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    Whoobie77's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Holon View Post
    "Process God" is the idea of some metaphysical suggestive will, like the God Whitehead identified, and in contrast to some static Christian God. Sorry, super lazy shorthand.

    To address the meat of that section, if there is some Whiteheadian process will that is equally shaping/being shaped by the processes of the Universe, at least in this little corner, it's starting to wake up to itself. I think it's interesting that there are consistent patterns of things achieving predatory conscious awareness of a consensus experience, and self-awareness. It started at first with small-scale collections of organs, and is currently seemingly happening in large-scale collections of minds. The internet is starting to circulate memes of "Is the internet becoming self-aware?" which to me suggests it is, although it could go either way.

    It reads like you've keyed into this, but at the same time, I think it's a fairly obscure idea, and probably outside someone's intuitive metaphysics if they've never been exposed to Whitehead or any of the people inspired by him (like Deleuze! Thanks for pointing him out).
    Ah, it was a problem of reference.


    Yes, I've realized something similar, but mainly it came from reading E.O. Wilson's superorganism musings, plus Ernst Haeckel's colonial theory at the micro-level, with Dawkins' memetic theory, Oswald Spengler's and Amy Chua's civilization studies, some cybernetics propaganda from the military industrial complex and some operations research texts, and of course Darwin and the Austrian school, forming secondary and tertiary references. (Plus probably a whole bunch of other smart people I'm failing to credit.)

    And of course, there's this great clip from Nixon:




    Deleuze had nothing to do with it. I couldn't get past his Frenchness. French intellectuals often seem to me be so enamored with how chic their work is that it immediately becomes dated...but I guess one would expect no less from the most fashionable city on Earth!

    The word "God", on the face of it, though, doesn't appear to me to be the kind of intelligence we are headed for. That seems to imply both a unified and benevolent force. The rule seems to be that things evolve, and for things to evolve, there must be competition. So I would predict a multitude of intelligences slugging it out (which might already be happening, if you consider states and corporations to be these kind of intelligences) as opposed to just one consciousness. There can be no God, but perhaps an asymptotic approach towards one. For an example, even though our species has effectively "won" this level of evolutionary competition, there's still AIDS and Ebola and all kinds of other nasties wiping us out in droves. The fight continues! Though these consciousnesses should start to appear like gods to us, since we are basically the equivalent of their gut bacteria.

    The benevolence implied with "God" I also find troubling, albeit to a lesser degree. I doubt we'll end up with Skynet, (again, they need us, we're their gut bacteria) but the intelligences might start experimenting with "antibiotics" to take down what they see as malignant growths or pathogens. This could be a painful period for humanity (Once again, this may already be happening, depending on your perspective, with these unmanned drones blowing up the postulated enemies of corporatism and technology...)

    But thank you for making me aware of Whitehead, I'll be sure to check him out. I think I've heard the name before. (God bless him, having the name of a pustule for a surname...must have had a hard life lol)









    Quote Originally Posted by Holon View Post
    Perhaps a progression from chemical to abstract, while maintaining literality. We start with chemical entropy pumping to maintain relative levels of biological integrity, but I see it as a natural progression that we (and termites, and beavers) build structures in our environments. This is still a kind of literal information pumping, by offloading chaos elsewhere in the environment in order to create structure and predictability in an area of interest, but that might be a very naive and tenous leap on my part.
    No, I think it's quite an astute observation once unpacked.
    Last edited by Whoobie77; 09-17-2014 at 04:50 AM.

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