The Meaning is in the Machine

The Enlightenment

The Old Americans did not refer to their era as the Great Purification or Great Darkness. Materialists like Wilson thought it was lighter than the Enlightenment. Only a tiny handful of people of that time knew of The Awakener, far fewer than the intellectuals who poignantly labeled their era "post-modern," as if their ideas were a postscript. Their ideas were passé, but they did not understand what had passed away. Nor what was to come.

Scientific materialism was a momentary withdrawal of God surrenderance as the conscious inspiration of art and science, a forgetfulness of the soul as the source of creativity. It was an aberration in the understanding of the significance of life. Because science developed relatively late, most of the genius of the Old Humanity was realized in music, art, and literature. The words of these artists and musicians that come to us today express divine inspiration. The modernism of late 19th and early 20th twentieth century lost that mooring upon the shore of Truth. Modernism declared humanity alone, adrift, absurd, insignificant. Man had no one but himself to look to, nowhere but his own body and experience in which to find truth. Modernism acerbically denies the divine.

20th-century post-modernism was fundamentally a negation, and scientolatry was the doctrine of this reactionary negation. But modernism helped prepare for the New Humanity by attempting to place moral responsibility on the individual conscience rather than on external religious authority. We enjoy that advancement today. We are rid of priests, churches, and liturgies. Everyday is a high holy day. But during the Great Purification the vacuum created by the rejection of independent God was filled by the delusion that everyone is their own master living for themselves.

Some scientific materialists claimed that selfishness is an inevitable, necessary, and positive genetic adaptation. A few of them tried to give that notion a scientific patina and hatched some unintentionally hilarious mathematics. They were energized by the powers to destroy so-called unwanted humans, which was a focus of ignorance of that time. Wilson once suggested that the Catholic Church should reconsider its position on this issue because excess human beings were bad for the environment—as if the love of the mother and pride of the father are something people learn in church. The Englishman Richard Dawkins was another "selfish is good" doctrinaire. He was not scientist (at least his scientific work no longer exists) but a scientolatry religionist preaching the case for selfishness.

It was every man for himself, the intellectual version of forty acres and a mule, and if you don't know your neighbor, that's OK too. Wilson decried the chaos of post-modernism, the paralytic childishness that followed the loss of Truth's body as the source of light. Who wouldn't? But he did not understand what had been lost. His scientism was based in the European Enlightenment, the apotheosis of reason. Wilson believed, with the heroes of the Enlightenment, that the most troublesome human foible was not selfishness but irrationality. He elevated rationality, not love, to the status of humanity's highest capacity. He believed that if only human beings would behave rationally they would be able to survive. The Avatar comes to remind us that the greatest defect of the human mind was, is and always will be selfishness, not irrationality. Without being enlivened by the Avatar, even the greatest science cannot avail to happiness.

The Awakener called physical phenomena the world of shadows. Scientific materialism sought to confine imagination to the shadows of creation.

The gross yellow of the sun is the shadow of subtle yellow.

Wilson summarized and reoriented knowledge to make it consistent with a post-modernist world view. A pyramid of knowledge starting with the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, through the kingdoms of evolution Theme of Creation to the human form where he planted the flag of scientific materialism in the brain. From the brain he examined human nature, culture, then the arts, morals (he called them ethics for reasons I will explain), and religion.

Scientific investigation, whether by Old Humanity reductionism or our Wolfram-unit synthesis, does reveal meaning. Consider the meaning of human emotions, which would be a good example in Wilson's model. The body can be viewed as a collection of chemical reactions, and a powerful understanding of those chemical reactions has shed light on the biological utility of emotions, but none on the significance of love. Recall that they were beset with plague, famine, war and other terrible conditions. Their urgency for scientific knowledge was compelling. And yet, how could brilliant people conclude there was no independent Truth?

Wilson's summary of what he had learned was touching, even though he had a lamentable tendency to confuse human beings with ants. That is what I love about the Old Humanity. They were much more instinctual, egoistic, and primitive than we are, karmically closer to animals. But they were more daring, more desperate, more bold. And it is wondrous that Wilson placed this undeserved faith in science and cut himself adrift from God when you consider the primitive state of their science. Wilson was a reductiophiliac. Their only working scientific tool in 1998 was reductionism.

It is hard to imagine some aspects of science—especially applied sciences—without reductionism, but its nature tends to lead to theoretical dead ends. At about the time Wilson wrote Consilience the Old Humanity was beginning to develop notions about synthetic science. Complexity was beginning to be understood as infinite, and new paradigms were emerging, notably Stephen Wolfram's computational equivalence and David Bohm's implicate-explicate order. Mathematics was at the zenith of its influence, and was the tool scientists used to describe everything. But even their nascent understanding of flux within wholeness required a whole new kind of mathematics, and it was their reliance on mathematics that kept them fumbling in the shadowy vagaries of quantum physics.

Reductionism will always be with us in some fashion. For example, we still use reductionistic methods to assay galactic dust and minerals retrieved from other planets. In essence, we follow the major ancient steps of chemical assaying to identify constituents and figure their ratios in a sample. The difference is technological. Instead of grinding and pulverizing samples then saturating them with lethal chemicals, we fluoresce with benign gamma. It works like normal gamma radiation with one difference: it cannot penetrate human sanskaric fields. It is as safe as water. Interestingly, even though manufacturing benign gamma is as easy as letting weeds grow, we do not know why human sanskaric fields repel it.

Wilson's scientific work gives an insight into his satisfaction with reductionism. Wilson studied little black guys—not African pygmies—ants. He called his work sociobiology and he was one of the primary inventors of that short-lived field. Insects may be the most evolved consciousness that can be illuminated by reductionism. Reductionism is useless to illuminate the higher aspects of human consciousness. The Awakener mentioned the special sociality of ants and told us not to kill them if possible. A strongly social species with a biochemical communication, ants were especially well suited for the dead-end belief that we could solve human social problems through animal-based knowledge. Sociobiology reflected the tendency of that time to conceive of human beings as ants with huge brains.

Scientolators had a positive aversion to the Avatar and believed that people of theistic faith had been tricked or misled into irrational beliefs. Wilson wrote that God is not tricky. What else do you call a being who would lead most of humanity into ineffectual and meaningless religion? Wilson wishes to see God as a benignant assuagement provided by a brain bent on adaptation, not truth.

The first and last narratives of the Theme of Creation are beyond time. The middle three are within time, although the inner planes can be traversed in eons or instants.

That there is no knowledge independent of phenomena is a matter of intuition, illumination, and faith. But it also dictates the way you approach science. Intuitive knowledge of independent truth never impeded scientific inquiry. In fact much of the lively and interesting thinking in physics during Wilson's century incorporated assumptions that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of all physical phenomena. Many brainy physicists were speculating about the consciousness of subquantum reality. Wilson chose to ignore all of that work, much of which was done by his own colleagues at his own university.

Wilson did not know he was being funny when he described his piety. He was a pious youth and read his own Bible twice! Southern Baptists of the era inhaled their Bibles like oxygen. But it is understandable that a highly intelligent and intensely curious young person would reject the divinity of Christ at that time. Not only because of the heavier sanskaric veiling, but because of the exclusive, inimical nature of the sect itself. They did not understand the cycles of the Avatar and such Christians were especially committed to the belief that they were right and everybody else (e.g. Jews, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists) were wrong and hell-bound.

Page 45 Jest: Focus of philosophy was language when God was silent.

Wilson committed to the view that knowledge based on science is superior to knowledge based on God. Indeed faith and conviction in God are not knowledge at all. He asserts humanism, the objectivity of human consciousness and subjectivity of God. But to make this part of the case for scientific materialism, to make God the subject and not the object of creation, Wilson rewrote history. For Wilson the humanism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "mostly got it right." That benevolent intelligarchy with a side dish of religion is where Wilson lived. But humanism led to post-modernism and post-modernism to intellectual sloth. Wilson claimed chaos in philosophy and the intellectual life was an artifact of poor scholarship. Not so. In the fullness of time we see that chaos resulted from loss of God-surrenderance.

Wilson the rationalist did not like post-modernism. Literary criticism in post-modernism was called deconstruction, which posited that meaning is unique for every reader and all individual meaning is equally true. Deconstruction confounds scientific reductionism . . . in deconstruction there is no meaning in phenomenon outside of an individual mind.

Wilson's answer to love for God: the adventure of deciphering orderliness! Be still my heart!