Practical Wisdom

What we want is to evolve quickly to a sustainable material culture. To have a revolution without the violence they often involve. Already our technology and detailed scientific and engineering knowledge make us masters of this material culture. We can build anything we can conceive if we can construct the public will to do it. So the question for those of us deeply interested in spreading the practice of wisdom as far and wide as possible, is how to construct this public will.

Following the political philosophy of Rawles, we have to construct a global public good that is compatible with, but independent of any religious belief. The public intellectuals who take a position of militant atheism will be challenged to soften some of their positions. To be sure, most of their critics come from a fundamentalist religious angle, and in those debates I find myself in total agreement against such critics.

The challenge here is that even if they are correct that the concept of god in not necessary, even to constructing the concept of good, a morality and ethics independent of God, that doesn't mean it is politically wise to be hard line about it. Peoples and cultures of our present day world are in many states of maturation and it is just plain unreasonable to publicly criticize them any more than we can expect the greek philosophers to have a good physical model of motion. Nobody had one then, or they didn't tell us about it, and all of the worlds religions are based in cultures older than that.

All humans are practical people, only the practical people suceed and prosper, but we have all prospered too much and are in danger of totally destroying the planet. For sure we have a human made climate and extinction event on our hands. Whatever our stage of cultural development, we are capable of understanding the stakes and acting to avert disaster. Ironically, it is the so-called advanced nations who have created the crisis and they seem unable to construct the political will to change.

We want to prove them wrong. Grass roots political movements can change the world, they are the only things that ever really have made lasting change. We need also to understand the foundations of religious culture in the history of bottom-up change.

Moving on from pragmatics to simple practicality. What happened to the utopias, is the future all distopia? I suppose it must be one or the other after the singularity either we get wise and find a sustainable utopia that we can implement practically. First, we'll need to accomplish some amazing feats of social change. Using the levers of poplular political power in liberal democracies, we have to steer a course clear of all the jingoistic fear-baiting and towards solidarity. No-one is served by industries the corrupt the political system to server their bottom line. The market can't work if money can be wealded as a political weapon to control markets by excercise of power and not by making a better widget at a better price.

 

(Find the right home for this (if any)) If the world were a simulation, it would have crashed by now. Where is the machine, how does it work and who started it?

Pragmatists conclude abductively, not that we have an ideal world implemented as a simulation on some universal magic simulator because there is no consistent theory where the given is anything but what it seems to be, or something isomorphic to what it seems. Information must have practical consequences to be transformable into knowledge, and neither information nor knowledge are often complete.

The world model that the proponents of the simulation theory propose has to be some form of quantum gravity theory not as yet discovered as a complete theory. We'd probably need a quantum computer to run it on, but where is the universe that the simulation runs? Frankly, the only reasonable hypothesis from which the rest of this might follow is that the simulation represents the operation of the mind of God. I would think God would bore quickly of the tedium and would be intelligent enough to create a sort of stuff that behaves like a simulation. Something that is granular, where information based rules are central to understanding what happens, where consciousness and awareness are related to the third category in semiotics made real in physical energetic relationships.

Then what is a reasonable ground of being is real substance that posesses informational properties at the most basic level. These informational properties are such to reliabably produce the world as given. This world is not magical, it is comprehensible with a logically consistent understanding to a high degree of accuracy. If we perform an experiment now or at a time and place separated by millions of years in time or light years of space, we expect the same results. We expect that the universe will be observed to evolve and have a different perspective as described by the appropriate transforms, but it is in our universe, past, present, future and at great distances, we expect that the rules of physics do not change. If they do, we say the theory is incomplete because it takes to be constant some relationships that are not. To be sure, we don't know that reality is not a multiverse where all possible values of some set of fundamental, seemingly constant relationships actually happen in some part of the universe that is beyond our horizon permanently.

The multiverse hypothesis has the power to explain pretty much anything, which is its biggest weakness. If the universe is some kind of universal simulator that is in effect simulating any and all possible universes, then our work is done and nothing else needs to be explained. Except why would all this extravagance really be necessary for our lonely species without any neighbors except our co-residents on Earth.