Thoughts are the output of intelligence. High level intelligence will produce thoughts which tend to be useful, accurate, and meaningful.
It occurred to me, though, that if we use the metaphor of energy centers–which I personally think describes something real, but your assent is not necessary to this exercise–then just as there are countless possible thoughts, with varying qualities, so too are there countless ways to express will (the throat), love and compassion (the heart), and sensual connection and pleasure (the gut and lower).
Lately I have been having dreams that I can only describe as revealing to me, now, feelings I had many years ago but never felt. I am getting back the feelings I was suppressing when I was numb. Feeling is coming back, and I have to say some of these are pretty unpleasant. It is no wonder I suppressed them.
But as I have felt often, and perhaps said occasionally, there is a sort of emotional Rube Goldberg machine in the background of our consciousness. One root something leads to something else to something else to something else. The Buddhists, in what reading I have done, not uncommonly do this sort of thing.
As one example, though, I got at the root of the latent depression I felt as a teenager and young adult. It was three or four layers back. It has no name. It is THAT. I can vaguely conjure it now in memory, but it has no form, no texture. But getting to it is, I feel, quite an accomplishment.
And here is what I will wonder aloud: what is the POINT of transhumanism? It’s taking an enormous amount of money, and that same money could be spent documenting and proving that the soul survives death. For most intents and purposes that has been done already.
Yes, the notion of living indefinitely as an infinitely intelligent cyborg has appeal to a certain personality type, but you die going in, don’t you? The “you” you know will disappear. Is it not worth mentating for some period of time what it is you want to endure? Because the QUALITY of your experience, even if this whole thing proves technologically feasible, is going to change. Do you know if a sunrise will feel as good?
And what happens to all the subtle qualities of experience I mentioned, of will, of love, of sense experience?
As far as I can tell, most of the people pushing this dream of omniscience, as seen from a factual perspective. Rather than look things up on their phones the answers will simply appear to them in their minds.
So what? You get to be the smartest thing in the room? If everyone else is similarly equipped, the smartest one is the one with the best data connection and processing speed.
To take over the world? To what purpose? To gloat for a time, then find yourself with nothing to do? Go to other planets? For what? New experiences? You got rid of most of your capacity for that sort of thing, which is almost inherently animalian, primitive.
Nearly everyone running around–and that is the phrase–today has major emotional issues. As I commented elsewhere, all of us not unreasonably, when we were born, had, or should have had, the right to expect two things;
- A mother who loves us.
- A culture able and willing to give us a sense of place and purpose.
But the women are working, and childcare outsourced from relatively young ages. And single mothers are often so tired they are not emotionally available; that, or they were children themselves when they got pregnant.
And the culture as a whole is obsessed solely with surface level experience, with thrills, with vanity and the vanishing. It has little to offer the thoughtful.
For much of the 20th century many literary sorts seemed to think that prose of all sorts represented an answer of sorts, but it doesn’t. It offers a higher quality experience.
We need a systematic way to calm down, to learn to tolerate silence and solitude and stillness. Once such a thing is achieved, THEN something like literature could be reintroduced, for processing on deep levels, those of human experience distilled and portrayed. A meditative book club.
Kum Nye, I will say again–that of Tarthang Tulku–is the best path I know, although Autogenics 3.0 also has much to commend it. I am reading that book right now, and using his methods with some success.
But just a a high level comment, trans-humanism seems to START from certain assumptions that are highly questionable. I think it is pursued mainly by smart people who have always considered intelligence the highest and best quality in human life. They accept Materialistic Monism uncritically, despite the enormous challenges Quantum Theory presents to that worldview and scientific hypothesis.
I think this is foolish, and in its own way, extremely UNintelligent.