on being the stewards of sentience
a manifesto. consciousness & stewardship: the most sacred responsibility, & the only responsibility: to be a steward of the light of consciousness. as an individual, you carry your lit torch. as a collective, we walk blind along that paved path towards telos.
Telos
As stewards we are especially responsible for the conveyance of sentient beings to telos. What is the telos?
I guess the telos is 'the path to the cessation of suffering', that 4th noble truth.
The human race, agriculture and civilization, was the telos of an incredibly exciting journey of living organisms. In many senses, we already did it. We did a great job.
But also, if you look at the way we're living our lives.. was this really what it was all for? For all the billions of years it took to get here, from the formation of our Goldilocks-zone earth and its atmosphere and oceans, to the first living organisms, to our ancient ancestors' leaving the water—the fact that most anyone alive could write a book of everything they know and their life experiences? Are we really making good on the sacrifices it took to be here? I'm not for the burden of zealous ancestor worship, im for taking a careful, hard look at the present, and asking ourselves critically, "is this what it was all for?" And if it wasn't, scrap it. Try again, do something different.
Each moment for you is a fresh opportunity to do something different. No repetitive process addiction can take that away from you, you are blessed with a pair of fresh eyes. The ultimate agency, the ultimate tool for change, starts from within. To be present, to do something great with that infinitesimal space between perception and action. Use your fresh eyes: what do you see? What shall we do next?
Stewardship: the unreasonable burden
It's like a baby literally, if you fuck up, the baby's dead. But in this impossibly gentle way, we are entrusted with stewarding this consciousness until we 'grow up'. We are the baby, our parent is the universe, but somehow we are raising ourselves. The metaphor breaks here.
We've been given an unreasonable burden, all of a sudden: we find ourselves conscious. There's a certain loneliness to that, and also an inherent responsibility: we find ourselves stewards of the world, of ourselves, and of the universe in which we find ourselves existing. This is an unreasonable burden to bear, and it carries with it the weight of all risks to consciousness that ever were.
This includes planetary events like biological and climate disasters, as well as extraplanetary events such as massive asteroid impacts, a nearby gamma ray burst or solar explosion, and who can forget the possibility that we will or have already invented a technology which ensures the destruction of sentient life. In terms of modern tech, nuclear war and AI carry much risk. On our planet, we're headed for a supervolcano drastically changing earth's climate every 50k–100k yrs. And the sun in our solar system gives us a fixed tenancy of approximately 5 billion years to figure our shit out before it begins star death, kicking us out of our digs and forcing us to find a different solar system.
And eventually, each one of us faces death, the ultimate return to sender back to wherever your unified stream of consciousness originated, perhaps oblivion.
To ensure our continued existence, we will have to create 'save points' like the antarctic seed vault, and redundant human colonies on mars, the moon, venus, and other solar systems afterwards.
Deducing stewardship: we find ourselves conscious over time. It's that kinesis—the 'time' aspect of having an experience—that implies responsibility. Well, once you factor in that you're conscious over time in a realm of causal reality. That is to say—you are part of this perception loop, when what you perceive leads to your actions, and your actions in the causal world directly affect what you perceive.
The birds and the bees are our children. (Humans aren't the only sentient species of course, but we are the most physically capable, and so much of these responsibilities for preservation and conveying us to telos fall to us. Those other beings are just responsible for carrying their own torch.)
Who are we to design the world?
This all raises questions: who are we to design the world? Thoughts about "playing god". Modern technology, and vague conservative techno-regressionist degrowther reactionary sentiments.
Humans are not separate from our environment just because we are some special type of sentient: personally i think natural selection and artificial selection are one in the same. Is there something impure about our minds and consciousness, fundamentally different and wrong, that our decisions and designs should be fundamentally divorced from all that is good an holy? I beg to differ. In daoist fashion, I propose the opposite: any design that we could come up with is part and parcel with the specialness and beauty of the natural world. It is a silly, elitist, anthropocentric, human exceptionalist notion to suggest that we are divorced from the natural world. No doubt this comes from our ability to design a world of isolation—especially when u got animals that r also sentient and yet we consider them 'natural'.
It's an interesting position to be in, nonetheless. We have the freedom to redesign our own worldviews, our environments and thoughts, our conscious experiences, our genetic makeup. We have the ultimate freedom, and often times little understanding of guidance, other than asking the question 'what can we do?', and following the incentives of capital. We can clone ourselves or alter our genetic fabric to be unrecognizable. In this world of limitless potential to redesign ourselves in some image—what ought we to do? I argue it isn't the case we ought to shun this power and reject it as alien. But tepidity is a virtue here. We ought to explore this calmly, cautiously, carefully. Not get carried away. (Lest we lose our humanity? jk.) We may be blind, but telos guides us, our human nature, and ultimately our nature as sentient beings, guides us. Accusations of playing god aren't accurate or helpful.
Worth thinking about: where do our designs come from? We design what we do due to the Robert Sapolsky thing—our human default settings in our brain and physical body needs as well. We design for what god/the prime creative force (stand-in, like the variable X, or like dark matter—necessary to conceptualize the existence of the universe) gave us.
Who are we designing for? The future of the human race? For earth? For raw consciousness itself? It's unclear what this is all about—the overall plot of the universe.
On the blindness, and finding what we ought to do: all we can do is to be open-minded, and follow our most reasonable value-functions. Try not to get ourselves killed, a la X-risk. Be reasonable and good to ourselves, each other, the world, whatever is beyond.
Also something about designing not for humans, avoiding human exceptionalism, and designing for sentient beings in general. Design for cats. Design for posthumans, this thing that we are evolving into. We aren't just our genetic roots; the future calls out to us too, the things that we are becoming.
On being more than human
I think it has to do with Robert Sapolsky. I don't remember why. The natural fundamental essence of being human is something fundamentally non-human, and the aesthetic of that is scary, weird, and, to us, alien. Advanced meditators that see through the apparently artificially-constructed sense of self have a hell of a time, let me tell you.
Stories of your lives: spiral dynamics. Humans are just playing out these dynamics from other places; all these things we think are inherently human are just expressions of game theory (read: math kinda). You can't pin down human, to X ritual, to alcohol. Our identity is as fluid as the flowing river. Rather than saying "to be human is to drink alcohol, listen to music", etc. Maybe we can try making room for the blank space: "To be Human is to _______". Where the blank is things we have never done before, never tried doing. Things currently alien to our sense of being human.
Are we the automatic behavior paths? Are we the addiction? Are we the failures like meth addiction in fresno? What does it look like to solve addiction? Would we be not human?