John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

I have never been overly afraid of death but after deep diving into meditation, math and philosophy, i have come to the conclusion that a form of "idealism" or consciousness-first is much more likely than a materialist universe. This makes a lot of "scientism"(not scientists) people very angry , but personally my best guess is that "spacetime" will be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, or much more of a morphable cultural construct that is no more real than any other human narrative received through narrow sensegates and molded by fitness filters.

This is not an escapism from death, because that prospect can be as absurd or as frightening as death itself. But i am personally leaning more to the side of "the seer keeps seeing" at the moment.

The dennet'esque "lets just explain consciousness away", western perspective and ultra reductionism has always seemed extremely silly and banal to me - there simply can be no dualism, and the arrogance and narrow mindedness is a huge blindspot. They got everything upside down, - great and useful in one context but useless in another.

My own journey started with a deep dive into mediation, then Dzogzhen meditation, lucid dreaming exploration (Dream Yoga), the realization that you can be aware even in deep sleep "like in death", very absurd, then i became intrigued at Gödels theorems (via Godel, Escher, Bach ), and lately i have found scientists like Donald D. Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup much more sane than many of their contemporaries.

That Hoffman associates (as in disagrees very much but have debated) with charlatans like Chopra is a bit annoying but looking back i think the western divide between "spirit" and science is fundamentally wrong, most, and i really mean all most all the the biggest thinkers we canonize today were into the weird and ungraspable, it has just been scrubbed from the reductionist retrospective. Also Hoffman really is doing all of the math if you go look at it and ignore the pop cultural shredding machine and even though his radical ideas might be gimmicks as Julian Janes or Hofstadter i think they point to a coming revolution where everything is going to get extremely "weird" in both math and physics.

Real insight exists in the liminal, i think.

Everything is more cyclical, warpable, field like, emergent, tantra-timelike, archetypal, perspective dependent, interpolated constantly and upside down in any paradigmatic sense.

Exactly. They say the Buddha was a very pragmatic man and the whole purpose of his practice was to find a way out of Samsara, the cycle of existence and suffering.

I always wonder if he would have advocated for suicide if only he didn't believe in rebirth.

Gray's view is not that there is no progress but that the idea of natural progression, unstoppable, inevitable progress is wrong and dangerous.

In the article it gives the example (a minor setback, I'm sure) of the return of torture in western democracies.

Data: In terms of lives ruined via proxy wars you can make the data show that more people are in misery now compared to less actual deaths. But we can discard this (personally I think its a weak argument and is a distraction). The main point is not "are we better than we were 50 years ago?" but rather "will we continue this short term trend and reach star trek society?".

The warning from Gray is that if you believe that the world is going automatically on the right path then you don't need to fight for it. You dont see the return of torture as something to be fought against, but just a minor setback. You dont see the rise of proxy wars as something to be criticised, its just a setback to progress. The rise of fascism in Eastern europe and the removal of rights is just a setback in the inexorable rise of progress. We toppled Saddam after all. China will naturally move to democracy. Its neo liberal science fiction.

The warning is that any progress we make is not a natural law. "Progression" is created by and can be destroyed by humans. Indeed when you see history through this lens one often stops calling change "progress".

The warning by Gray is that "believe the Long Peace and technological progress put us at the dawn of the Golden Age" is dangerous hubris and is a belief that can destroy the very things that have been achieved.

Gray does not try to prove that no change has been made, he tries to point out that the good changes need to be continually fought for and defended.

Cats are humble.

I recently watched a video where three cats waited half a day by the door, waiting for their owner's return.

Do not go gentle into that good night.