In fact, let's grant to Rosenberg his great insight, and say that "there's nothing but bosons and fermions", or whatever. That literally makes no sense, because, I'm speaking to you and we understand each other, more or less. If it were only bosons and fermions that really existed, we wouldn't be able to talk at all, much less make sense of anything. — Manuel

Exactly. The talk of 'there's only X' is silly if taken at face value (or taken 'metaphysically.') An entire lifeworld-and-language is presupposed in any statement.

Husserl was mentioned above, so I also link to a great & short online text: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

We don't really know what any word means, — Manuel

Agreed. What I am agreeing to is therefore not exactly clear, but for me this is one of the bigger realizations that I associate with philosophy. We are sleeptalkers, taking the vague intelligibility of our grunts for granted. We don't meow what we are barking about. (This doesn't mean that we can't get things done nevertheless, but it may mean that certain things can't be done, whatever that's exactly supposed to mean.)

Obviously some of these attitudes were social norms of the times, but it begs the question, why, with their powerful intellect, could they not discern the wrong and if they did why go along with it? They don’t appear to have applied their thinking and discrimination to themselves. — Brett

As a Hegelian thinker might say, it takes time for the social human mind to make progress. For the most part, 'men are as the times are.' Most of the time, I am anyone, no one, a mere follower of conventions that I've perhaps never even become conscious of as conventions. These invisible conventions, too obvious to even notice and therefore criticize, and perhaps the most important. A philosopher can become great by becoming aware of only a little of taken-for-granted mass and winning some distance from it, and therefore the possibility of changing it.

Which makes me wonder if it’s possible that philosophy has nothing to do with life or how ones mind operates. Like I said, it’s as if philosophy is attached to the mind inorganically, that it’s completely alien to what we are. — Brett

I can understand a certain slice of professional philosophy being viewed as inorganic artifice, but you mention Schopenhauer, Hegel, Hume, Heidegger,... Those guys seem very involved with life, issues of grave concern for human beings. In some ways, though, I see how philosophy is alien, transgressing, transcendent. But instead of making philosophy inhuman, it reveals the disruptive core of the human being. Humans are haunted. That's our glory and curse.

But when people are so attached to their opinions, having those opinions challenged becomes a loss of identity. — Garth

I think about the issue in a similar way. Identity is sacrificed in the pursuit of truth. But what motivates the pursuit of the truth? One identifies with rationality. So really we have an internal collision of sub-identities. A network of belief and desires is constantly modified. Identity is unstable, especially when people are young and running through a gallery of alternatives, as they discover this or that fault with their current persona, which is only a mask in retrospect, at the moment of transcendence/detachment.

A side point: to be rational is to be virtuously depersonalized. A reality in common is acknowledged, along with the limitations of any individual perspective on this reality.

It's not that a physical person employed would have to follow the stuff, so the cost isn't so high. — ssu

Right. With AI the eye of Big Brother really can be everywhere. If that's not the case now, it will be soon. Captions can be provided for images automatically. Speech can also be converted to text.

I'm not quite paranoid enough to actually worry about a department of precrime, but it's feasible that algorithms will be used to select which citizens get special attention, even if such citizens have done nothing suspicious yet in human terms.

I'm concerned that we will end up with an endless war on domestic terrorism. The threat is real, but so is the counter-threat of an exaggerated reaction. I agree that we're not on that track yet.

Snowden talked about how resistance can be nipped in the bud before it spreads. Oppose the wrong entities and one could in theory be discredited with lies or just embarrassing context. One's self-defense could be silenced before the attack begins. Like I said, it's paranoid. I don't really expect it to happen to me, for instance, but it sucks to realize how fragile one is. Reality is mostly mediated by screens I do not control.

You know, forums have a serious brand problem with many people. This is a big challenge and I don't have a super clever solution to it. — Hippyhead

I don't know a single person IRL who uses this kind of forum. I guess most are happy with Facebook and Twitter. In the case of FB, they are happy maybe to only broadcast for their friends. In the case of Twitter, it's perhaps because they can measure their fame.

Trumpers couldn't even revolutionise their revolution. I doubt technological innovation is their forte. — Baden

Of course you are right about the majority of them. But I do worry about the odd genius with such leanings. Like what happened to Bobby Fisher? Or Ezra Pound? I'm reading the Toland bio of Hitler, and it's eerie how otherwise intelligent people can be become seduced. Or they cynically ride on the back of a beast they think they can control (like the GOP on the back of Trumpers). (It would have been poetic justice if some of them had been captured by a crowd they humored, but the better part of me is glad that it didn't happen.)

On the bright side, the left could hijack/borrow such technology for themselves.

Or at least you get the government search engines to note that the user "Brett" on the site "Philosophy Forums" says "he supports terrorism" and that is then put to a huge database to be used possibly in the future. — ssu

I must confess that I'm personally a little paranoid about this kind of thing. Our minds are mostly externalized nowadays and subject to potential policing and analysis as never before. A new kind of tyranny is becoming possible.

Yup. I despise Trump, but I don't love control of the commons with no oversight.

I'm pretty sure that most Trumpers would censor people on the left given the chance. They'd justify it in terms of public safety too.

It's possible that the censored right-wingers will revolutionize communication somehow. Text doesn't require that much processing power. Perhaps a decentralized Twitter-clone will be co-hosted by millions of cellphones. Not my area, but it seems vaguely possible, especially as phones get more powerful. (It's a Silicon Valley plot-line, but in that show it's from a place of genuine idealism.)

It's true that you don't eliminate the water cooler.

Maybe some posters are being scared off by low quality posts. I don't know. I have sometimes wonder why this place doesn't have thousands of active users. The interface is the best I've seen. Perhaps most scholarly types are just too busy or proud to expose themselves to the peanut gallery. I can imagine academics not wanting to waste their valuable time posting here when they should be working on a paper that will advance their career.

Anonymity is crucial. You can play with ideas at minimal risk but can't take credit for your ideas. Who does that model fit? Is this place not a massive wall for interactive graffiti? I suppose your article idea wouldn't really hurt that, but what comes to mind for me are long opening posts that don't really invite conversation. As I see it, a paragraph or two is ideal...just enough to stir responses. Posters can link to papers in their profiles.

I'm not against your idea. Some sort of image control could bring in more posters, and it wouldn't hurt my feelings to be hidden in the background.

For some it's space, for others it's time that makes us ridiculous. For me it's always been time more than space. If all that space out there is devoid of intelligence (which it's probably not?), then the density of its significance is almost nil.

It's that the generations come and go like the leaves on the trees. It's that all paths lead to the same nothingness (or so I expect.) It's the big death of the species, too, which defeats the usual transpersonal escapes from our little, individual deaths.

How do we bear it? Or is it actually an ecstatic vision? To think the absurdity of the species is to put oneself above all mortal doings. Some part of us temporarily floats above the grand spectacle of human history, drifts in imagination to before its evolution and beyond its extinction. The vision of the absurd is a kind of transcendence, but it can also be hell, and many ambivalent states in between.

I like the clash-of-personalities model better than the magazine model. What my books can't give me is an unpredictable collision of hundreds of personalities.

The matter boils down to two options that are laid out before us:

1. Accept that the universe has no cause (it arose by chance)

or

2. Accept that the universe has a cause (Call this 'i]first cause[/i] God or whatever you like) — TheMadFool

Another option is that we can't really make sense of the issue. The fluffy either does or does not have a gurgle.

I suggest considering the design of experiments. How do humans currently find and understand evidence for a causal relationship? We use a treatment and control group. We look at p-values.

This is presumably only going to get worse as AI and automation can take over more and more roles in society, which was still a way people could feel part of that bigger whole and derive some meaning (although that certainly has it's problems too, I won't deny). — ChatteringMonkey

Good point, and I also suspect that our dependence on screens is contributing to mass delusion. Our ape brains can't handle the tech. The lil' guy has no economic imperative toward info hygiene. The foundation is vanity and greed, with a fragile semi-neutral matrix that keeps us from ripping one another to shreds literally and not only in spirit. The whispers of Q make people happy, put some evil cabal in charge, provide ideal victims. The trafficked children are strong metaphors for the soul of man under late capitalism. To me a more realistic vision is that no one is steering the machine and that all are more or less complicit. This is the unmarketable position, fit only for anonymous graffiti. The figure of Socrates is only useful when integrated with a Cure and a Plan.

And how we will use it, will depend on the state our civil societies will be in... which, you know, doesn't look to good at this particular moment :-). — ChatteringMonkey

One difficulty here is that any nation that sacrifices economic or technological strength for mental health runs the risk of being overpowered by more reckless nations. The machine can't stop. I can imagine humanity wiping out 95% of the population in some disaster, and then a few centuries later it happens again. Transcendence/transgression is the demon that lifts us above the apes that came before. (Maybe I'm laying it on thick, but it does seem to be the largest drama we can think of, our own global-species drama.)

Any unambiguous good would do. It’s quite hard to come by. — Wayfarer

Right, or at least it's hard for a neurotic-critical-sophisticated mind to hold on to. Anyone in a state of genuine faith is saved by that faith while it lasts.

Does the self-lacerating conscience take itself for an idol?

Yes I think you, and I am too for that matter, are viewing it from a humanist perspective, which has grown out of the western judeo-christian tradition. — ChatteringMonkey

Right. It's my understanding that post-tribal universalism is historically entwined with a Christianity that was preached to the gentiles. I imagine pre-global societies understanding themselves as warrior organisms. A good citizen was a good cell, a good piece of the holy machine. Traditional societies like this just want proper repetition, to live up to the ancestors, the same anew. Well, we have to account for expansion (Assyrians come to mind, etc.) That pops the nostalgia bubble. But then Life 'is' expansion and exploitation. You mention Nietzsche, and he does seem like a key thinker on all of this. (footnotes to Nietzsche == foolosophy since? )

But we end up with global self-devouring humanism and runaway technological disruption. The tech promises and threatens. It could/should liberate us from drudgery, but it also threatens unprecedented domination. How about a department of precrime, brought to you by A.I.? Or a Big Brother who actually can watch everyone all of the time, a parody of God?

I would argue that any existence that is not a perfectly ideal world (for that individual being born) is probably a decision one person shouldn't make on another's behalf. — schopenhauer1

I can see where you are coming from. Any pain chosen for another is a violation in some pure theoretical sense.

My response is just the suggestion that human thinking is deeply probabilistic and approximate. So I can see that you are right in some sense, but an almost perfect life still pulls my heartstrings. That suggests that humans are willing to pay for pleasure with pain, and I project that onto this possible child. It's as if I am shopping for them and decide that I found a good enough deal.

Of course we don't get such assurances.

Humans use linguistic-conceptual frameworks and socio-cultural enculturation to be able to function in the world. So this is just a truism of how we operate, not a declaration of how humility is some sort of arbitrary concept. — schopenhauer1

OK, but here we are within language appealing to concepts like dignity. Let me zero in. Human suffering has an extra dimension, made possible by abstract thought. We can experience the world as a meaningless nightmare, where 'meaningless' names a recognized absence of some kind.
We develop human notions of fair play and justice, and it's only then possible to see life itself as a kind of injustice or foul play. Other animals just hurt, but humans can see the absurdity of their pain, perhaps as they look forward to an inescapable personal death. For people in our culture, the 'point' is to become an Individual, which is to say irreplaceable and therefore genuinely mortal --unlike the interchangeable beavers who repeat, repeat, repeat the beaver destiny.

I like the dignity theme, and I remember it occuring to me many years ago that 'life is an indignity.' One is thrown absurdly into an unchosen situation with responsibilities that one could not consent to.

But we learn to think that way as part of a human community, so that our culture allows us to articulate the violation in a way that other animals can't. And we have to have the fantasy or goal of dignity in the first place.

If we were less proud, we might not notice the indignity. If we weren't future-and-status-oriented individuals, we'd probably forgive a certain amount of pain. With humans there is humiliation.

Difficult question for some: If one could somehow know that one's child would be gloriously happy and successful for 30 years and then die suddenly and painlessly (without expecting it)...would one consent to the birth? I'd be tempted to consent. His or her life could be known ahead of time as a dream worth having. (Implicit here is an aesthetic justification of existence, and of course what is promised is well above the expected value of the random variable that we actually have to work with.)

I think resistance to antinatalism is more of a gut-level thing that finds reasons after the fact. But I don't see how the issue in general escapes being dominated by an overall judgment on life.

I can imagine a character bent on the elimination of suffering. He would wipe out not only humanity but also all life on earth. It would be best to destroy the planet too, in case life were to evolve again. There's a kind of 'insane' rationality at play in this idea. Put everything to sleep, out of...love?

I'm not this character, but I do have an antinatalism streak. Lately it occurred to me that a contempt for vulnerability might be at play. Also an outraged tenderness. The genius of traditional visions of afterlife is that they ultimately negate all suffering. Temporary pain (which may be intense and long-lasting) is intuitively-emotionally if not logically justified by an eternity of safety, dignity, pleasure. It makes sense that the original Schopenhauer with his atheism would also see the guilt in reproduction.

If they know what they are doing, it's a red herring. — schopenhauer1

That seems right to me. What is family planning after all? A conscientious potential parent will at least consider what kind of life they can offer that possible child as a parent. Does this make sense to everyone? Humans have vivid imaginations. We project into the future constantly. It's easy to imagine a person who on some level would love to be parent worrying about whether creating that child would be a selfish act.

I think the meaning people generally seek, is feeling part of some greater (cosmic) plan. If God created the universe, then you have such a plan because presumably he created it with a purpose. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree with you about participation in the cosmic plan. The only hitch is that maybe humans could resent and rebel against the plan of a god they considered evil. Or perhaps they obey out of fear of Hell or some other punishment. That makes the world a kind of prison, and casts God as the worst tyrant ever.

It's possible that I'm thinking from humanist prime directives that I just can't see around. For 'us,' a god must make sense, be rational, and seem virtuous by human standards in order to 'truly' be god and not just some powerful alien tyrant or inscrutable, cold machine.

Thoughts?

The problem, in relation to believing in a god anyway, in our current age is our commitment to empirical truth and scientific advancement. So I think it has more to do with the general cultural climate, than what a particular God looks like... but being all powerful, all knowing and infinitely good probably helps, yes. — ChatteringMonkey

I know what you mean about the climate. I'd like to believe in a good God, but I just can't. I had some belief when I was younger, and there was something nice (if also eerie) about a consciousness who could witness and care about every detail of my life and consciousness. If you have real faith in a benevolent God, you are never truly alone.

I do still find it hard to make sense of an evil god, except as an enemy of the good god which is actually worshiped. What I can make sense of is a conception of the big bad world in its entirety as a metaphorical god, but then the relationship becomes ambivalent. Or there is the strange vision of God as presented in the book of Job, a glorious and powerful God who is beyond human notions of good and evil.

Since a simulation is in fact created by purposeful beings, you wouldn't have that problem. — ChatteringMonkey

Let's imagine that our world is a simulation created by humans who are more technologically advanced. If they are ethically no better than us but only have more power, would that really satisfy our need for meaning?

How has the idea of God comforted people, given them a sense of meaning? It seems to me that God 'has' to be adorable in order to function. Think of a son wanting to grow up and be like his good father, who seems not only full of love but also full of power and knowledge. Anything confusing or questionable in the world can be explained in terms of the son's incomplete education.

If all we have for a god is a confused older brother, on the other hand,...

Maybe the common thread is the fear that life is not going anywhere. Don't people want an unambiguous sense of indestructible progress? If evolution is directed by trans-human intelligence, then presumably it is going somewhere, and one can perhaps participate in (or at least adore) this trans-human intelligence.

Along the same lines, thinking the heat death or just the death or sun suggests a blind machine unimpressed by what humans call progress.

Does the demystification of rulers figure into this? We want to believe that genuine, noble adults are in control. In the age of Nero, Christians had a secret king who was at least on his way. If the world is not run by holy or rational or noble adults, then one has instead a vision of the runaway machine.

Our madness is strangely our glory and our privilege. Give humans time, and they will revolutionize their environment and their lifestyle, until it's normal for them to video-conference with humans on the other side of the globe or worry about terrorists with dirty bombs or the onset of an AI-perfected surveillance state.

What is the individual's fantasy these days? To disrupt, change the world, getting credit for something new and important. Anti-zen is something like our religion. I can't simply rebel or complain because even that rebellion and complaint must be original and disruptive in order to be good. In a certain sense rebellion is conformity in systematized permanent revolution.

In that Russell quote a big deal is made of personal annihilation and the second and arguably greater death of the species itself. This second death means that individuals cannot escape death by storing their genius in works of art and science that will survive them -- or in the more usual vessel of descendants.

Beavers are not pretentious. They have accepted that they are fundamentally cool and so are comfortable remaining at that level, therefore, as they have found true balance in themselves, feel no urge to seek a radically different world.

We could do worse than to aspire to the Zen state of the beaver. — Book273

I agree. But can we manage it? Instead I imagine humans competing to see who can seem the most zen.

It's as if any good thing has a kind of surface or shadow that can be caught up in the same anxious play for proximity to it, whatever it happens to be.

Having said that, I think we all sometimes really do enjoy the zen of the beaver. (You might say that we are only metaphysically human in a state of angst [Kojeve talks about something like this.] )

Does all life consciousness seek meaning? Is the thirst for meaning an inevitable consequence of consciousness, the kind we're familiar with? An open question. — TheMadFool

I think we can see a spectrum in human affairs. We can see humans arranging things to stay warm, stay fed, etc. And this we can also see in animals. But we don't see beavers building the pyramids. We don't see them arranging a dam so beautiful that they hope it will be remembered forever by all the beavers to come. And I don't think that we think that beavers imagine some radically different world.

You mention consciousness. Perhaps we have to add a vivid imagination, including that of the past and more importantly the future.

One last issue is envy. Maybe a beaver can envy the dam of another beaver or even its mate. But humans can envy in such intricate and surprising ways. I propose that the complexity of our pursuit of status is tied up with this. Some men committed suicide when they weren't allowed to join this or that war because they were medically unfit. I can also imagine a rich artist envying the talent of a poor, unknown artist, because that rich artist has taste enough to see what the world can't. Or one human can envy the tragic backstory of another, envy its negative glamour. And so on.

It springs from the widespread acceptance that life is a fluke and we're products of an accident. Death of God, and all. — Wayfarer

Let's say that plays a big role. I still think it misses something. Would deism help with the crisis of meaning? To some degree, I guess. If there were clearly a higher being, we could worship that being sincerely, assuming we saw it is wiser than us and benevolent.

But if there were just a creator who left us to our own devices? And we were still mortal?

I relate to a contempt for flatland. Something in humans want to transcend the human, or at least transcend the settled and the banal. In the brave new world of sensual pleasure the human mind would perhaps find itself creating problems for itself, taking a perverse pleasure in its restlessness (or, a cynic might say, playing ever more complicated status games in the symbolic realm.)

If it's not possible to program meaning into the simulation under any scenario, then how is meaning created in our 'real' world (assuming there is)? — Wheatley

Doesn't this hinge on what you mean by meaning? From one perspective, as embodied animals we are drowning in meaning. It feels good if X and it hurts if Y. Beyond the simple animal stuff, we want to feel like part of a community, believe in our work, and so on. Give people this, and most of them don't notice an absence of some other kind of meaning.

IMO, the crisis of meaning that people often mention on philosophy forums quietly involves time. Nothing endures. Everything is vulnerable. Is a contempt for vulnerability central here? Is the lack of meaning the lack of a hiding place or perfect suit of armor?

At what price can the deeper-meaning-seeker be bought? Eternal, indestructible youth in an earthly paradise? Is this particular crisis of meaning a frustration that one is not and cannot be a young god?
Some religions promise something like this in another world, and even down here some can revel in their youth and forget their vulnerability for awhile (forgetting also the lack of meaning.)

What I wish to argue is that the inner world is the most central aspect of life, for experiencing and discovering reality. Therefore, it is the most important area to understand and develop, especially in this time, in which for many of us, is one of social distancing. Isolation can be hard but perhaps it is a chance to know oneself. — Jack Cummins

'The kingdom of Heaven is within you.' It's an old and beautiful thought. I think of stoics, skeptics, Christians, and so on. Call it escapist or profound. It's a tempting idea.

But for me knowing oneself is dialectical. Maybe I have conversations with myself. But don't I have better conversations with myself having read some good books? Having been impacted by charismatic otherness?

The solitary self doesn't seem that interesting. A child only becomes a self proper by living in a world with others. And what do humans want? To love, to be admired, and so on. Certain thinkers come to mind who weren't understood in their day...but they looked forward in their imagination to when they would be cherished.

I still like the idea of spending a month in a mountain cabin alone if I knew that my loved ones would be happy and safe in my absence. (And I'd probably worry about being creatively productive or having something to show for the time nevertheless.)

Erudite and scientifically informed but shallow, in my opinion. — Wayfarer

I've just seen the video, but I am also repulsed by a kind of shallowness...not his but of the vision of data-ism which really seems plausible (we are already on the way.) But then I formed myself during the age humanism.

At the same time, a Star Trek future has a certain appeal, if we could manage it. What Star Trek couldn't anticipate was the evolution of our self-conception. Transcending racism and sexism is just projecting a purified humanism into the future. What we are faced with is the 'end of man' in a certain sense (the 'divine' private mind/conscience.)

Isn't that the 'creative destruction of capitalism?' Constantly reinventing itself, always rushing towards the new, the new tomorrow, the new product, the new idea. John Coltrane, jazz saxophinist, was tormented by having to reinvent music all the time, jazz became cliched - as soon as it was recorded it was no longer sufficiently new. — Wayfarer

That's a good theme. One of the things that torments/amuses me is that angst-ridden critics of capitalism are also its products. One can become rich and famous by mocking wealth and fame, calling out shallowness and hypocrisy. Even if one gives the money away, the social capital remains. So the private conscience ends up questioning its motives. Is critique one more play for status? Or, along the same lines, is gloomy existentialism (or its update) about seduction? The private conscience can devour itself along these lines, providing the kind of fireworks that keep that product from going stale.

They weren't simply dream states or hallucinations, he actually vogaged to these realms through dreams. I think any kind of mystical transport will be like that. It will be an awareness of entire domain or realm of being which all us mortals, the hoi polloi, would never be aware of. Not anywhere spatio-temporal but on a different plane altogether. Those who visit come back speaking of visions, and we think they're seeing things or making it up.

Actually the final myth of secularism is space travel, really. The conquest of the stars. I'm sure it's the sublimated longing for heaven or 'the life eternal' in material form. — Wayfarer

I suppose we only consider dreams unreal because they aren't public. From the outside, such a voyage must be a 'hallucination' for those who didn't or can't share it. People might believe and envy the dreamer/voyager while being locked outside those realms.

It occurs to me that anyone is 'saved' by genuine faith. Even conspiracy theorists are 'saved' to the degree that the world makes sense to them and they enjoy a sense of shared, grand meaning. The difference is whether empirical claims are involved. Your voyager reminds me of virtual reality.

You mention the stars, and that makes sense to me in terms of the need for a frontier. But my money is on biotech and the quest for eternal youth. Right now even Bezos can't pay off cruel Father Time. Think of Brave New World. Or the movie Get Out. I can imagine the vampire as the overman. If somehow aging were conquered for all humans, we need a frontier to make space for everyone. I don't think people would forgo the joys of parenthood, especially if aging was conquered in advance for next generation.

2) freedom of conscience for all individuals, circumscribed only by the need for public order and the respect of the rights of other individuals;

In this video, Hariri suggests in different words the dominant but endangered religion of our times is liberalism/humanism, by which he basically means 'freedom of conscience.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6BK5Q_Dblo

In a democracy, the truth is (ideally) crowd-sourced. 'You can't fool all of the people all of the time.' Peer-review is essential for science, and machine learning takes this implicitly statistical principle to extremes.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. — Stanley Fish

The little people all feel cheated. Who or what is cheating them varies: this is the age of 10,000 religions, if not 10,000,000. Freedom of conscience means everyone synthesizes their own. I suspect a love-hate relationship with this situation is common. The problem is the solution: humans just manage to get reabsorbed in the daily detail...or perhaps in the instrumental progress of science (nevermind the threats of perfected dystopian surveillance and control or the information Apocalypse, etc.) That's the genius and trouble with secularism. We don't bother to figure out where it's all going, perhaps because it's impossible. One generation passes on the machine to the next.

It's glorious and obscene.

Another aspect of the secular state is that it is concerned with providing the economic and physical infrastructure within which citizens are free to practice any religion or none. — Wayfarer

While I agree, this leaves out that this infrastructure is itself at the heart of current 'religious' controversy. 'Tax the rich' is a theological proposal, I suggest, along with environmental concerns, etc. As Harari argues, communism was an updated religion responding to the industrial revolution. What creeps me out is the data-ism he sees coming. In short, he expects us to begin looking not at the free human conscience for authority (an evaporating myth, in his view) but rather to fresher algorithms (he stresses the dogma of current life science that life is a biochemical algorithm.) Last but not least, he also stresses that religions need not be true in order to function and even dominate (his own preferences aren't clear.)

Granting that humanism is the dominant 'religion,' does it know where it's going? Does it lack self-consciousness? Given the gloomy mood of our times, I'd say that it knows that it doesn't know where it is going. It does not lack self-consciousness. Don't expect thinkers in high places to be too gloomy or vulnerable, though. Part of their job is propping up what's left of this amusement park.

How many people earnestly wrestle with the big issues now and then, suffer a terrible vision of world and their own complicity, and then flee to some private, ultimately narcissistic project in order to stay sane? I think of the world as a gleaming machine that is larger than any of us. We are its teeth and its food.