. I just think that we don’t know a fuck about what intelligence is. And I refusrefuse to say that the world is not intelligently designed on the pretext that some people have a narrow anthropomorphic view of intelligence. As an engineer that focus on reducing external mind intervention to the minimum in the design process of my works, the design principle of evolution is about the most intelligent you can get, believe me. One must not confuse intelligence with consciousness or intentionintentionality.

Second, I don’t see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion. At all. I think most scientists don’t know a fuck about what religion is and what it brings to people. I think they don’t understand that not everyone can be positively inspired and excited by the current scientific views. And that this excitement they feel is precisely the excitement religion brings to religious people ! And thus I refusrefuse to say that religions are bad things on the pretext that most of them are actually pretty bad, outdated or incomplete. I firmly believe there can be an adaptive modern religion, compatible with the scientific view. A religion that suits everyone. We just need to develop it. The bad thing about religion is when one think of it as the holy global truth and defend it like it is. That is, being fanatic. But it is not specific to religion, it apply to any belief system, including scientific views, that some scientits defend vehemently. Fuck global truth, sense is adaptive and contextual.

But these are not the main reason why I am not in full alignment with most Darwinists.

To me, evolution will never be an answer to the question of « what is », because what is (the nature of things), is perceptions and narratives, and perceptions are fundamentally abstract. So yes, as every serious Darwinist, my rational cortex is convinced that evolution is basically what objectively explains best how everything of the living world came into existence. It’s the narrative I believe in about that subject. But to me, that is not to say that evolution explains everything. At all. Darwinism in itself, lacks human sense for example. Which is logical and perfectly ok. So Darwinism does not explain human sense. Only human sense can explain what human sense is. Darwinism just explains how human sense came into existence. Not its existence in itself. It is sufficient to explain the emergence of human sense. And it is also a generic why answer to human sense (that is adaptationadaptation). But as an engineer, I will never identify the implementation mechanisms (the « how » narrative) with the implemented product (the « what » narrative). Darwinism simply describes what I call an abstract building principle (see my first book). A very generic abstract building principle. What you can create with an abstract building principle is basically whole functional universes. And it’s perfectly ok to know about such universes without knowing about abstract building principles. That’s how they have been built, but not what they are. No animal has ever needed to know about evolution (some rational how and why it exists) to know what being what it is, is. It is not part of what it is.

How this abstract building principle came into place, that is not really relevant, unless it already contained some concrete intelligence.

If I ask some individual « How do you exist ? », and that he answers something like « Energy » or « I don’t care ». I’d be perfectly fine with these « how » explanations. It’s very human. And these kind of human answers become even more acceptable with the « Why do you exist ? » question. Honestly, if an individual answers something like « Because I am made to spread the genes my organism carries ». I’d worry about his future. Whereas if he answers something like « To have a great life and do great things ». I’d be glad for him.

One must understand that because of existential perception, anthropomorphism is always a thing for us. We make human narratives of just about everything. It is just more or less obvious, and thus we are just more or less aware that we are doing it. Understand that if we could not humanly understand Evolution (through human common sense and metaphors), we would have never been able to understand it through non human sense. I talk more about that in my Natural Hacking Thesis. But my point is that, when you believe for yourself that you are made to spread the genes your organism carries, you are not being objective. You are just being a dumb human telling himself a dumb story about his existence while thinking he is objective, and is probably hurting himself doing so. Human perception is metaphorical by nature. Evolution is a great metaphor to study by. But a shitty metaphor to live by.

I for one, don’t think that elements of a capsule have to reflect something out of this capsule. Why the universe shoud bother existing ? What is its purpose for existing ? I don’t think it must have one. Seems to me very plausible that it just don’t. Unless… you come up with a metaphoric narrative. So the universe might not have something akin to a purpose, and yet we have purposes. How come they were defined. I don’t care. They are here. That’s what matters to me. My purposes don’t have to reflect some external logic, the universe don’t have to be purposeful because I am. And it goes in both directions. What the Evolutionnary Theory narrative tells about the « purposes » of living organisms. It is just a metaphor, so that we understand what’s going on in another capsule with our limited human capabilities. We don’t have to relate to this metaphor and let it impact our reality and personal narrative. Because « evolutionnary purpose » really is a non sense that we use to make sense of a process that we are not. It’s non sense because purpose is a concept from the human capsule. One that we can understand easly, and hence apply to various distorted metaphoric narratives.

To me science is never about defining what our reality is, or explaining it for the sake of explaining it. It is about how we can improve our reality. By creating perceptions and narratives that are mental tools allowing us to do plenty of things we couldn’t be able to do with only our natural perception and narration. So that we live better. It’s ok to be fascinated by tools. It’s actually pretty adaptive and common (see distal-to-proximal shortcuts and parallel logics). But nonetheless, a tool is never meant to be more than that.

It is just nonsensical

But the hard trick for human beings with science is to study the world within a fundamentally inhuman but powerful « tool » perception and narration without getting emotionally lost by the conflicts with human common sense. Because when you start to feel bad about the world, your perception has lost its adaptive nature. Playing with perception and narration is something every scientist does to make sense of the world. And it can mess around with your feelings. And that is dangerous.

A lot of people just can’t cope with these bad feelings, and hence, try to find rational ways to cope with it. They dish out ideas and narratives such as Darwinism (that make them feel bad), saying they are myths (without having thought about what a myth is ; and I’ll come to that later in this text). And they try to find every convoluted logical explanation (all explanations being narratives) to our human origin that doesn’t conflict with human common sense. Every explanation that their human mind can come up with. It’s funny when you think about it. Creating explanations. That’s what creationism is all about. The goal here, is not to explain the world in a way that our rational brain says « it’s right, there is no conflict ». The goal is to explain the world in a way that our emotional brain says « it’s right, there is no conflict ». In a way that makes us feel good about ourselves. The goal is to feel good. Creationism theorists want to convince themselves by convincing others. It really is the work of existential perception and narration. And even as a Darwinist, you must understand that you can’t blame people for having existential perception and wanting to feel good about themselves by telling themselves stories. That is you can’t blame them for being human. If you want them to believe in Darwinism and not to believe in Creationism, you have got to give them something else than just intellectual Darwinistic logic, because obviously that is not making them feel good. Which is perfectly ok, because it’s not a tool to make people feel good. It’s science. And science is by principle, opposed to human experience. Thus, Darwinism is not a replacement of Creationism. There are at least two capsules of sense here, not one ; Darwinism is a metaphorical frame to study by ; and Creationism is a metaphorical frame to live by. Not the same role at all, not the same market. Creationism is a narrative packed with strong human values activators. That one is a tool that make people feel good. Understand me, I’m all for developping and spreading the best human cultural, narrative system. But the thing is, I don’t think we have a decent release candidate developped yet. And before we positively « lobotomize » ourselves with a good narrative, we better make sure it’s not as flawed and that it is actually useful and adaptive. If your task is to spread a good culture and that you are trying to jam your ideas and narratives down the throats of people, then you still have a lot to learn about your task. Replacing Creationism is not that of a simple task. Well it probably is actually. But as with anything, to make it simple… we need to figure out how simple it is. By understanding what we are, and what we need right now.

All in all, our culture is lacking two ideas. First, the idea of what I call natural encapsulation of narration. So that we understand that we cannot find the origin of something within that something. That we cannot find the human origin within the human capsule. And that it’s perfectly ok. Even if it does not make sense. Actually it has to not make sense. At some point in time, things just were not here. Hence they had to emerge from what they are not, and create a new narrative. This is what I call transcendancetranscendance. The only way you can get through transcendancetranscendance is by saying either that all we experience don’t exist or that all we experience has always existed. Which are both pretty dumb positions if you ask me.

Being human. It is merely a term to refer to what we are. Hence it is a term that gets bigger everday as new individuals are born. We can hardly relate to primates. How could we relate to an abstract origin ? You can say that it is a human-like entity (~ god) that created us. But then you’d still have to explain the origin of this human-like entity.

And two, which follows from the first idea, is the idea that intellection is one of many senses that makes our perception. Using this sense, you can render reality intelligible in many ways. You can explain everything through physics. That is you can render intelligible how what was not became what it is. Well I for one think you can. But it will never make human sense. The perfect physics explanation of reality as a whole will never make human sense. Because human sense is not, and will never be only about (some) intellection. An intellection can be correct and not make much sense. Because it’s too off-grounded from common sense. But that’s ok, an intellection don’t have to make sense out of its own capsule. Though we try to retain as much common sense as we can when building intellections, using more or less obvious metaphors.

Scientits have a pretty developped sense of intellection.

Human language… it is an adaptive product of evolution too, not an objective tool. « Being », « Not being ». « What », « Why », « How ». I believe that these concepts are way, WAY, more human oriented (and imbued with common sense) than we commonly and currently think they are. They emerged to work in a single capsule, and for adaptive existential purposes. And are therefore quite unadapted tools to tackle the objective Cosmos. Because the external Cosmos is not one big capsule. But plenty of little capsules. Well at least that is how I think it is. Because as an engineer, it makes more rational sense to me that way. The « fuck » that is happening with our existence, I think it happens a lot in this Cosmos. We just can’t relate well to the narratives that are too far from human existential perception.

Anyway, most people don’t realize that, but when we are using language to objectively describe some phenomenon. We are merely bringing this phenomenon into human common sense. It’s always anthropomorphism (the target form being human thought). How good you are at writing is basically how good your at anthropomorphizing phenomenons into narratives through language. So that we understand them.

I suspect that because we think there is only one capsule, when a new explanation (~ which is a narrative) enters the ring, some psychological part of us feels it’s going to die and get replaced. Which might somehow be the case if we identify too much with the explanation. To explain the human capsule through language, you have first to experience it. You have to experience what is in there. But if we forget what it is because we identified it too much with something else and thus implicitely rejected it, we might not be able to experience some of it anymore, or at least not be able to pay attention to some of it. And thus some existence would be nothing to explain, because not payed attention to. We somewhat experience reality for what we think it is. And I think language really is limiting our senses in that way. There are plenty of senses in our perception. But only a very few are conveyable through language. And we identify existence with language existence. What can be expressed through language and explicit narratives feels way more existing to us. The rest we don’t really pay attention. Whereas language existence is posterior to existence. And scientific views makes things even worse. We tend to interpret everything through the lens of what is already known by science… which is not very much really. In current science, we describe our existence through concepts of lower capsules (neurons, molecules, etc). This is what I call the autistic science. The science that understands how things work, but not what they are. And that is why I can’t really talk about my theses with most current cognitive scientists. My theses seem so far fetched to them, it’s almost as if they could no longer interpret reality out of the current scientific paradigms. For example, I think it is far less autistic to understand what reality is cognitively by describing it as a very special dream. « Reality a dream ? What are you talking about », they will say. It is as if all my theses were protected from stealing because they don’t seem scientific at all, and because I’m not yet of any authority for people to care about what I develop. Well it is somewhat annoying, but good at the same time, because there is plenty of things that science is blind too and that (I believe) I’m not. It’s like a free pass. All in all, we’re somewhat trapped in and blinded by our own cultural systems and narratives.

Don’t misunderstand me, I think matching capsules is a very good thing. Like matching neurons activationactivations with what we experience. But the thing is, we are not doing that. In the case of neurons, we take neurons as reference and progressively kill what we experience. Instead of trying to be hollistic and join the capsules, we make some capsule the new center of the system. If there is a center, then it should be human common sense.

In our current reductionnist era, we tend to question the existence of everything without purpose. Identifying perception to perception to perception, narrative to narrative to narrative, in quest for some truth. Clearly showing that we don’t know a damn about existence and that we never thought that maybe it was important to understand how and why things exist for us in the first place before trying to understand the world, or worse rejecting things. In my view, there is no point to question the existence of anything if it’s not done for an adaptive, pragmatic purpose (which can be indirect, like studying fundamentals is pragmatic in the sense that it can foster a real application). Questioning for the sake of questioning is pointless and dangerous. It’s basically our rational brain on the loose, running on its own, cycling in our very head, taking control of our human existence. Yes all is one and one is all, we got it long ago, now let’s move on.

To me existence (or beingness) is fundamentally perceptive and narrative. I don’t deny that there is something beyond perception. At all. In fact existence implies an Imperceptible World, a Cosmos, to which all existence is functionnaly related. I simply deny that existence must be more than perceptive to be part of reality. Furthermore, I also deny that it is possible for us tell the difference. That is I deny that we can perceive and use our subjective existential tools (vision, language, emotions…) to apprehend something beyond perception. It’s already somewhat very biased to call what we can’t perceive an « Imperceptible World ». What we can do with existence though, is perceive how adaptive and pragmatic it is. To be part of reality, existence must not be more than perceptive (that is more that « in our head »), but it must be adaptive and pragmatic.

Existence is at the same time out and in the Imperceptible World. Because its implementation is in the Imperceptible World. But what it is, is not in the Imperceptible World. But in a perceptible world that has emerged in this Imperceptible World. That’s where the trick is. There is no existence in the Imperceptible World, only implementation of existence. Or at least, there is no existence in the Imperceptible World in the way that you can think of existence. That doesn’t mean that there is absolutely nothing out of perception. No. That means that you can’t possibility think of it, even if it’s somewhat here. If you think of something out of perception… you have to make it exists in perception (that is in your head). Maybe your perception will reflect what you can’t perceive (The Imperceptible World), but you can’t be certain. This « existing without existing » is somewhat counter-intuitive, but I hope you can get my point. I could invent a word for this or use an existing one such as « presence », but I precisely won’t so as to not make it something that you can talk about, because language implies existence to me.

It is like when we human beings try to think of what it is gonna be after we die. We think it’s gonna be « nothing », and it makes us feel somewhat bad. But the perceptible « nothing » we think of is nothing like the imperceptible « nothing » when we’re dead. It’s a human nothing. We just can’t access the imperceptible and imagine how it’s gonna be.  Heck the mere idea of « after » we die is perceptive. There is no « before » or « after » outside of perception. When you’ll be dead you wouldn’t even know about these concepts.

It is the very same with existence. When you try to think of existence as something out of your perception (i.e., think of the world, etc), it’s like trying to think of death out of your perception. You can do it, you’ll totally imagine and feel something if you try do this. But it won’t really be what you’re talking about. Because you’ll still be in perception.

Some people might argue that the Imperceptible World, or Cosmos, contains all the perceptive worlds related to it (our dreams), which are merely views of it. But I reject this idea ; you cannot contain a « what » ; you can either be it, or not be it. In my view, the Imperceptible World merely carries our perceptive worlds, they are not in it. For something to exist, you have to be in it. You can’t identify a what with a how (an implementation). Again it might be counter-intuitive, and it’s ok. The relation between the Imperceptible World and a perceptive world (related to it) is reciprocal : one cannot access the other. Then again, I think our language and words are not suited to apprehend the Imperceptible World. Which is precisely why I insist that we should not say that the Imperceptible World contains the perceptive worlds, making it seems like a « what » can merely be a part of some external system. And again, I have no problem with saying that the implementation of a « what » can be contained. But the implementation is not the implemented.

Pragmatic existence and non pragmatic existence

Existence is a functional abstractionabstraction, a myth, a « thing », an identity, an individuality from an Imperceptible World. Aimed at making part of this Imperceptive World processable by some other part (an entity) of this Imperceptible World. The very fact that something is being, that we know of it, means it has an existence (and means, if we assume that the Imperceptible World is deterministic — which seems somewhat more reasonable, but then again, we can’t really know — , that this existence is somewhat not as random as it might seem). Humanity exists. So does the Cosmic Teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can’t deny their existence, because well, they exist, we can think of them. And that’s precisely why the last two emerged. It is their adaptive purpose. To show that our minds have become so flexible that we can create an infinity of perceptions (which make sense) depending on what is activated in our brain. And that some perceptions might serve no adaptive purpose to our well being and evolution. And that while we can’t deny their existence, we can reject them from the domain of reality. Reality should not be defined by external presence (rejecting things such as free will) or mere existence (including things such as The Flying Spaghetti Monster), but by pragmatic existence. Because existence has emerged to serve adaptive purpose in the first place. That is to allow living organisms to better handle their life in the world (which is composed of multiple capsules). And it’s precisely why our perceptions have become so flexible too. So that we can create mental tools. So that we can adapt our existence to our rapid cultural evolution instead of relying on genetic induced existential changes. So let’s not use this flexibility to do the opposite and stick to not so good and not so pragmatic ideas. Because well, you know, now we are responsible for what we do. Whether this responsibility is externally implemented through deterministic logic or not, we don’t care : it exists and is pragmatic, and pragmatic existence is what matters to us existential beings. Never merge capsules or else you’ll face the illusion paradox.

Common sense is common existence. That is common sense is just a bunch of myths that are accepted to be reality in a group of individuals. Humanity exists and is part of common sense, because almost every human can think of it, and has thought of it. God is part of common sense too. But the Cosmic Teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are not. Common sense is not fixed though. It is adaptive and cultural. But it is my belief that consciousness arises to handle problems. When everything is going well in your body and in your life, you are not as conscious of them as when something is going wrong. Problems somewhat make things exists, so that they become parts of a solution. If something is part of common sense, then it might be part of some solution to a global problem. It might be part of making what is wrong right.

Thinking that existence is fundamentally perceptive makes the search for an external truth somewhat paradoxical. But that doesn’t mean that I think it is pointless to try to create an external world perception (such as scientific views) and that we should not bother doing it. I think it is pretty practical in fact. And that has somewhat proven to be true. The mere fact that it can make us humans beings work together shows its functional role. It has a cohesive power that is quite sane, because we inhibit some sensitive parts of our nature and follows abstract rules. I just think that we should never forget that it is just some specific perceptions we are building. Tools. Cultural objects.

Doing science is basically choosing to see only the order in the world, and make a pretty convincing cultural perception out of it. But the world is not all about order, it’s also about subjective experience. Phenomenology. Qualia. Therefore, the best external world perception can only be a part of our experience and culture as human beings. Problems happen when a part tries to become the whole and suppress other parts.

To show that existing is only a part of the equation. The other being having an adaptive role.

I am what the world is minus what I am not. Something exists in a world. A world that it is not but can interact with to fulfill its existence.

Le passage difficile d’une existence autocentrée à …

When we make a scientific discovery. It is not that life has suddenly changed. It is our perception that have. Life as an external object, has always been the same, from the time you were a kid to now. Atoms, cells… There were already here somehow, before you learned about their existence. As I’m sure is the case of an infinity of things that have yet to exist. Reality is exactly what you think it is. But what you can think of reality right now is not all you can think of reality in the future. Reality can be pretty different for you. Better. Depends on what you make it be.

Likewise, when you see someone you know well getting hit by some heavy brain dementia. You might not recognize that person. Seeing it behaving like an half-broken robot can hit your feelings like a train. But that is because you identify what was this person and what this person is now. This person behavior makes no sense to your perception. And you wonder how could this person not realize that he does not make sense now ? Your empathy is broken. You are like a child that lost the sight of its parents in a crowded environment. And you start to think, in fear, about the absence of meaning of life. You start to question the meaning of your own life. Which is something only a sane man, not an insane one, can perceive about life. This is the weird thing about dementia. It mindfucks the sane observer.

Everything that does not make natural common sense makes us fear. But remember that human common sense is an adaptive creation of evolution. For the insane, nothing makes much sense anymore, cognition is disintegrated. We think « If he knew how he would end up… with his pride and self-respect… he wouldn’t be able to stand living in such a state and shoot himself before it happens ». Well that’s the thing. As an organism we perceive life for what our perception system makes it, and don’t get everything else. If our perception system is « wrecked », we have no way to know it, we are « anosognosic ».

But existential perception is always an anosognosia. A normal anosognosia. In regard to our nature and place in the global world. We think it’s sad and depressing to end up insane. But if one could know the inner working of his mind, the inner working of its existential perception… he wouldn’t be able to stand it. But the thing is, we just don’t, because we are not made too.

If one could know the « better » life he could have had if he acted differently… he wouldn’t be able to stand it. But the thing is, we just don’t, because we are not made too.

Clearly when we do this kind of « what if » mind projecting, we are fucking up with our existential perception. And if we don’t know that our perception is existential, it can be dangerous.

We have no problem studying physics & such because there are no emotional barriers to it. It doesn’t overlap with natural common sense, it is very neocortex (rational brain) based. That is why, I believe, our understanding of our human cognition is so behind the times of other abstract fields. And that is why current cognitive science is so neocortex based, keeping its distance from natural common sense. Human cognition overlaps a lot with natural common sense. Therefore they are plenty of emotional barriers to its study. We uncousciously know that our mind should not go in some places. That it’ll make us feel unconfortable and insecure. Not because we’ll uncover the truth about ourselves (again, there is no truth). But because we’ll create an artificial neocortex based perception that will be in strong conflict with natural common sense, automatically triggering bad emotions. Our rational understanding of ourseleves is constrained by very primitive biases. If we didn’t have these biases, we would have no problem thinking of ourselves as deterministic agents or whatnot. Because it’s not the ideas that makes us feel bad (even if we think it is, because of others biases of existential perception), it’s the emotions that have been naturally tied to these ideas (or their opposite) through evolution. A snake is not fearsome on its own. With a little bit of « brain tweaking » it will probably be possible to redefine these emotive associations in our future. Making a snake something positive for example.

We can’t feel how it is to be what we are not. Maybe it would feel good. We don’t know. We can’t know. Because for us, what is good is what is humanly good. More than that actually, it is the good of our specific existential perception as an individual. A very adaptive product of evolution. We are only made to feel what we are. What we feel when we think we are not what we naturally thought we were, is not just the feeling of being what we are not, it’s the feeling of being what we are not through the existential perception of what we are. So of course it is a bad feeling, to feel that you are not what you are. Unless you think you are some kind of God, super-hero, or anything else that is humanly better than being a mere human. But every feeling is relative to existential perception. Relative to what you are supposed to be. And it is very adaptive. Otherwise how could you know that you are fucking up with your life ? Say, how could you know that this job your are doing is or is not for you ? If not for this natural feeling that you are at your right place or not. If not for the feeling that your are being yourself or not.

All in all, when you feel bad about what life is. It is not that life has suddenly changed. It is your perception/narrative that has. Don’t tie yourself to any negative perception/narrative, keep in mind that it is just a perception/narrative, just like the positive ones you can choose to have. Control your perception/narration and you’ll control your life. The only thing that you can fear is fear itself.

Think about it. When you wake up from a bad dream. You are perfectly ok to acknowledge that it was just complete inner perception/narrative. You don’t identify it with an external reality even if it felt pretty damn real. And therefore it does not bother you. You don’t stick to it. You let it go. And replace the content of your mind with reality.

The thing is, we dream a lot during day life too. Existential perception is basically dreaming reality. The Prime Dream. That is, our reality is an everlasting dream of an Imperceptibe World that we are part of. And we pursue this persistent dream waking day after waking day. And some parts of that big real dream reflects things that are actually only in our head just like sleep dreams. But because we feel awake and in the same real dream, we identify these distorted sub-dreams to reality. And they bother us. While they don’t have too. They are just bad dreams within the big real dream. Nothing more. And if they bother you, it’s probably that they are pretty unadaptive. Let them go, just like if they were sleep dreams. Only stick to good dreams.

…

If everything is a myth, then what does it mean to debunk a myth ?

It is my belief that human perception is mythic by nature. That is, that everything we can think of and believe about the world is a myth. To me a myth is an evolved form of view.

A view is created to make sense of the world. A myth is merely a view that makes higher sense of the world. Thus everything we can think of and believe about the world is also a view, because myths are views.

Myths and metaphors (such as free will) are advanced kind of views that put us human beings into action. This is why I like to come up with fancy myths and metaphors, I think they have the power to light us up and make us act. Knowing how to play with words is a form of seduction. Because again, words aren’t just words, they are packed with emotions and whatnot. That’s why poets are seductive.

Anyway… if everything is a myth, then what does it mean to debunk a myth ? Simply put, to replace a myth by another one that is more pragmatic and consistent (results wise) with reality.

My usage of the term « myth » is very generic, as I said to me a myth is just an advanced view or perception. In common sense, the term « myth » is very connoted ; it refers to a view that people have, something that people believe but that is not « true », or not pragmatic. For example, a myth can tell you that if you do X, you’ll get Y because of Z. For a more concrete example : « if you eat that food, you’ll get fat because it contains that substance ». And in common sense, such statement is a « myth » if it is « false ».

But understand that for a myth to be « false », you have to have… another myth ! One that tells you another story on the same subject. The different results that these myths procude is what make them « true » or « false ».

Anyway, to me there are not « myths » on the one and and « truths » on the other. There are myths that are effective, and myths that are not. It’s not that we’re getting an external truth or something when we have an effective myth, it’s that we are getting very pragmatic mental tools or representations. That is why there is no purpose of debunking the myth of free will with science, for example. Clearly if you give authority to science, free will is probably false, because both tells a different story about control. A rational mind can pretty much demonstrate how free will is absurd and physically impossible. But demonstrating the logic of ideas is not debunking a myth. Because, is it the myth of science or the myth of free will that is more pragmatic for us human beings ? For now, definitely the myth of free will.

Pragmatia is what makes free will true. You can demonstrate everything you want about the impossibility of free will, it won’t make this myth less pragmatic. Understand that we have the ability to tell ourselves about any story about life. These stories can be bullshit stories such as free will or the famous « everything happens for a reason ». But it doesn’t matter that they are bullshit if they allow us to get from one point to another. Succeeding in life basically implies bullshitting your way into success, never letting something stop you. And this attitude is basically being congruent with our very nature as existential beings. Because existential perception is basically a form of natural bullshitting, making organisms believe they are  self-determined individuals and such.

So again. Truth. Not really digging this ghost. I’m all for a « whatever works best for you » philosophy.

« Love » is also a good example of a myth. Because it’s very cultural. Heck, some people say love is an invention that we inherited from medieval time. Crazy, huh ? Because it seems so real. But that’s precisely the point. We are reality. A culture is an ecosystem of shared myths.

Note : Lionel Naccache, a french scientist working on consciousness, basically share the same idea as proposed here. He does not use the term « myth » but the term « fiction ».

Once you see it, you’ll never unsee it – Of wanting to stay a « kid » forever

Some people, they just don’t want to know what science has to offer. Because they fear that it will forever change how they dream reality (their perception) for the worse.

For example, very young babies can smile. And people feel like, « Oh look at him, he’s smiling at me ». But science teaches us that it is not a « real » smile. That is it is not what we commonly call a smile, even though it looks the same. This is just something that young babies do when something happens in their digesting systems. It is not something directed at others. Learning this, it might be hard for some people. Makes them doubt reality. But what is « bad ». It is the feeling of doubt that is triggered by the conflict between the scientific fact and natural common sense. Not the scientific fact itself.

In the human dream, when someone smile, it means he is happy. If he’s not you realize we’re in a dream.

When you go to an amusement park as a kid. It seems wonderful. Wonderfully real. Years later, when you go to the same amusement park. Everything seems bland and dull. That is, it is so obvious it’s fake. You look around, you look up and see all the mechanics, you see the strings. Makes you wonder how you could have felt is was realistic when you were a kid.

This. Is normal. It’s adaptive. If humans beings never left their kid’s existential perception. Well it would be hard for us to do the things that adults do. Some people. They want to preserve what they used to perceive at all costs. They don’t accept the evolution of their perception. Then again, the problem is emotional. The past is the past. If you’re no longer enjoying what you used to enjoy. It’s because there is new things for you to enjoy in the world. It is because it is time for you to move forward. Because you have nothing to learn from this past.

This evolution of one’s perception with time. It is part of existential perception.

Enfant. Sourire gastrique.

The only « matrix » that can exists is the one your mind creates

Some people. They fear they will identify with knowledge. They just don’t want to hear about certain things so as not to identfy with them. Makes them feel unconfortable. Seems to them that it has the power to break the myths they believe in and the dream they are living. While they want their myths and dream to be true. They want to believe they are true. They want to stay in their « matrix » without knowing it is one.

Then again people need to get that a myth cannot be made false, even if it is in rational contradiction with another myth that has more authority. Myths are perceptions. It can be good or bad to want to believe a myth is true. What makes a good myth is its adaptive functional power (in some contexts). Free will is a good myth. At least for now. Creationism ? Well that is another story. I don’t think creationism is absolutely unadaptive. I think it has been a very adaptive myth in the past. But now ? I think it’s outdated. In my view, the myth of creationism needs to be replaced by a better one. With all its advantages and some more. So we need a new myth with all the advantages of creationism. Current science is not one. Science doesn’t (yet) make you believe in yourself as much as creationism does for example, which is very important in a natural dream. It just don’t work the same otherwise. But science plays in its own league. It is a very solid myth. One that needs to evolve, yes, but one with a very solid and promising base. Because it has the power to be very adaptive for us.

As I will argue later, irrational beliefs can be very adaptive, because they have a lot of particular consequences and make us transcends things. That is you can rationalize irrational beliefs, and see how things could not have been and be if it were not for them. You can’t simply reject an irrational belief because it is irrational. Because then you would have to reject almost all what makes us humans, including love (the psychological dimension of love). Our human reality is basically made of irrationalities and non-sense. But irrationalities and non-sense that are adaptive. That said, creationism is an irrational belief that, I believe, is starting to get unadaptive for humanity as a whole. But until we have a solid replacement to creationism (in terms of adaptive roles), then it is even more stupid, dangerous and narrow-minded to want to get rid of it right now than to want it to stick forever. Because I reiterate : science is not ready to be a replacement of creationism for common folks. And even for non common folks I might add. Suppressing a belief is not something efficient to do. Replacing a belief is. But for that you need the appropriate belief material.

Note that some day, when humanity will be ready. The myth of free will might need to be replaced too. Because there is surely adaptive power to a non-free will perception that we just can’t perceive right now.

Human beings have the power to change their existential perception and narration

« Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days. A purpose. »

There are infinite parallel perceptions of our Imperceptible World. Our goal, as an individual, is to create the best perception for our life. The one that makes the most sense and that awaken our inner forces so that we unleash our potential.
Our goal, as humanity, is to create the most adaptive perception for our common well being. The one narrative that makes us work together towards a greater good.

Our goal as modern human beings is to reajust our existential perception, to make it up to date with the cultural world. And a completly objective « wannabe » perception will never do the job. Because it is too rational and thus not existential, not narrative. An existential perception is irrational by nature. And it is good thing. Without this existential irrationality we could have never experienced individuality. We could have never experienced love. We could have never experienced what it is to be a be a human being. You could have never experienced what it is to be you. Because all this, is total non-sense in regard to pure rationality, it just cannot exist. And yet it does. It is your narration.

Reality is part of Life, and it is the dream of the planet

If there is no Life to perceive it, a world — and all its beauty — is unrealized.

That is, in my view, Reality does not precede Life. And it is one big special dream. The prime, shared Dream. And we human beings are best understood as dreamers entities. That is in my opinion, sleep dreams merely emerged because we had the ability to dream the Imperceptible World in the first place : that is perceive it as things, drama, etc… Which it is not on its own. And hence, sleep dreams are kind of inceptive by nature. When we wake up from a sleep dream, we return to the reality dream. In other words, we never cease to dream. Being a human is being an eternal dreamer.

But identifying Reality to a dream doesn’t mean you can do what you want and that nothing is of importance. On the contrary. It is a permanent dream. You won’t wake up from this one. Because well, you are not sleeping, you are living. We should take the greatest care of it, make it the best dream possible. The whole point of my existential perception thesis is that existence is fundamentally perceptive, and therefore that a dream can be real.

Sure the dream is in our head, that’s where existence is born. And it is strange you know, because language makes it look like we already knew about this. Because, we don’t call ourselves humans. But humans beings. Being a human, being in love, being good, etc… all this narrative stuff, it’s essentially part of the dream. But this dream of yours makes the Imperceptible World function and change. And other individuals dream the same Imperceptibe World as you. You can interact with them. You can interact with their story. That’s what makes our actions real. Our dreams are shared and make the Imperceptible World gear in a functional way. That is why Reality, which is part of Life, is the dream of the planet.

If I define Reality as the shared dream of the planet, it is to show the beauty of natural creation and how far science is to understand it. Because in science, we somewhat distance what we experience from the objective world and from life. But the thing is, life has come such a long way that it became a dream. Molecules, cells, and whatnot. This was just the beginning. Our very logic is life as it is now. How come such a simple process created such a complex dream. And the privilege that we have to live through such refinement. It is simply astounding. So astounding in fact, that almost no one realize it’s a thing.

Existing as an individual, it’s dreaming the world.

Existential perception and enaction

Enaction is yet another theory developped by someone else that I discovered after developping this thesis. To me existential perception and enaction are very complementary. Actually I’m glad I was not aware of enaction before developping this, because I think it might have restrained my thinking, especially on the concepts of existence and narration.

Existential perception basically asserts that higher form of life (such as human beings) are some kind of self-defined narrative dream. That there is not really a full-fledged world outside our head, but that we are that world. It also asserts that dreaming reality (that is perception and narration) is originally pragmatic. All this, is very « enactive ».

Existential perception also encompasses what I call existential inertia and existential drift, which are concepts related to the Meaning of Life (and loss of Meaning) currently « floating » in life itself, and shared narratives that emerge when beings synchronize themselves to create a culture. Which is also very « enactive ».

Enaction integrates phenomenology (subjective experience) in the big picture, and phenomenology is basically what existence and narration is to me.

And finally, I really dig the term « enact » because to me human life is basically a movie that you have to act (and at the same time the movie directs you). As an individual, we have no static state. We have to enact the world in the best way possible.

To sum it up, enaction is a boss-like theory in my book, and I’ll gladly acknowledge this thesis (and others) as supporting enaction.

The shortcut design : where the magic happens

But there is something more than perception that makes existence of things so “magic” and seemingly unrelated to a global system functioning. Indeed, because of distal-to-proximal shortcuts there is no actual links (ontological dependencies) between distal purposes (survival, reproduction, blabla) and common things (hunting, eating, loving, etc). What does it mean ? It means that evolution is just a framework that defines what things of the living world are supposed to provide, a reason for their presence. Why they exist. Not what they are actually. Love (and love developement) has been selected because it is linked to reproduction. But it is indeed something different, it is its own thing. It has not been crafted with evolution in mind (because evolution is mindless), only selected afterward. If anything, love is linked with evolution because it has been built with systems that existed because of evolution. But that doesn’t go beyond that.

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Existential perception, being conscious and consciousness

What does it means for an organism (or more abstractly, for an entity) to be conscious ? It means (among other things) you are not fully unconscious of what you are. But by no means having a consciousness implies that you are not unconscious at all. In other words, being conscious does not make you completely omniscient of your organism, yourself, the world or whatever you are supposed to be. It is quite the opposite actually. According to the view I defend here, adding consciousness to an entity is not the unveiling of some of its unconscious layers (creating its self). Adding consciousness is an addition, and it is the addition of layers that « unveil » certain things in a particular way. These layers, they are the existential perception system. Consciousness is the result of existential perception. In a coming chapter of this essay, I will present a thesis of how this unveiling work for thoughts (revelation process), that is the link between unconscious processing and consciousness.

The thing is, maybe we have a tendancy to misconceive what consciousness is, because we have a tendancy to believe we are the organism. We identify to it. We believe we are organisms that are conscious of themselves. While we are just a consciousness that is associated with an organism, not the organism itself. If we think on the basis that we are the organism, it is easy to see how we are misleaded to think that we are unconscious of some part of our cognition. Whereas if we think on the basis that we are just a consciousness, a dreamer, then it follow that we are fully conscious of our cognition. Because what we are unconscious of is just not what we are.

The thing is, we might also say that we are the world. The world that we perceive. It is us. And it seems perfectly normal for us not to be conscious of all this world can be. Of all the potential perceptions we could have.

My view of what consciousness is (and what its purpose is) is grounded in existential perception. That is why I define consciousness as an interface (read SLPI and the associated chapter of this book). A good way to describe existential perception to common folks is to say that when we perceive someone (a human being), we do not automatically perceive it as a blend of bones, skin, organs and whatnot. Unless we force ourselves to see it like this, we don’t think about these things at all. And why ? Because it’s pointless. Unadaptive. It even seems somewhat gross and disturbed to us. It is like our own mind restrains us to view a human being like this (again, because of existential perception). We have no problem doing it in a context where it is adaptive though. Because well, the existential perception of human beings is also adaptive in this sense : it adapts itself to contexts and goals. But in a classic social context, no, we do not perceive a human being as a blend of organs, bones, cells and whatnot. We perceive it as an interface with which we can interact. It’s an object of its own. It’s a thing. And if you think you still see this thing when you think of bones, organs, skin and whatnot that are supposedly parts of this thing… then you don’t understand the message I’m trying to convey through this thesis. To me, almost no one understand the word « thing ». What it means about us. About the world we perceive. Everything is a thing. And each thing is its own thing. A perception.

Existential perception makes us see things. These things are interfaces to interact with the world. Interfaces to our current goals. If the world was a program, then consciousness would be some kind of user interface. Consciousness therefore, is our organism’s adaptive interface of the world. A functional dream.

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Existential perception and cultural systems

As I was saying earlier, existential perception systems emerged through evolution because it is an efficient, economical and somewhat easy solution to the problem of maintaining advanced natural agents in the balance. Evolution “likes” that kind of solutions (efficient, economical, easy), that is this is typically that kind of solution that naturally emerge (because of constraints). And not surprisingly, because it works so well, the functional approach behind existential perception has since reemerged in the world (~ recurrent evolution). I think religions, mass-media (particularly television), marketing, and to a lesser extent actual democratic systems use the same functional approach as existential perception (without it being intentionintentional or controlled, humans find out solutions the same way as evolution does, they try things and from that keep and develop what works best). That is, they are things that efficiently, economically and easily regulate the existence of individuals, make them do what they are supposed to do (doing their job, buying things, …) and therefore maintain a balance in populations and societies. Considering natural existential perception system that all humans are in from the start and the increasing cultural complexity of humanity, “cultural” existential perception systems (especially religions) were bound to exist. From a systemic perspective, these « cultural » existential perception systems form the higher layers of our global existential perception ; our natural existential perception system forming its base.

The thing is, some of our cultural systems could be a lot more efficient if their functional approach was closer to the one of existential perception. The job market system, and the education system are especially quite bad when it comes to optimization.

Religious myths are another story. They are not the system itself, they are perceptions. A special kind of perceptions that I call cosmic dramas. Ones that emerge from the activationactivation of our inner sense of purpose, our sense of intentionintention, our sense of control, our sense of drama. Senses that were meant to be applied to ourselves get applied to the world : we see purpose, intentionintention, control and drama in the world. And with the conjunction of our representational systems, we embody these things in entities : god(s), Illuminati, … It’s a kind of an expanded empathy or theory of mind. We see a mind everywhere, without realizing that the only mind we perceive is our own.

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Leaving cultural encapsulation and building the perfect mental tool

The existential paradigm produced by existential perception is a simplification of the world. It is basically a program to operate the world and interface with it. Because it would be too stressful to have an objective perception of the world. Too much information. Too much connections. Our mind would be flooded. In that regard, less is better. With existential perception, the rules are simpler, it is quite easy to know how « the world » works and manage your life. Note that there are cultural existential paradigms within domains too, allowing one to manage its carrier. Simplification is an adaptive functional protection.

But a simplified vision of the world can limit your actions and global understanding. I won’t lie to your, our sense of what we can do is kind of limited by the encapsulation in common existential paradigms (natural and cultural). If you are ambitious and think you can manage stress, you might want to willingly leave the common existential paradigms/interfaces and develop a parallel, more complex and personal perception of the world. Your personal mental tool (or program, interface) to operate the world. Though you need to have moderation and keep in mind that a perception is always a perception, parallel to others, and that the human level will always be the reference for your species. If you create your own existential paradigm and think it is the truth, people won’t understand you and will think you are crazy and have completely lost your mind, even if the tool you have created is brillant. Just remember that what you’ll see is your tool to manage your life.

If you already left the encapsulation of common existential paradigms and wonder why so little people did, well, the answer is simple. Fear. Stress. Human beings unconsciously avoid leaving existential paradigms because of it. Natural common sense tells you not do it. It is our mind natural comfort zone. My hypothesis is that most people that have left common existential paradigms have suffered a great deal of pressure, alone. They overcame fear and stress in their life on their own. At one point in time, they also had to realize that sticking to natural common sense was of no help to them. They became comfortable being uncomfortable. And now their mind can wander more freely.

We only leave existential paradigm (or encapsulation) for another one. So as to live an other type of existence.

Common cultural sense and values might not be suited for everyone. Especially people with strong mental. Because – and what I will say will surely hurt a lot of people feelings – a lot of common cultural existence is workarounds norms to make things work for most people. It’s a matter of social balance and social integrity. So not the myths that can produce the best results, but myths than can produce results for everyone.

Think about school, degrees, love, how to behave with people, etc. Following all this will cap your natural potential if you want to unleash it. Because that’s just not the myths that are best fitted with primitive nature.

A self-made man will tell you that school and degrees are useless crap. And he’ll be right. A man than can seduce any woman he wants will tell you that love does not exist. And he’ll be right. A man that is strong enough to do whatever he wants and get around well with it will tell you sticking to social rules is very limiting. And he’ll be right.

They’ll be right because they live in their world. And what works for them is true in their world. What we call reality is mostly in our head. So because we do not share the same head, we all live in different realities, even though we share the same Imperceptible World.

But if you are incapable of running your own life. You’re glad that school exists. If you’re incapable of proving your value. You’re glad that you have a degree. If you don’t know a damn about seducing women and have no time learning it. You’re glad that love exists because you just have to seduce one and you’re done. If you are weak, then you are glad that they are social rules that make you equal to others. And you believe in all those other culural myths that are reassuring.

Thing is, common cultural paradigms are not bad. It’s kind of a necessity so as to not live in complete anarchy. It is what allows social balance. Furthermore, we have no time to learn to get good in every domain. So we believe in simplistic interfaces, except for the domains in which we are expert. And even if we had time, some individuals just don’t have what it takes to cope with natural rules, they need a crutch. But the problem is, this « crutch » can constrain and weaken the stronger individuals. Because no one will tell them that there is something else, and that this « crutch » is merely a social construction. They have to figure it out themselves. And most of them probably never figure it out in time.

Human reality as a whole is like a living organism. Most humans serve some kind of purpose in this whole. And to serve this purpose, they have to be unaware of some truths. That is why a lot of truths are naturally hidden in most human circles. Society wouldn’t work if it was not the case. Not everyone one can be on the top.

I myself, felt very different than other people, I felt a great potential in me that could not be expressed through common cultural paradigms. And at the same time, I felt inadapted to the world, I thought I was lazy, undisciplined and all. I thought I was the problem. But it was only because I was a fish trying to compete in a landish environment. And so I eventually decided to create my own path, in my own culture (I spend most of my time alone and developed my own framework of ideas). But understand me well. I’m all for social balance. In fact my goals are to produce a more effective global culture, where everyone is happier. But that being said, my current existential paradigm is very different than the ones of other people. Mine is a lot more grounded in nature, almost instinctive. That doesn’t mean I can’t interact with people. On the other hand, I can « hit » them more deeply. But I have a hard time doing small talk though.

Becoming a master – or creating your custom existential paradigm

…

And then you just see things. That people cannot see. Ideas come naturally to your mind. As natural existential ideas (that is human level ideas) come naturally to the mind of every human being.

People don’t get that you are never abstractly intelligent. You can « compute » things really fast if it is within a domain you have hardwired, a domain in which you have plenty of connections in your brain. And at the same time being incapable of the simplest task in a domain that you don’t understand. That is perfectly normal.

A lot of things are hardwired by nature and culture. Which makes us think intelligence is abstract.

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Existential perception and global changes

This is kind of a hunch here. But I firmly believe that the key to apply rational global changes (the kind of changes that is promoted by scientific studies) is to convey them through common existential perception. Science as it is now, is too far from common existential perception to have a global impact outside science.

And at the same time, I think it should be important to teach children about existential perception, because well, if we are to continue with these kind of societies, some parts of natural existential perception should be deprecated. Because we live in societies that are too much for us (see SLPI chapter 23).

Existential perception and the functional role of evil, suffering and overcoming difficulties

Existential perception is all about functional meaning. And I think « evil », suffering, etc, are also all about adaptative and functional meaning. I think that they are part of existential perception. We want to destroy evil even though it is the product of our own perception. Perception of evil leads to action.

When we experience life, we might suffer. We might experience « existential crisis ». And after that we want to suffer no more. Pain and suffering is the start of one’s redemption process. We do all we can to avoid suffering. We want to create a positive situation that is even bigger than our pain so that it won’t matter anymore. In a way, we are fueled by it. Suffering forces us to take certain actions, it shapes our life’s dynamic. We turn evil into good. Human life wouldn’t work the same without evil.

vaisselle.

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Existential perception and the Adaptative Ego Drama

The adaptative ego drama is another thesis that will be presented later in this book. It explores how experiencing drama is adaptive and fits into existential perception of the world. By drama I mean what I juste mentioned : living a life with ups and downs, experiencing successes, defeats, failures, existential crisis, suffering, feeling like being on a mission, the perception of good and evil, falling in love, changing (e.g., redemption) … All these things in the addition with the natural sense of story or destiny.

Philosopher Artuhur Schopenhauer kind of nailed this aspect of existential perception : he pointed out that when you reach an advanced age and retrospectively look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order or plan, as though composed by a novelist. Events that when they occured had seemed accidental (in the present) turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. (My existential perception thesis was standing on its own years before I read A. Schopenhauer, but I must say his view have explicitely influenced the developpements I made since).

This aspect of existential perception explains why it so hard for religious believers to understand a purposeless perception of the world such as presented by evolution theory. It is quite painful to realize that something that is so meaningful for us might just not have been (or might have been completely different). This latent story compositioning of our mind is a kind of bonding with our own fate as it happens. Some kind of romanticism. As I developped in my « appropriation process » thesis, bonding with what we are is highly adaptive. You are more likely to defend a hand that you think is yours from an injury than a hand that you don’t, precisely because your mind think it is yours, that is has something « special ». When you willingly choose something, this something becomes better for you, as if some kind of global placebo effect was engaged. Which is especially noticeable with love. A lot of people stay in love with the same person their whole life. They feel like they found the right person in the whole world. The one that was waiting for them. The one that was destined to them. The one that has something « special ». Romanticism at its finest. Truth is… maybe they would have had a better relation and story with another individual if things had been a little different. But there is no denying that this behavior is very adaptive. If a man believes a girl is the one. Then he will  treat her as the one. If a man stays in doubt, always wondering if that girl is or is not the one, then we will never treat any girl as the one, never bothering to dig deep into one’s girl « soul ». Believing we can never find someone like the one we love pushes us to transcend the relationship. It makes us commit to it, and thus we elevate this relationship into something it could have never been without this irrational belief. We get to experience life in a new, positive way. We get to experience things that we didn’t even know existed. As I often say, over-rationality is a trap of modern times. Because existence is deeply psychological.

And what happens if the « one » decides to break up with us ? Then our mind will eventually come up with a different story. « It was a great experience, now I can move on », « After all she was not that great, I was fooling myself with this one », etc. Or else it is very unadaptive, you become either psychopathic or depressed, trapped in eternal grief and madness. The bonding is very, very adaptive. Actually I think our very tastes bond with our fate. The first time I fell in love with a woman, she was the incarnation of feminine beauty to me. The beauty of any woman was basically judged according to its ressemblance with the one I loved. And then, a decade later, I fell in love with a very different looking woman. And progressively, my epitome of beauty changed. Feminine beauty had a new name for me.

What is less much appreciated with the latent story composition of the mind though, is that how this aspect of existential perception is important prospectively too. That is, we litteraly imagine the future of our life plot. For example, when you fall in love with someone, it is quite common to imagine the continuity of this burgeoning relation, that is imagine how life is going to be if this relation becomes more that what it is right now. It is also quite common to imagine future successes, future visions of what we want the world to be according to our current goals. And this future plotting prepares us to actually realize these goals. At many points in your life, you’ll think you just got yourself the start of a story. That you will try to expand. Keeping on the momentummomentum. You will write your future. More abstractly, our mind is quite good at handling projects.

« Everything happens for a reason »

Sometimes retrospection and prospection become one : we perceive how all our previous life was actually a preparation for what is to come for us. « It all makes sense now ». We tie everything together, perceiving past events in regard to our current goals. Seing how all these events led us here, in our current state, with all our experience and skills, ready for the task that is to come. We realize that we couldn’t be in that present good situation if it were not for these past bad situations. It makes the experience of life fundamentally dramatic. Surely a great and adaptative way to promote perseverance, overcoming defeats, and such.

It is a kind of natural (self-fulfilling) prophecy. Which of course, does not always works ! And of course is all an « illusion » if you take a non teleological perception of the world as reference. But the thing is… it actually happens that way at the human level. We have a sense of destiny, a sense of purpose. And it can work. We get this feeling that « everything happens for a reason » for a reason : it is adaptive and pragmatic. So you better believe in it, even if you’re a pure « rationalist » (which I reiterate, is to me as much being realist as being completely « irrational » : these are just different perceptions, just more or less adaptative depending on context). Because just as believing free will is a thing (despite how irrational it is) has benefits and make you act in a certain way, believing « fate » is a thing has benefits and make you act in a certain way : that is precisely why our mind naturally compose our story ! You just have to be careful how it does it so that your irrationality stays your friend as well as the friend of humanity !

Note that to me, consciously writing a story is something very natural because it is already done unconsciously in the first place. That is it is a what I call a natural hack (see my Natural Hacking Thesis), a hack of this natural ability of our mind to create our self-story. Professional writers have mastered the hacking of this natural ability, they developped their consciousness to understand how it works so as to create independent stories. But almost all storytellers are not even aware that what they do implies the existence of a natural logic that is beyond their cultural domain. A natural drama logic, inner feelings that they are getting in touch through psychological simulation.

That is why stories are so powerful. It’s not just something totally new that we humans invented from scratch as part of our culture. It’s part of how our minds work. It’s part of our nature. Something powerful that we seized through inner mental connection. The abundance of stories in our cultures is merely the reflect of this natural power lying in ourselves.

When I was a teenager, I often ended up in street fights. One night, I ended up facing a group of ten opponents, alone. When I realized the situation and what was going to happen, I suddenly felt like my life was going to end if I screwed up. I felt a strong heroic sensation. I felt like I was a movie hero facing an insurmontable challenge that I could not escape. It’s almost as if epic music was playing in my head. I was empowered. I was going to face them, and I was going to win. And as it happens I fought in such a fearless and beastly way that my opponents couldn’t feel anything but the opposite feeling and eventually fled away.

Then years later, I understood. I understood it was the other way around. I was not empowered by cultural heroic feelings back then. These heroic sensations that I felt, they are adaptive traits that are part of our nature, and are activated in the right contexts. Therefore I didn’t felt like a movie hero. I felt like a natural hero. It is the cultural movies that capture this adaptive part of human reality, that get in touch with it. Not the natural that gets in touch with the cultural. These heroic sensations, they have been developed by natural evolution, not by human beings. It was part of existential perception all along.

We have plenty of natural senses and abilities inside. That are dormant, latent. And that we are connecting to only in the right situations, through the right stimulations. How much of these senses are still hidden to us ? I wonder.

Nowadays, we’re basically toying with our minds latent abilities without realizing it. Without questionning why our minds can do such things in the first place. It is indeed my belief that our imagination was initially made to create true stories, ones that we embody. And that what we are doing nowadays with our imagination is a leak.

Notre imaginaire est fait pour créer des histoires vraies, que l’on incarne.

The more I think about it, the more I am under the impression that we are drawing something bigger that ourselves without being aware of it. For example, human languages capture so much of our psychology without us realizing it, it’s insane. Think about the prepositions words. Why is it more right to use « to » rather than « for » or « on » in some context. We basically rely on feeling for that, but there is more to it. We’re somewhat getting in touch with deeper meaning.

On this subject, I am really amazed to see how much people have already grasped about the logic of our world and  the mind, through arts, stories (think of Marcel Proust), spiritual writings and whatnot. That science and cognitive science still hasn’t. It is as if our minds were just spitting the truth hidden in artistic products. And that we could not see them for more than that. So that we don’t even realize that there is more to it, so that we don’t even realize that somehow, we already know what we are seeking. Unless we have developped an inner « intentionintentional » eye to see such things everywhere. It’s crazy. Sometimes, when I read my past writings, I retrospectively realize that I already grasped the essence of a concept I attentively developped years later, while I thought this concept was something new for me when I attentively developped it. It was there all along. We already saw almost everything in this world. Without looking at them with the right abstracting attention. That is why good explanations makes sense to us. They simply make us look at things we already saw. They shed some light on our intuitions.

As I was saying in my first book (ch1), through our natural expression, we are unconscious vehicles of the functional logic of the world. And some people study that expression, like external observers that seek to learn something from it. Well precisely like I am doing now in fact. But for a more common exemple, think about people that study art (paintings, poems, …). These people pay a lot of attention to the art produced by other people. And they assign a lot of meaning a posteriori to human creations. These people, they could literally make authors learn what they did, what they meant. Make them learn about themselves… That is why I think psychoanalysis should not be put in a dumpster, as some people think. Hidden meaning is definitely a thing in this world.

Science. History. Books. Movies. Documentaries. Interpreting people. Interpreting our life. We are like a big system that describes itself as it runs to know what it is and build upon this knowledge. The dream of the planet is an introspective, psychoanalytic one. The funny thing is that it is so encapsulated that we don’t realize we are doing that. Movie makers just want to make good movies. People who analyze philosophical texts just want to analyze the work of philosophers, because they kind of enjoy doing state of the art. But by doing so, they contribute to our evolution, because people will experience their work, and be influenced by it. Yes, evolution is something that you build nowadays. And it is to me the distal reason for art (in the broad sense).

Luck – a human feeling that has nothing to to with true randomness

I believe that randomness is just a word to refer to some causes that are unexplainable and not perceptible by our human minds. (And also to a lack of human care and awareness about your fate. If you care about what happens to you, if you are not a victim of what happens to you, then it’s not random).

To me, the global situation in which some individual finds himself after years of life has very little of randomness to it. Thus, I think it is narrow perception to believe that our life can be turned around because some day we met the right/wrong person, attended some special event, went to the right/wrong school, bought a special book, …

Firstly because what makes these things special is what we are, as much as what they are. Because we never process what they are, but what they are for what we are. What they are for us. Things don’t actually happen for a reason outside the human mind (because reasons are human creations), but that doesn’t mean they are not caused. Is it really random that you chosechose to read one book among the astronomic quantity of books that exist in this world ? No, it is because you felt you would find something in it. Something that is already inside you, and wants to be awoken.

Luck is something that you take… with your inner forces. Good luck, bad luck. They are feelings, products of our existential perception. Good luck (or « fortune »), is the feeling of being happy after finding what we were implicitely seeking, without being really aware of it. If you acknowledge that luck is a feeling. Then luck, by nature, is not random. Which does not mean that there is no randomness before luck. You can choose a book that in spite of your intuition, fail to please you. Intuition is not infallible. But then again, randomness is still relative.

But say, if you were implicitely seeking everything in the world. Then you’d always feel lucky, whatever book you chosechose. But of course that is not the case, you don’t seek everything, because it’s not adaptive.

They are other reasons that I did not translate here, but invite you to read in my first book SLPI (chapter 14) if that interest you.

All in all, I think luck is a typical natural human idea, adaptive and functional, stemming from the perceptive opacity of the inner workings of our cognition. A human idea that do not exist outside of the human capsule. At least not as we conceive it in the human capsule.

« Fortune ». When you think about it. The word says it all.

One big unfolding drama – existential perception and the myth of free-will

To realize that our perception is existential, I think that there is no stronger reasoning than the reasoning and rationalization about the « illusory » (or rather mythic) aspect of our free will, of our sense of control. When you focus on it, you can glimpse that what you are doing right now, was caused. That you won’t have done it without these causes.

You realize that you can’t stop time. You realize that you can’t really take a break. That a break is not a break but a functional part of your life. You realize that the present is an everlasting wagon on invisible rails. And that you are that wagon.

Seen as objects, we are only very special reacting systems. And what we perceive, our sense of control, our sense of being out of any inertia in the everlasting present, not seeing the reactions chains… is part of that reacting.

All these human feelings. Hesitation. Regret. Control. Cringe. « Not giving a fuck ». Humor. Ambition. Merit. Wonder. They are part of the complex deterministic functional drama that is unfolding. That is why people don’t understand the physical impossibility of free will. You just can’t understand it while staying human. And it somehow becomes more absurd when you metathink about its illusory nature and the big drama that is unfolding… while knowing you are part of it. As I am doing now. It’s like a character in a movie realizing he is a character in a movie and talking about this movie he is in. It’s a recursive glimpse. You believe it cannot be, because well, everyone would know then, and the world would be very different. But then you realize there is no point of knowing this. Not yet. You realize we are not ready to acknowledge that we were sleeping all along. Not ready to awake. And that is why we are still « dreaming » (and not « lucid dreaming »).

Free will is a myth, and there is nothing wrong with it, because, well, human life as a whole is a myth. Human life is an ongoing myth of nature. A dream. And we are part of it. Absence of free will doesn’t mean what you think. Because it simply can’t.

For example, if you take a physicalist approach to understand the absence of free will. One that is completely deterministic. You might say that I was forced to write this text, and that you were forced to read it. That there was no way around it. But when you do that you are anthropomorphizing reality (which I rehearse, we always are) in a bad dangerous way. The dream becomes insidiously nightmarish. Because « Being forced », « no way around it », are not merely abstract logical terms, they have common sense connotation. That is like every word, they are somewhat emotive. They are gears of the dream and trigger existential feelings. This physicalist understanding is an essentially depressing understanding. Understand that you are simply understanding a depressing understanding here. And not actually understanding the absence of free will, because you can’t. Of course, a lot of intellectual people thought about such subjects such as free will. But because they didn’t realize that their intellection was grounded, they never understood how it impacted their feelings. They believed they just could think about everything, without consequences on their existence. And hence some insidiously became pessimists.

That’s why one have to be careful using the words « fake », « true », « illusion », « deception », « selfish » and whatnot to create intellectual explanations. For they are highly charged human concepts. We can metaphorically use them, as I did earlier (and as Robert Wright did in his book « The Moral Animal »). But one must not forget that they are merely human metaphors, not truly objective views. That is, from an evolutionnary point of view, our scientific human explanations are narratives as jury-rigged as our senses, if not more. The mindfuck Robert Wright showcases in its book by placing the mind of the reader on top of the moral sentiment and deconstructing it, showing how it’s grounded in evolution. Well, we can reproduce it by placing the mind of the reader on top of the whole book explanation and deconstructing it, showing how it’s grounded in evolution.

You gotta be careful when such things as « biology », « chemicals » or « physics » become important characters in your world narrative, for these abstractionabstractions exist only in the human mind. AbstractionAbstractions such as « biology », « chemicals » and « physics » seem to be tangible entities of their own, but they are not. They need us to exist as they exist. We can give them power. Or not. Either way, it would be some form of mind trickery. Oh yeah that one word too. « Trickery ». Is one of those words.

« Mutiny against natural selection ». As if that « mutiny » was not itself powered by some part of natural selection. Ah, non-duality.

I was determined to be determined to be determined to be determined to be determined to write this sentence with that many « to be determined » even if it sounds silly. It seems like one would have a choice not to write such a silly sentence. But obviously I had not, because the world is ruled by determinism.

Hum… Yeah. Determinism is not a silly idea, but determinism as we can humanly think about it is not determinism as it is in the Imperceptible World. And it’s quite silly.

People don’t realize that when they boil down their decision making process to a bunch of chemical reactions… they change these chemical reactions ! And not for the better.

Then again, you are not just an observer. To reiterate my previous evolution argument to fit this chemical frame : the subject that perceives all what these chemical processes means for us human beings. The subject that perceives itself as the result of chemical processes. Is you. Not an external, objective observer. So your view, especially its emotional dimensions, is biased by common sense. It’s still a fuckin mind-created narrative. If you feel unconfortable about yourself in regard with what you think chemical processes narrates about you, then congratulations: you just trapped yourself ! We’re basically made to believe we control ourselves, so thinking that we don’t makes us unconfortable.

If your mind thinks about « chemicals » while making a choice, versus if your mind thinks about « freel will », the outcome of the choice will probably be very different. Because it changes the way you operate your existence. Even if it is somewhat true, what help can it do to you to operate your life thinking about chemicals ? Yes, this uninspiring, neutral way of thinking about what you are might be adaptive in some circumstances. But overall, you should stay away from this kind of thinking.

Because you might make the « illusion » become « truer » !

So, then again you can easily counter the pointless debunking of free will as an illusion by not restricting the illusion to free will. Indeed, if you assert that an illusion is a thing, then when debunking free will : it’s the illusion you are that is trying to realize an illusion without realizing that it does it through an illusion. Purposeless intellection.

To me, being free really is more of a feeling than anything, the feeling of agreeing to play your role in this dream ; having no problem not being free and dreaming because you would do the same thing anyway if you were free and not dreaming ; being at the place where your will can be free to express itself : doing what you want. In a way, we can say that a tree can be free. That is if its internal growth is not constrained by some external force causing stress in it. In the same way, your own back can be free, if it is aligned with gravity. Otherwise, it will feel pain. Being free is having your inner forces aligned with the external forces of the world.

Cosmos is about order. One of my task in this life, is to free individuals. That is make them uncover their true role, their right place in this cosmic drama that is the real world. So that we build the most harmonious human symphony there can be, where everyone’s potential is aligned with its position. As I said in my first book : balance is a life necessity. Without balance, there is death of life. But balance can be harmonious and pleasurable or disharmonious and stressful. You can live in a sweet dream or in a terrible nightmare. No matter what, you are forced to live what you live. So you better like it, isn’t it ? This human symphony. I believe that’s where we are headed. I believe that is our destination. I believe that is where evolution will lead us. And I am glad to be a part of it.

How to empower spirituality through physicalist conclusions

Let’s say that free will does not exist. Because it is not consistent with physics, and that every phenomenon can be reduced to physics.

Then that would mean that I can’t write my destiny, unless I am some kind of messiah. But the problem is that… I’m doing it. I am thinking about writing my destiny, I want to write my destiny, and I am doing it. I can try to convince me that I can’t, because it’s physically impossible. But it is really silly, because reality clearly tells me otherwise. Day after day, I work to write my destiny. This is happening.

I am intentionintentionally writing this to you, and you are reading my message. So that you understand that if I’m doing it, then that means you can do it too. And you are not dreaming asleep, this is for real.

But if we can control our destiny in a deterministic world governed by rules, then what does it tell us about ourselves ? Simply put, that we are gods. We have the rational choice to deny either what we experience or to deny physicalism. But if we don’t, the only rational explanation is that we are gods. Or that reality is a mythic dream. That transcends the rules of physics.

If a human being reject that he is responsible for his acts, if he rejects that he has free will, etc, because the study of lower capsules tells its technically impossible, that it is an illusion. Then he fucked up his common sense through intellection. And guess what ? He won’t act the same.
We are existential beings. Existential beings don’t really exist out of perception. But guess what ? None of us can experience that. We can only experience beings.

It’s the same thing as the romanticism effect I mentionned earlier. You can tell yourself that it is a merely a myth, that it don’t really exist. But you can’t deny that this myth can transcend human relations and what happens in the life of human beings. This myth makes the world transcend itself.

When you workout, at some point you’ll want to stop. But you can’t deny that you can choose to keep on, isn’t it ? Well, believe it or not, but this is a myth too. It is no less of a myth that romanticism. And still, it is precisely that myth, that will make you improve.

When you are in rough period. And someone is here to support you. You can tell yourself that without that person, you’d be cracking. Again, it’s a myth too. A real myth. All this is part of what I call the adaptive ego drama. The functional dream.

I’m fascinated by how pushing the limits of what we are really is a thing in this world. But then again, it’s only very consistent with what the living world has always been about : transcending itself through evolution. The precise limits of reality are the ones we put ourselves. I don’t deny that there are general limits to reality, that is it not foolish to think we can be and do everything. But I deny that we don’t have the choice to define our precise position relatively to these general limits. I am a man, yes. But what kind of man I am ? An average one ? A good one ? This relationship with that girl. What kind of relationship is it ? Is it a casual one ? Or is this the love of my life ? How many more push-ups can I do ? Ten ? One hundred ? This dream life that I think of. Is it just a dream ? Or can I actually achieve it ?

Depending on your attitude towards these limits, you will channel the latent inner forces that lie within you in a very different ways. And the myths of reality that you will experience will not be the same. Reality really is plastic. Reality is something you can negotiate. Hell, it’s something you have to negotiate if you want to live a better life. If you give a chance to a belief. It might become a thing. That doesn’t mean you should give a chance to everything. Sometimes we are not sure how we feel about things when they enter our life. Will my belief about it change if I give it more chance ? My advice is that if a thing intrigues you and seems to have the potential to bring value to your life, do it. It might turn out to be something of a far greater value than you had imagined.

So maybe it’s true that we don’t have free will. Because will might not be something you can have. But only something you can be. Or become.

I view free will as some kind of active state of being. When you are consciously directing your life towards what you want. Channeling your inner forces to control it. And persevering in that mental state. You are a free will. Some individuals are not free wills. But they can become free wills. It’s not something that you are born with or not. It’s way more psychic than that.

All in all, the reason why a deterministic implemented control is disturbing is because we think we are free individuals acting in an otherwise completely deterministic world, and thus that it’s contradictory. Whereas we are the world enacting itself, having all the control we think we have.

Really, as its core, the disturbing problem of determinism is an anthrophmorphic narrative issue. When you see the mind as a set of subsystems, and that these subsystems are not « you », your human mind tries to understand how you make a choice based on these premises.

Because it’s a human mind, it tries to create a story.

The probem with stories, is that they imply a linear progression.

They implies order and causal relations.

In the case of a deterministic choice, you see it as a directed sequence of steps. You tell yourself that these subsystems characters of your mind (that are not you) make defining sub-choices before you make the final call. And hence you tell yourself that you are not really making the call.

You can not understand that determinism can be multidirectional and simultaneous, and that everything happens synergistically.

Because well, that makes no sense as a story.

Your duality-making mind tells itself that you can either be free or the world can be deterministic, but not both at the same time.

But then again, as you are in part the world, you are in part these subsystems.

The world is a freely deterministic thing, and at each point in time, you are some part of that freely deterministic thing. So that doesn’t mean you are always completely free nor completely determined. And you don’t want to be completely free or determined by the way, because in both case you’ll lose your identity.

That rather means it does fluctuate.

Note to myself : some people call this « freely deterministic » stance « compatibilism ».

An illusion that stands clearly is not an illusion.

Even the cultural state politesse, the questionning , are. Very very complex.

Existential Perception and inertia – the invisible paths that we all follow

People don’t realize how easy things are made for them through existential perception. And how hard others are.

Our stories unfold without any real conscious effort of our part. Most of the time we never understand how we made it, how our story actually turned out to be that thing. Heck, most of the time we never think about it. It’s the magic of life.

… TO CONTINUE …

Folk psychology and the quasi-absence of rationality

We humans, tend to see ourselves as rational individuals. However, this is because we compare ourselves with typical animals. Reason is in fact, barely a second nature of human beings ; we only use it for a tiny subset of things we process. It is surprising indeed, to notice the non necessity of reasons – and even the natural absence of reasons – in our processing and appreciation of the world. We totally abstract from the “low level”, from the why things are the way they are. This a particularly remarkable with feelings. Why this fear of darkness or bugs, why this attraction towards the opposite sex (~ e.g. shapes and curves) ? Why is sex a sensitive subject ? Why sport ? Why I like this, why I don’t like this, why I do this (why do I go to school, why do I have a job)?

Of course we may think about those questions once in a while, after experiencing the world. To us, there is nothing rational about all this. That’s how things are, we do not ask ourselves why. It is just normal.

Why do we speak, etc.

Believe we own our proper intelligence.

We simply don’t realize how much of our cognition relies on intuitive, spontaneous, common sense. « folk psychology ».

Note : as it almost always happens with my personal work, I discovered about folk psychology after I developed my existential perception thesis. Which by the way initially originated from my work on the abstractionabstraction principle thesis which itself originated from my work on object oriented frameworks, which basically makes programming closer to folk psychology ! Folk psychology captures a part of existential perception : the human level interface. To my limited knowledge, it is not as deep and wide.

We don’t realize how much we grasp through intuitive capsules. And then, when someone explains a capsule. It’s like we already knew.

TODO : SLPI chapter 1

Existential perception and the appreciation of the current global context

Honestly, when I think about it. It seems astounding that a world as rich and seemingly flexible as the one we are in has been created by evolution (that is mindless deterministic natural processes). And that someone like me, a product of this world, finds this world astounding. My common sense would have made me believe that individuals with existential perception would be incompatible with variety. That we should be more or less like termites building termites mounds and be completely blind to certain things. But then I do exist. As many others peculiar individuals. To realize that you have an existential perception system. That you are part of one big unfolding drama. And that you can still be a spiritual individual. It is as if realizing that some termites could be spiritual termites, really.

I find this situation astounding. The hidden potentialities I perceive in the current world. They are huge. Experiencing the possible impossibility of my own existence. The fact that I’m writing all this on the internet since almost ten years and that no one cares. What a frightening inertia that we can’t perceive. My eternal fight against illness. The fact that I almost screwed my life in random street fights or impossible love affairs. And that yet, I’m still here, writing about our very nature, without anyone knowing about it. But firmly believing that some day, it might just be a thing. In other words, feeling like building a good future. Or did I just came up with that to egoistically justify my writing behavior ? What a peculiar drama… Where does our meta actually starts and ends ? I wonder. And I find this very situation astounding.

Then again… it might simply be it. Existential perception at its finest. I might simply find this world astounding because all my experience made me perceive huge potentialities in it. I might simply feel it. A proximal emotion towards distal treasures. A prospective positive scenario for myself… hidden in a feeling. That is what evolution does after all. Makes us feel things. Inner forces. That’ll make us write scenarios for ourselves.

Yes, feelings… They might as well be abstract stories. Our future.

We really are incapable of imagining the depth and complexity of a world built with very simple rules. And why would we, for we are merely products of this world.

I always wondered… why is it that doomed people, plagued by cancer or some kind of incurable desease, have such positive philosophy of life that normal people don’t ? The answer is because they are somewhat constrained to develop it. They realize that they just don’t have time to be needlessly negative anymore. And forget about all the petty solutions towards happiness that everyone consider but that actually don’t work. Because being happy is about the only thing left for them. They have a sense of urgency and proportions. That normal people lack. For them, it’s basically find happiness inside or die unhappy.

They realize they are different. They realize that the typical human rails and societal narratives are not suited for them. They bond with their tragic fate. Their sense of drama is fully empowered. They start to focus on the spiritual, cosmic scope of life. They leave the cultural rails and focus on what works in this big world. On its beauty. They start to focus on what they still have instead of what they don’t. And they realize that there is actually a lot. And that they could not have asked for more.

It was there all along. They just needed to look at it.

They search in the world what they don’t have in them.
Why ? Hawkins. Sam Berns. Random people plagued by cancer.

Is existential perception the same for everyone ?

Honestly I wonder. I argued in this thesis that most of what we experience is « merely » functional creations of our mind.

And there might be some kind of natural classes in a species, with different existential perception systems. That is, some individuals might not need to think that there is more to it to their existence than what they perceive to achieve their natural purpose. And others, like me, need a bigger scheme to live their life. We would not have the same level of appetence to spirituality.

I’d like to think it’s not true though. Just more or less repressed/expressed.

A Nature that is mythic by nature – the story of Life

Sometimes I get glimpses of this mythic cosmic drama we are in. I stop seeing the word through limited lenses, or as disjointed capsules… and see the whole. I see how all is connected. Biology, philosophy, physics, humanity, cultures, individuals with their own personality, goals and story…

Nature really is mythic by nature. Think about it. We. And everything we can experience. Emerging out of almost nothing. Life is such a force. A creative force. And we are it.

Most of it is just in our heads, yes. Stories. Values. But our heads, these stories, these values… it’s part of Life, it’s part of the Cosmos.

We are the fucking dream of the planet. And we do not even realize it yet ! Wake up people. Wake up.

Natural Evolution is as mythic, spiritual, magic, and wonderful as any Creationist myth. It is just that no one has ever told you about it the right way. It is desperately underappreciated and undersold as a myth. That is why a lot of people have never been satisfied about it, and thought about something else.

Natural Evolution is about the story of a phenomenon called Life, that emerged out of nothingness and became a dream. It is about emotions, stories, individuals emerging out of determinism. It is about what was not becoming what it is. It is about Life getting consciousness and taking control of its destiny. It is about the emergence of us, beings capable of good, love, care, wisdom… out of natural selection !

Don’t you see the beauty of it ? I personaly could not imagine a more wonderful myth, filled with inspiring teachings. When I see a human being I like looking at me, sparking a great smile of joy. And think about what this situation I am experiencing implies out of our human capsule, what journey Life had to travel to reach this state. It is almost holy… and makes this situation more beautiful than it already is.

And Natural Evolution is above all a myth of the now. An ongoing myth. It’s not about some God having set up great things for us in the past. It’s about we setting up great things ourselves. It’s about we becoming our own Gods by choosing to be better and more aware of our world. It is about the emergence of you, reading me right now. And me having the ability to tell you that you can set great goals for yourself and decide to focus on making this global dreaming symphony we are in even greater. And you having the power to either accept this challenge that is offered to you. Or not… Don’t you feel it, the choice happening in yourself ? Who can tell you that it is not real ?

Actually, I dare to say Natural Evolution is even greater that any Creationist myth could hope to be. Because at best, a Creationist myth would be a pale imitation of Natural Evolution. A manufactured ersatz produced within that natural myth. A child story lacking depth and cohesion. Produced by individuals somewhat inherently knowing that such a myth exists and is to be found, but not having the right understanding to get the right one.

Understand that Natural Evolution is so magic that we can only get glimpse about how magic it is. Understand that Natural Evolution is so beyond our imagination that we have never managed to grasp it yet. Its finest creations.

And when you think about it, Creationist myths are kind of overrated and bland, because they are the ones which lack transcendancetranscendance, magic and hope. They basically assert that the origin of advanced intelligence is advanced intelligence. That the origin of human beings is some kind of human-like entity. All that sounds good and reassuring at first, but understand that they basically assert that everything we have right now was already here in the past. In other words, that there is no evolution and that there don’t need to be an evolution at all. Myths overly focused on our origin. That is, overly focused on the past. But what can you do about the past ? Nothing.

The future on the other hand… that’s another story. And guess what ? We can’t deny what we have right now. It’s here. No matter how we made it, we are human beings with all our capabilities and responsibilities. We’re not going to live the past, but we’re going to live the future.

Don’t be fooled. Creationist myths are only creative in that they are focused on creating compelling explanations of the past. Because they need to. Natural Evolution don’t need to make the past better than it was. It just tries its best to tell you what the past was and what it was not. Because it is the one myth focused on perpetual creation. Focused on change and innovation. Focused on the future. Focused on transcending what you are to become better.

Static creationist myths can tell you that everything was well thought out. That there is already a plan. Does it seem we live in a world that is well thought out ? I don’t think so. We have a lot to do.
Creationist myths make you take a wait-and-see approach. Because well, God has a plan for you, and you just need to have faith and believe in it. They create fake hope. They make you believe that the greatness of this world is external to you. That hopefully, you’ll be blessed by it some day.

Natural Evolution on the other hand makes us responsible for ourselves. It tells us that our greatness was not preceded by greatness. That there is a lot of hope for a better world if we act as what we are : godlike organisms. Because really that is what we have become in the category of living organisms. Gods. That have yet to understand and control their powers though.

Natural Evolution tells you that greatness is part of what you are. That you are living it. You are living the dream of the planet. There is no external god, it is the world and its functional logic that is godlike.

Maybe you are one of those who think a myth that says that our ancestors can be compared to monkeys is a degrading myth ? Because the gap between humans and monkeys seems so big ? Well, think about it the other way around. If we managed to go from « monkeys » like organisms to humans in the past, how much more can we go in the future ? Where will we arrive ?

I’ll tell you where : beyond our current imagination. But for that we need to behave in such a way that evolution goes in the right direction. We need to take the reins of the business of Evolution. And we are the first beings on Earth that can do that…

Understand. All that I’m telling you right now. It’s part of the functional dream of the planet. It can influence you, because you are part of that dream too. Maybe you can feel the impact of my words. That is how advanced life is now. It’s not directly the work of molecules or whatnot anymore. Stories. Values. Meaning. That is what makes the world move now.

Once, all organisms were just dreamers unaware of being dreamers. Sure they had a consciousness, but they were just playing their role in the Cosmic Drama. Consciousness was certainly an important milestone in evolution on Earth… but it is not the end. The dream of the planet never ceased to develop itself. And we are starting to reach the next milestone in evolution by entering the era of lucid dreaming.

precedes greatness.

There’s hope for a better world.

« woo-woo » views vs « autistic » views vs hollistic views

People need myths. I totally get it. Most human beings crave to know that they are part of something greater than them. It is my belief that it is a perfectly natural appetence for creatures such as us. Hence the constant presence of spirituality through human cultures. We need to believe and be inspired. What I have to say about this though, is that it is of no use to manufacture a myth ourselves because it has already been manufactured by Nature. We just need to read it while being part of it. And it is in my view, both a spiritual and scientific endeavor.

Being spiritual is an adaptive trait. That is why spirituality exists. Our natural appetence for spirituality has emerged a long time ago. At the time, we had no capacity to create the « perfect stimulus » to perfectly alleviate this appetence. But still, we needed to alleviate this appetence, as any other appetence. We needed to get inspired. And so emerged plenty of « cavemen », « woo-woo » myths, including Creationist myths. Imperfect, temporary cultural objects, strongly grounded in natural existential perception, aimed at alleviating our natural appetence for spirituality and connecting with the external world.

We could say that we took the Cosmos from the « top », creating Cosmos views that are expanded from our common senses. Focused on what the big thing is, without much care for how this big thing works. But since then, we have entered what we can call the rationalist scientific era, and took the Cosmos from the « bottom », creating Cosmos views that are expanded from rational observations, almost rejecting common sense. The views of the world produced within this era are basically completely opposed, and as much incomplete. They are rational, inhuman, abstract, machine-like, analytical, uninspiring, « bland ». Almost autistic. Focused on how the big thing works, without much care for what this big thing is. Focused on the local order of things, lacking higher-level logic and meaning.

Now, any serious rationalist can’t believe that there is such an object called soul, which would be some kind of invisible burning fluidistic energy that breathe life into our body, and contains our very self. And that this object can be sent to etheral places such as Heaven or Hell. It just makes no sense. And I think it is a good thing.

But does that mean that souls don’t exist ? Not at all. Obviously, we have a self. It is just our way of representing it (and how it functions) that should be updated if we want to go beyond the metaphor. It’s the same thing as when we say « follow your heart ». It captures something that is really meaningful in this world (at least in my opinion), but we don’t actually means the heart as an organ.

When my body will die, my soul will die too. Is it sad ? Not at all, it makes my time on Earth infinitely more valuable, for all the value there is to take and make is here and not hereafter. When I’ll be dead, I’ll be dead, no longer here to feel what it feels to be dead. Though my soul might somehow continue to live on through the momentummomentum my life created in the Cosmic Drama, through the value I made and expressed.

Still, standard theist myths are not discontinued nowadays. Far from it. And there is a reason why. They are seductive by nature. They are like sexy beauties to our existential perception. It’s superficially all we want to believe in. Free will, intentionintentionality, control, purpose, reason, fate, immortality, secrets, mystery, miracles… All these natural myths provided by existential perception that we are made to see in ourselves (or want for ourselves). So when rationaly thinking about the Cosmos and something seems hard to understand, we tend to return to some kind of theism, which is our natural tendancy. It’s like an addiction. Our minds are addicted to these concepts, want to put them everywhere.

The best way to stop this addiction is to make sexy this badly marketed geeky creature that is Natural Evolution. And I think it is possible. And needed.

Because the good thing about seductive theism is that it makes people focus on the higher logic of life, on meaning. I’m not a materialist. Though I don’t deny the idea of materialism. It is correct. I think the whole Cosmos can indeed be reduced to physics. I just don’t care. Because even if it is right, reducing the world to physics blinds me to the higher logic of life. It focus too much on matter. And in my view when you focus on matter you almost automatically focus on low-level, boring, uninspiring aspects of the world. That is just not a practical view for me. Almost depressing in fact. To me, the world is directed toward transcendancetranscendance. That is towards what it is not, something higher. That is what the world have done through time and evolution. It transcended itself. « Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. » And I think we humans, also seek to transcend ourselves. And what is reductionism if not the complete opposite ? That is why I don’t care about materialism, I feel like it prevents me from transcending myself.

If there need to be a reductionism, I’d rather think of a reductionism that focus on logic. Because you know, physics is not just matter. It’s some logic. Most naturalists say the mind emerged from matter at some point. But isn’t the mind just some complex form of logic ? To me, mind is basically matter that makes no sense to call matter, and vice versa. There has never been two substances, but two perceptions.

With « realism », we somewhat presupposed that we could, as adaptive products, understand the objective Cosmos. This is a rather bold statement, and a fairly existential one if I may. But ok, why not, I can buy it. Though we also thought that this understanding will make sense. And that, I don’t buy. It will make sense only if we convince ourselves that it makes sense.

…

In the same way as theists myths still prevail, woo-woo ideas (energy, chakras, …) are still a thing in these rational days. And it’s a good thing too. Because sure, their explanation is almost always non-sense, which can be dangerous, but they get something. Without woo-woo ideas, we wouldn’t even consider some part of reality. And it would be pretty bland really. With science it’s : if you can’t study it, it doesn’t exist. Senses and intuition tell you something else. And woo-woo ideas are based on senses. The problem is that people convey their senses through words to communicate them to others. And that’s where the problem is. Because if you don’t take a great rational care, the words are simply non-sense, even if your intuition is good. Conveying senses through words is a delicate work.

But I for one, really believe that behind every woo-woo idea hides some real interesting logic about our world. That rationalists are blind to. And so I try to get the gist of woo-woo ideas. To really understand what the fuck they are about. Rationalists shouldn’t dismiss woo-woo ideas, but consider them as the start of rational investigation. An orientation.

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So, all in all, our thinking capacities have evolved, as our ways of apprehending the world. We are starting to understand the world as capsules that don’t merge one with another, out of our natural existential perception.

We know that Classic creationist myths, are out of date. And we somewhat glimpse that current philosophical scientific views are disconnected from our higher senses, too much analytical and autistic. Dismissing what they can’t understand.

Our appetence for empowering spiritual myths is still there, craving. We want to be part of something bigger, out of ourselves. And we are. Because we are also part of the Imperceptible World. Natural myths are decentralized. They exist through existence, that is through entities that makes them exist. They have no existence on their own.

We, human beings, are part of the Dream of the Planet. Its leading forces.

We are the consciousness of the world.

I think that now, we can produce new types of cultural objects to empower our future. That now has come the time for us to create a better reproduction of our myth, that connects everything we know and sense of the world, in a right way. That is neither woo-hoo nor autistic. But hollistic, and measured.

… TO CONTINUE …

Principe d’illusion fonctionnelle (couleur, 3d).

Things are how they are, and in a way,

Les chosechoses sont comme elles sont, et quelque part, toute manière extérieure de les voir est futile et décalée.

Is everything we perceive a fake illusion ? What is the true world ?

It’s as unnatural for us to see us as animals as to see social interaction as primitive influences and whatnot. We process ourselves differently.

When considering existential perception, we human beings are probably the most intriguing organisms to investigate because of our advanced intelligence and rational thinking abilities. We never realize

Avec du recul, on est très bizarre. Ce mix archaïque + néo. Mais ça ne nous choque pas plus que ça. On se questionne sur les oiseaux, etc, mais pas sur nous. Evidence that we are made to feel individual.

For example, it’s hard not to want to be with someone at least once.

People don’t care if they have free will or not. They know what they want and that’s it for them.

Broadly defines the kind of signal an agent sends/throw (eg : speech)

emphasize a particularity the illusory aspect of individuality in the consciousness phenomenon.

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