Michael,
Thanks for the mention.
One thing to keep in mind about progress is the nearly infinite ways it generates blowback.
A hundred years ago, if the prior several centuries of technological progress were erased, a vast majority of the population would find ways to adapt, from farmers reverting to actual horsepower, to laborers becoming craftsmen. Yet today, while we still exist as these extremely temporally finite lives and to the degree we spend our lives seeking quick thrills, surfing media, eating processed foods from global networks, we have lost any real sense of self, or small group sufficiency. Which leaves us at the mercy and direction of ever larger social forces, turning at ever faster rates. The effect of which is to shrink our sense of self. We are no longer cogs in the machine, but random electrons in the circuits.
Our tools quickly become our gods. This is a fairly common phenomena. Language, narrative, money have come to define who we are, even as we think we can see beyond the factional gods various groups build their identity around.
The medium becomes the message.
The trick is to internalize this cycle and learn to see both sides of the coin equally. Nodes as essential to the networks, as the networks are to the nodes. Organisms as fully integrated expressions of the ecosystem, as the ecosystem is expressed by its organisms.
We are individuals, like the trunk of a tree is singular. Yet its roots spread out one way and its branches the other. Our inner and outer, past and future lives connect in the moment, of the here and now.
We have this sense of narrative flow, but it too is a tool that has become a god. Time is a tapestry being woven of strands pulled from what had been woven. Cause becomes effect, as tomorrow becomes yesterday. The energy moves onto the future, as the events fade into the past.
Our sense of reality are just these borderline hallucinary flashes of perception, organized by little more than the sequence required to navigate. The only difference between being awake and dreaming is that when we are awake, we have to constantly reset the flow to new input. Which we naturally resist, creating these edifices of indulgence, when possible. Yet they too eventually have to reset, to new information.
If we better understood the whole, we would better integrate into it and be able to exist as healthy social organisms, not as fear and greed driven social atoms, in a world from which we feel separate.
There is no ideal of knowledge and wisdom from which we fell. There is only this essence of sentience from which we rise. We can grow together, or we can fall separately.
