Opposable Thumb to Opposable Mind: Grasping Our Situation by Shifting Our Consciousness.

I’m a big picture guy. I tend to spread out in an absurdly wide breadth-first way to try to find the commonalities in everything. Kind of like trying to wrap my arms around the universe.

The title of this blog and this post occured to me while listening to Ray Kurzweil at the Accelerating Change conference last month in Palo Alto, CA. He mentioned the role of the opposable thumb in our evolution from the apes, with just a shift in the leverage point, tools went from potential to manifestation. Cognitive capacity expanded to make best use of abstraction as more and more items became tools. This is a powerful feedback loop; the more robust the abstraction, the more versatile the tool, increasing the need for robust abstractions, etc.

We now find ourselves in a funny predicament. Being mostly blind to our own paradigms, we’re having a hell of a time figuring out what to do with ourselves. Lots of gloom and doom talk with terrorism, global warming, peak oil, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, ozone holes, antibiotic-resistant super-bugs, etc. All of this stuff comes about because of unintended consequences of unchecked growth.

But wait just a minute. Let’s take a second look at those consequences and see if they really are unintended. In this blog, I’ll explore the possibility that the universe has a teleological bent that can be discovered and exploited. I’ll go even further: its starting to seem to me that part of this bent is the desire to have this bent discovered and exploited. That’s a seriously twisted perspective, and to fully explore it, we’re going to have to break a few paradigms. (I can feel my melodrama coming on…). The universe may be more like the Matrix than we currently suspect. Each of us is Neo, and the universe supplies all those other programs just to get us to develop the very insight that I’m proposing.

The first victim is the question, “Does life have a purpose?” I think the answer is, “yes.” But the purpose isn’t 42, unless 42 is a code for “finding balance.” But, upon finding balance, the universe isn’t happy. It doesn’t just reach a static equilibrium. It then uses that stability as a platform from which to hurl itself into another disequilibrium in a never ending game of pendulum swinging from disequilibrium to equilibrium, and back again, at successively higher levels.

The second victim is the question, “What is life?” I’d answer that life is anything that expresses intent. In my view, this means that the universe is alive, and that everything in the universe is alive. This is probably too bold to state right up front. Almost no one thinkgs a rock expresses intent. I would argue that the degrees of freedom with which it can express its intent are extremely limited. A molecule has a very tiny degree of freedom, but more than an atom. A virus can express more freedom than a molecule, but less than an cell. A colony of cells more than a single cell, but less than an organism. A society more than an organism, but less than an eco system, etc. The ordering makes one think that a galaxy is the jump above eco-system, but I believe it is a competing/collaborating intelligence; a different track, not a member in the sequence chain. Galaxies metabolize hydrogen into all of the elements necessary to create life, and then create the galactic organs that shuttle this matter into star clusters and solar systems.

As I’ve alluded, I’m positive I’ve said too much for an initial post on this subject. I’m going to shoot my credibility to hell before I even acquire an audience…

Ahh, to hell with it. You all are grown ups; you can make up your own minds. Just don’t be too quick to dismiss an idea because it doesn’t fit what you were taught in school.

- David