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= ############################ To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1