ToKers:
Apparently Jamie has written a long essay (or short book) with this
title, with this at the core of the Introduction --
"We will introduce the main antagonist of this book, Peter Wessel
Zapffe and his philosophy of despair and then attempt to overcome
Zapffe’s despair through the hopeful ideas in Transhumanism and other
related visions of hope. One of the main goals of this book is to
overcome the pessimistic views of Peter Zapffe, exposited in his essay
The Last Messiah.
"Zapffe is my favorite philosopher for showing me the dark
enlightenment that explained so much of how I’ve always felt the world
to be, but must be defeated for their to be a hopeful future for both
humanity and myself. My main counter against Zapffe’s philosophy of
despair is the optimistic philosophy of Transhumanism . . .
"From the views of various hard scientists, philosophers, theologians
and mystics, I will offer a glimmer of hope that the world is
accelerating towards a future that will be both the salvation of all
sentient life, as well as the redemption of all the suffering and
injustice in the past.
"I will argue that while Zapffe is correct in saying that the world is
objectively tragic, he forgot to admit that the world is also
objectively heroic, and that the ongoing, everyday heroism of life in
this universe is intrinsically meaningful and that love will be our
ultimate salvation and redemption as our civilization grows
increasingly powerful and capable of both immense destruction and
creation."
And this as the book's acknowledgements --
"Much of this paper is informed by Dr. Gregg Henriques’ Tree of
Knowledge System and the Theoretical Unification of Psychology (TOK),
which includes Behavioral Investment Theory (BIT) to describe the
evolution of mind and the Justification Hypothesis (JH) to describe
the evolution of culture.
"Dr. Gregg Henriques has formulated a brilliant unification of
psychology based on the central insights of Sigmund Freud and B.F.
Skinner. Not only than that it offers a grand, sweeping narrative of
the evolution of consciousness that puts academic Psychology in it’s
place. Henriques’ unification of Psychology helped me to understand
basic Psychology better, like Freud, and I have a Psychology BA!
Henriques’ unification of Psychology gives us direction in how culture
will continue, or should continue to evolve beyond today’s pinnacle of
evolution: The Institution of Science. His model fits analogously well
with other ideas such as Transhumanism and the Technological
Singularity. Hid Justification Hypothesis also enlightens us to
realize that our minds are still going through a rapid process of
memetic evolution by selection for fitness in an epistemic or belief
environment.
"Peter Zapffe and Albert Camus opened my eyes to existential horror
and the philosophical problem of whether or not to end consciousness.
Zapffe really showed me a depth of horror that I will never forget,
and since much of that horror is based on the human condition, created
from the blind forces of natural selection, I thank Zapffe for
deepening my understanding and empathy for humanity’s collective pain.
"Zapffe will turn out to be wrong in his solution to the salvation of
consciousness. He had never learned of Transhumanism and it probably
wouldn’t have made sense in his time. Even today with the apparent
acceleration of technology and machine learning, sadly few more, but
novel seekers, are drawn to transhumanism. It will have to take
game-changing technologies like Telepathy, Mind-uploading, Anti-aging
tech, mind uploading, teletransportation, Intelligence Augmentation
and sentient Artificial Intelligence for Transhumanism to become a
real player in the world. Most people would happily distract
themselves from these ideas that contradict their simple basis of
meaning in life that gets them through the day.
"Having a mental illness myself, I can say that Ernest Becker’s The
Birth and Death of Meaning, gave me a great deal of hope that people
with my condition would find redemption in a near future that better
understands mental illness from a sociological point of view. So far,
the understanding of mental illness is tragically lacking in most
people. The mentally ill have a great deal to teach us along the way
to Transhumanism, like “how the brain works so we can make it persist
longer in higher states of well-being”. With regards to Cultural
Evolution, Henriques’ ideas can be closely connected to Becker’s ideas
to come up with some novel insights. According to Becker, culture
evolves through a cascade of Birth and Death of Meaning as the meaning
in old fictions goes extinct and new meanings are discovered to help
us endure and go on. His other works, such as The Denial of Death and
“Terror Management Theory” are hair-raisingly similar to Zapffe’s
Philosophy of Despair and techniques of repression.
"I thank Ray Kurzweil for sparking in me the hope that has been the
fire that keeps me going. His vision of the future is extraordinary
and it comes with extraordinary evidence. Some people have called it
“gold mixed with shit”, and while I don’t think Kurzweil will be right
about everything, I sure hope he is, and I’m increasingly confident
that he will end up right as the months go by, and new technologies of
near magic powers emerge on a regular basis.
"Also, special thanks to the community of Transhumanists and their
hard work waking the public up to the rapid transformation that
humanity is about to enter, aided by exponentially growing Artificial
Intelligence.
"A special thanks also goes out to Josiah Royce for offering the first
concept of God that doesn’t contradict all that I know and even
includes me as an instance of the “All within All” which seems like a
more perfect God than other representations given by ignorant
fundamentalists.
"Lastly, I must thank the following thinkers whose views, however
imperfect, have converged on concepts of Identity and “The Absolute”
in ways I would have never imagined given my philosophical trajectory
in life. I will list those thinker and their basic ideas that converge
around Transhumanism and an open view of Individuality in which we are
all evolving to increasingly internalize the world around us and the
inner lives of other people as we, in tern are internalized bu others.
The ultimate goal is somewhere around the ideas of Josiah Royce’s
Absolute Self, Teilhard De Chardin’s Omega Point, and Ray Kurzweil’s
Technological Singularity and “Awakened Universe”, any many more
similarities to consider.
"1. Discovering that each of us is a momentary instance of the
Universe or “Absolute” representing itself while being represented by
itself in a continual stream of consciousness opens up my identity to
heavenly possibilities:
"a. It also increasingly reveals that while there’s such thing as
basic human dignity for our suffering and alienation, human identities
are ultimately unjustified for how we represent ourselves as
autonomous, individuated agents “inside” a foreign natural
environment, and conceptually separate from one another and the
Absolute.
"a. Each of us is little more than the experience within the “specious
present” while the universe represents a bit of itself and is in turn
represented in part by the other instance of the universe I just
reflected.
"a. There is no evidence of a persisting self that survives the
passage of time; I am no longer who I was yesterday because the
universe slowly took apart that “me” and put “me” back together in a
new one today.
"b. In each moment, during our day-to-day experience, it’s probably no
different than being tele-transported or uploaded into our very next
bodily instance, leaving the old person to pass into memory, and that
we might as well be teleporting or uploading very slowly from instant
to instant, as our material and Psychological substrate always changes.
"a. What is the basis of who and what we are besides the experience we
endure and behaviors we cause in the present moment?
"a. That everything’s existence is defined by its relation to
everything else. We are made out of each other. We create each other
and are in turn created by each other.
"a. That I contain within myself an imperfect model of myself and the
natural world, both of which have possibly forever to improve upon,
all while I exist both in the natural world and on the minds of people
who know me gives credence to Josiah Royce’s Absolute Self.
"1. Discovering that each of us is a continual present instance of the
“All in All” will be the transformation of our identities that defines
the transhumanist movement and leads to our salvation. The following
ideas support this, and there are too many similarities for thereto be
a coincidence between them. It is to the following that I give thanks
for providing me a worldview I can endure and keep expanding on
"a. Hegel’s concept of dialectical progress towards the Absolute
b. Gregg Henriquez’ concept of cultural evolution through the
justification hypothesis
c. Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning; culture as
progressing as sources of meaning die out and new ones come to take
their place.
d. Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of God and “Process Philosophy”
e. Josiah Royce’s “Absolute Self” as England containing perfect maps
of England
f. Sri Aurobindo’s “Gnostic Being” evolving towards the Supermind
g. Teilhard De Chardin’s Internet-like Noosphere and Singularity-like
Omega Point as “All in All”
h. Ray Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity and “the Awakened Universe”
i. Open and Empty Individualistic concepts of Identity
j. Identity in thought-experiments of teleportation and mind-uploading
k. Identity in Psychology and Neuroscience and heroic cases of damaged
neural functioning.
l. Identity in Mysticism Buddhism, Hinduism, etc."
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__transhumanities.wordpress.com_acknowledgements_&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tN2dnCDEieGQaPEoIeI-45QNjudsqVKttBRIvydoQ2I&s=8QLqtgV0paDxEIQURce7hxVcI-LwfTfAQLLQRhCWAps&e=
Mark
P.S. Peter Zapffe's 1933 essay "The Last Messiah" (echoing Max Weber's
1917 observation about the world being "dis-enchanted," which McLuhan
would describe as an *effect* of ELECTRIC media technology, with some
Spenglerian/Nietzschean gloom thrown in), can be found here --
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__transhumanities.wordpress.com_2017_04_09_the-2Dlast-2Dmessiah-2Dby-2Dpeter-2Dzapffe_&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tN2dnCDEieGQaPEoIeI-45QNjudsqVKttBRIvydoQ2I&s=RQsMim5c6qUn9BK8Dn72mc-PyzrYZGsRXCGW7vVvY9E&e=
It ends this way --
"If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the
conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds
in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph,
nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual
atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an
increasingly brutal character.
"And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and
a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and
stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.
"Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip
his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the
lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its
cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With
what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his
thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe,
and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond
and a backwater.
– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick
against the pin-pricks?
– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
"And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by
the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.
"He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer
by the waterhole.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_Peter-5FWessel-5FZapffe&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tN2dnCDEieGQaPEoIeI-45QNjudsqVKttBRIvydoQ2I&s=dDdNPyD0JuhFRqXactZQpM2MjeuoKFI3IN0Bc1xzGLQ&e=
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_The-5FLast-5FMessiah&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tN2dnCDEieGQaPEoIeI-45QNjudsqVKttBRIvydoQ2I&s=3fBOsu3FGuTaHgNRoxiSDMgQmoW8slaGp8hGMy3NIuU&e=
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