On Medium: Secular versus Religious Enlightenment
Here's a lengthy dialogue I had with a monistic mystic on the nature of enlightenment and God. Should enlightenment be secular or religious? Should we be traditional mystics or cosmicist pantheists? Should the sage show compassion or transhuman amorality? Why would God create anything?
When it comes to the big philosophical questions, we're all likely ignorant of the answers. Philosophers understand the questions and the many ways of asking them, but if anyone knew the answers, the questions wouldn't be philosophical in nature and we wouldn't still be asking them even after two thousand years.
ReplyDeleteIt's not about finding complete answers, but about learning to live with doubts. A philosopher is inclined to doubt everything, feeling unsatisfied with anything apart from the final Truth. But that Truth never comes; we're waiting for Godot. So life and philosophy are absurd. The question is whether all lifestyles are equally valid or invalid in the shadow of that worst-case scenario. The philosopher's job is to show there are still reasons to go on living even though life is absurd, since some responses to that existential predicament are nobler than others.
I think you're asking about the potential for human heroism. How far can we go in our anti-natural direction? Clearly, science fiction presents many vivid possibilities, including both pessimistic and optimistic versions of transhumanism. All we can do now is conjecture, based on our history and our current trajectory. But no one has a crystal ball. The brain, though, is perhaps the most flexible thing in the universe. We're highly adaptable, so we can survive in many types of environment, including one we create for ourselves. But we may destroy ourselves in our attempt to humanize nature. Human progress may not escape the universe's absurdity and inhumanity, after all.