We do seem headed for a cyclical peak, but that does offer an opportunity to reset and do a little conceptual housecleaning.
To address your first three questions, I would start with the issue of time.
As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception, cognition, then sorting, ordering and judging the concepts and relationships derived. Which is necessary to navigate our environment. Then we narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge.
The consequence is that we view this progression as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical state, as events coalesce and dissolve.
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.
As this physical state is constantly changing form, it goes from one configuration to the next, past to future. While the markers of this process go future to past.
Processes and the patterns generated.
For example, in a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line consumes material and expels product.
Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes from one perception to the next, as these thoughts and feelings rise and fall, like so many waves.
The feedback is that the process drives, while the patterns steer and define.
So consciousness is always and only present and it is what generates the processing of organized thought, that is so favored by our species.
Therefore the origin of consciousness is not an ideal of knowledge and judgement, from which we fell, be it a god, or some platonic mathematical formulation, but the essence of sentience, from which we rise.
More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.
So this dynamic is constantly adopting forms and then breaking them down.
The absolute is not the ideal. It is a neutral state, like absolute zero, where all the forms cancel out. It’s the ups and downs, the waves, that keep everything from being a flatline.
Look at galaxies; Light radiating out, towards the infinite, while mass coalesces in, toward the absolute.
Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through the forms and patterns precipitating out, as well as referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up.
Society is that dichotomy of raw energies bubbling up, as civil and cultural forms coalesce in. Youth versus age, liberal versus conservative.
Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no middle ground, other than the energy of the chicken becoming a fleeting moment of the fox.
So morality is a constant tension and fluctuation between the dynamic emotions and desires, against the structures of reason and tradition. We fluctuate somewhere in the middle, between anarchy and tyranny.
The problem is that potential is nearly infinite, while the actual is a tiny fraction of that and the residue of memory and history is a small fraction of that. Yet everyone wants to follow their fullest potential and live forever, but….. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree.
The future is not pre-determined, because the calculations doing the determining only occur as the present. However set the laws doing this computation are, the input does not arrive before the event occurs, therefore the output does not exist. There is no physical past or future.
Our will is not free of cause, or it would be equally free of effect and the entire premise of will is to affect. We are part of the calculation occurring as the present. As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.” We have taken on some of the selection from nature.
The issue of meaning has to take into account that what drives us is not so much the objects of our desire, but the fact of our desire. What would this banquet hall of life be, without an appetite, whether for pleasure, power, or knowledge?
We learn to focus and control it, because it would consume our forms as readily as we consume the forms of the foods we eat, if we allowed our desires total freedom. So we mostly steer them by using other desires to balance them. There are few brakes to the process. The mind is the refereeing of the dynamic.
The problem is that as these mobile, intentional organisms, with a narrative based culture, is that we have a linear, goal oriented view, in a reality that cycles between polarities. Aka, thermodynamics. The galaxy, with energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Cosmic convection cycles.
So both sides of every debate see themselves as on the road to truth and perfection, as those on the other side of the process must be evil fools.
Humanity is certainly making progress, but we are reaching the edge of our collective petri dish, so a more cyclical and less linear paradigm might be on order, at least after the coming crash.
For example, the mantra of the modern economy is efficiency, which is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing… More is not always better. Our thought process cycles between reductionism and contextualization. Those hard nuggets of truth only exist in context.
For example, the entire focus of our world economy has become the accumulation of notational value, aka, money. Yet money functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but as we individually experience it as quantified hope, we treat it as a commodity to mine from society and try to save and store.
While Econ 101 tells us money is both medium of exchange and store of value, a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. In the body, blood is the medium, while fat is the store. Or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store.
So in order to save the asset side, there has to be similar amounts of debt to back it up. This creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the assets to the center and negative feedback pushes the debts to the edges of society.
Yet money is the value circulation mechanism of society, similar to its heart, arteries and blood. Just as the executive and regulatory system, government is analogous to the central nervous system.
So the effect of making money the entire goal and not the tool it is intended as, is to feed this centripetal effect, rather than the health of the community. It is as if the heart were telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
The fact is that as a social contract and economic medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids passing through our bodies. Its functionality is in its fungibility.
So don’t simply look to some projection of current trends, when it is obvious they are breaking down. Sort through what has led us up to this point.
