Give Peace a Chance
Why the doomers are wrong in the long run
Hey, I send little snippets to post.news these days, since Twitter became a stinking pile of musk oil. Also, who am I kidding that twittr was ever a public forum where I can make a difference? I’ve grown to appreciate working locally is highly effective grass roots politics, and twittr is next to insignificant locally. Stone Age email works pretty good.
Anyhow, here is a sample of what I might stick on post.news:
Give Peace a Chance
What the "(fake) globalist" neoliberals do not get is that they are anti-internationalist, you could say anti-global. A true citizen of the world sees nations as indispensable organizing units that enrich all humanity, and support the families, in analogy to how a family supports the individual. I link to this recent Jeff Sachs monologue.
It's just that we do not need no friggin' globalist oligarchs and multinational rentiers.
After writing this note, I realized I did not provide the answer for, “Why the doomers are wrong?” So like any decent university lecturer — the answer is implicit, figure it out for homework yourself! 😜
There is a lot more that can be said. I don’t hate people, but I hate pathetic ideas. I hate doomerism. I like some spiritual scifi, but cannot findd much of it. To attempt to ward off social anxiety and incipient depression spirals recently I took out a scifi novel to read. Remembrance of Earth’s Past. But… damn. Liu Cixin infuses hios sotry with a whole lot of neoconservative militarism and blakc aesthetiscs of M.A.D. and ultra-darwinism. I took it as cautionary tale only, like Dune, so I could pretend to enjoy the trilogy. In the end though, it is not SciFI, it is Horror genre.
No doubt the Singularity crowd will loath me for saying this, but life is most precious in our cosmos because in our cosmos it is finite in duration. It is good to trust in an afterlife of the nonphysical soul, but you don’t have to prove the idea. Faith is sometimes sufficent. But even if there is no afterlife, the life we have now is precious because it is finite. The greatest horror was not in the invasion of the sophons in The Three Body Problem, nor the M.A.D. by cosmic sociology ultra-darwinism of The Dark Forest (though I admit a cool new scifi anti-trope). The greatest horror came in Death’s End. I did not finish the book, it was too bleak. Hope it has a fairy tale ending though.
Unlike the corny Pop music my sister blasted out all weekend in our youth, which I found insufferable, some other types of corn one can grow to appreciate. A appreciate a well crafted fairy tale far more than a raunchy horror story. If it does not funciton as cautionary tale, the hoorror genre is something I choose to actively avoid.
As for Death’s End. Whatever the twist the plot takes, for good or bad, I will appreciate it as modern fable. The thing about cheating death, even if it is not scientifically possible for us in the far future, is that you are consumming real resurces that are finite. There is no infinite source of energy in our universe. (Trust me I want to say, Neil Turok and Latham Boyle — my new GOATS of theoretical phsyics — did the counting. Euclideanized path integral with all the damn fields in it.) So it is the most selfish thing imaginable. You are killing, effectively, people who will never be born. You say, “Well that’s only a counterfactual, a potential,” and I say, “Yeah.” (Yes, the pro-Lifers are not entirely barking mad, you see. Listen to Norman Finkelstein.)
I will not say the childish desire to be immortal in our current spacetime is loathsome. I respect your beliefs and desires, even if you’re a lunatic, since they come from your soul’s longing. However, I think the laws of physics prevent physical immortality — if for no other reason than the tyrrany of probability: accidents wil occur. Even photons “die” — have finite affine parameter range. But in the scifi counter reality, everlasting life in this cosmos is a horror story, not a fairy tale. Without the possibility of loss, love loses Its deepest meaning.