I’m not so sure we need some grand vision, so much as a general housecleaning of the myriad cobwebs in the collective subconscious.
As someone who grew up on a farm and spent my life on the cultural fringes, looking in, I see a few very basic fallacies which have generated more complex problems.
As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception and cognition, which we then sort and judge, in order to navigate our environment. We then learned to narrate our journeys to one another and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge.
In itself, this creates two biases.
For one thing, the narrative flow, from past to future, is deeply ingrained into our perception and culture. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
Yet the evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the eartth turns. Potential>actual>residual.
Duration is this physical state of presence, as events coalesce and dissolve.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies. No space travel necessary. In fact, much of history is about getting disparate cultures dancing to the same rhythm.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Time is asymmetric, because what is being measured, action, is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both. The relative order of the system, entropy, is not what is being measured and is irrelevant.
So time is an effect of this activity, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure, with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
The other primary bias of this narrative foundation, is that we naturally gravitated to those tales with the most illustrative and informative narrative arc, so there is this inherent cultural assumption that we are going somewhere else, than where we are now, be it the pearly gates, or the singularity.
The reality is that thermodynamic feedback loops are far more illustrative of reality, than the linear progression of time. In fact, time is more a tapestry being woven of strands pulled from what had been woven. The whole causality and conservation of energy thing.
As for thermodynamics, think of reality in terms of energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Look at galaxies. Cosmic convection cycles, basically.
As these mobile biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through the forms precipitating out of this dynamic, as well as referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up. Motor and steering.
As are societies the tension between organic desires bubbling up, versus the civil and cultural forms coalescing in. Youth versus age, liberal versus conservative.
Yet because we have this linear, goal oriented culture, both sides see themselves on the road to nirvana, so those going the other direction must be misbegotten fools.
As this dynamic is the conserved energy, it transmutes from one configuration to the next, past to future. While these forms rise and fall, future to past. Process and patterns.
Think of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
As lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
As consciousness goes from one thought or feeling to the next, as those impressions come and go.
So the feedback is the patterns generated, that steer the process generating them.
Suffice to say, the issues arising from this narrative focus permeate our understanding of reality. For instance, money functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but as a quantification of energy, hope and security, we try to save and store it.
The problem is that as a contract, it is a very effective medium, but as a store, relatively equal amounts of debt have to be generated and the asset side tends to gravitate inward, while the debt side siphons the perimeters of society dry of the medium required to function. It is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store. No doctor would confuse them. For cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. It does become frustrating when the lines get blurred there as well. Yet econ 101 tells us the medium and store are the same notational device. No. We own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the water going through our body. Its functionality is in its fungibility.
Another result of this focus on the goal is that we are culturally conditioned to confuse the ideal with the absolute. Monotheism being the primal example, as a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
On a cultural level, this tends to promote both cultural absolutism and group narcissism, as members see themselves as ideals of some universal monism, rather than unique expressions of their context. Nodes in the network.
This idealistic monism permeates many other assumptions built into society. Even materialism assumes some base state, yet what we actually experience is more the yin and yang, of the balance and tension between polarities.
Even the absolute is balanced by the infinite.
I could go on and on, but this is getting a bit long and my experience is that most people will say, “Whatever,” and sidle away. Try telling someone with a physics background that time is better explained as an effect of action, than a geometric dimension, if you want to understand ostracism.
So, no, we don’t need some grand vision, we just need a good slap across the head and the powers that be seem intent on getting nature to do that. So I’m just waiting and seeing. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
Though, in the long run, I see humanity as more toward the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end. It’s like an overwrought adolescence that we are going through.
