The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Continuing from where I left off here…

2. No more need to understand everything

As I stated earlier, we (“humans”) are CCA; parts of the One. Not very low on the complexity scale, but also not very high. Somewhere in between. This gives us some capacity to comprehend some CCA, some of the structure… CCA that are as complex as us, give or take; maybe simpler CCA; maybe even CCA somewhat more complex than us.

However, I have no reason to assume that we can fully comprehend CCA much more complex than ourselves. Certainly no reason to assume we have the capacity to comprehend the One, in full. This is actually good news, for me. It gives me licence to let go. I don’t need to understand “all of it”, because, most likely, I don’t have the capacity.

I actually find the default assumption that we have the capacity to “figure out” and understand “everything” a little arrogant; a kind of hubris. Why should that be the default assumption?

I fully understand where it comes from, though; all I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to suspend that assumption. In the 15th and 16th centuries, when science was just emerging, and the default was institutional religion dogma, it was very much necessary to assert that we (humans) DO have the capacity to understand essentially everything, eventually. It was the antithesis to the religious convention that “We are small and limited, and cannot fathom divine intentions and workings.” Contrasting that convention was absolutely necessary for establishing and developing science (more about what role science actually plays in understanding reality, as suggested by Hoffman’s model – in future posts). But half a millennium later, when science is well-established, and no one disputes the right to study reality and to make up one’s mind for ourselves, we can afford a little humility.

It’s now all right to admit / accept that we might not be “at the top”, and maybe we will never understand everything – simply because we might not have the capacity. In RSU, that’s not defeatist thinking; rather, it is quite a reasonable outcome from the model. We are still allowed to try and figure out things, and perhaps we are more capable than I speculate. But whether we actually ever complete the task is not that critical anymore.

3. Death

We don’t really know death, first hand. None of us (still here) has actually experienced it fully, and can ascertain what it actually is.

All we “know” is that we see (or otherwise experience) people around us die. We also know of people who died, and “see” a lot of evidence that they actually lived once, and have died.

But again, those are messages we receive thorough our sensors.

One possible way of perceiving death, in the CA-based reality, is as a change in the communication with a CCA. While the person (actually, a CCA) is “alive”, we interact with them in some way; then something happens, and that interaction changes. You might say “it’s over”, but are we sure of that?… We might still interact with that person through images (photos, videos), through related objects, through places once shared and memories, and so on. That person might also appear in a dream – can we say for sure that this is “not real”, just a fabrication of our imagination? Sure, if we believe that our consciousness resides in physical matter. But what if our consciousness is just floating in “consciousness soup”…? A dream could be just as “real” as touching the table in front of you. If we accept that the totality of our experience of another person is received as “messages” from another CCA, there is no reason to prioritise the messages that we seemingly receive directly from the live person over anything related to that person that we experience after their apparent death.

In the CA universe, death could be readily seen as a departure, moving away, change in nature of contact, withdrawal – any of the above or some other similar descriptor you prefer. That CCA simply chose to move away, dial down, maybe even evolve…? Maybe that CCA got integrated in something bigger, more profound? Maybe it split into smaller parts that did or didn’t integrate into other CCA? Good thing we don’t have to understand everything anymore…

Peace to all.