Being Humans Together

Paradigm shift: We should value knowing our people more highly than professional knowledge, technical knowledge, or political knowledge, even though those domains are often connected with increased status or money. Too often we are convinced to pursue success, degrees, career, or just excitement; and so we walk away from/ move away from/ let go of the people we know, who know us.

We believe that relationships are easy to make or replace, We believe that the connections we made when we were young will always be there. Or we don’t place enough value in the people with whom we share relationships, relational knowledge and bonds. Maybe we even consider those people and those relationships to be a weight to be shed and left behind so that we can reinvent ourselves in the anonymity of a new city.

Sadly, building new relationships is hard work that takes a long time. We will never replace many of those people, particularly not family. And in many cases the relationships we leave when we move away will not continue.

We also mistake new contacts or professional connections for long term relationships. But most of those people will not sacrifice for us. They won’t be there for us when we have crises, or when we lose our apartment or our job. They will find someone else to chat with at work.

We also naively believe that we will be good at knowing who to trust and that we will be able to gain the trust of others. I have certainly made that mistake in my life. But you can only trust people to be who they are, and do the things they normally do. It takes a lot of time and experience to know a person, and what they will do in a given circumstance. Sadly the result often is that we get hurt when we hope and trust in people who never were who we thought. The failure to highly value relational knowledge is a road to isolation and loneliness.

 

I don’t mean to say that we should never move, or not pursue education or careers, or not have dreams that extend beyond the confines of our current locale and current relationships.

I am saying that we should highly value our relationships.

We should understand the costs of moving away, moving on, changing our circle of relationships; and we should make those decisions carefully. We should do whatever we can to maintain relationships.

I promise you there are plenty of cubicles and corporate offices out there. You will get the degrees and certifications needed to find jobs and sit in office spaces. Perhaps you already have.

But along our pursuit of success, degrees, careers, and all of the technical and professional knowledge required to do that, let us not forget the central importance of knowing your people and them knowing you, and sharing the experiences together that create and cement that relational knowledge and bonds.

 

When everything else passes away, when your life breaks down, when you are up against something difficult, when you’re not sure you can make it on your own, when you finally lie down in the last bed you will ever occupy—relational knowledge is what matters most.

Your people will be there for you to help you pick up the pieces, to make sense of the disasters, to overcome the trials and obstacles, to laugh and cry and love our way through it all.

That is how you will know or remember who your people truly are. And you will be there for them. In those situations, no one cares what your salary is, or which desk you sit in, or how many followers you have, or how many degrees you have, or how important you status is.

For the people in your core circle, you are all that matters, and they are everything that matters.

In the end, relational knowledge is all that matters.

We need experts to accomplish many of our advanced goals.  To gather, sift and organize new knowledge; to apply basic research in order to engineer new possibilities; to better understand the physical and human worlds we live in.  Experts are well trained in narrow specialties that enable them to do original, creative things.  Expertise is often accompanied by experience, commitment and dedication.

But there are limits to the utility of experts. Experts can be elitist and authoritarian.  Experts can be bought.  Experts can be biased and ideological.  Experts can be as foolish and fallible as anyone else.  Experts can bludgeon dissent and frighten lay people into obedience.  Experts and expertise can be a two-edged sword, particularly in the realm of civil society.  We need experts for many things, but we cannot surrender to experts our opportunities – our responsibilities – to engage the world as intelligent, passionate, informed citizens and community members of the social fabric.  

Gathering knowledge from diverse perspectives and sources enriches our minds and hearts, gives us more complex tools to understand our modern and increasingly global societies, and provides us with more robust and healthier abilities respond to challenges.

How do we know what is real? How do we know what is true?

How do we balance the differing worldviews and approaches to knowing that shape each of our worlds and the larger world that we share together?

 

One of the core issues of this set of episodes of Being Human Together is how we understand the world scientifically, philosophically, socially, and religiously. 

In this episode we will lay out three ways we know things, or three methods of epistemology — arguments from authority, the scientific method of inductive reasoning, and knowledge passed to us relationally or socially. 

Next, we’ll consider some historical examples of the tension between scientific and religious ways of knowing, including a more complex view of Galileo than you may have heard. 

Finally, I will tell you a personal story about balancing religion and biological evolution.

Our goal is to give you more perspective on the inevitable struggle we must all engage in to piece together meaning from multiple approaches and forms of knowledge. Because in the end, none of them is complete alone.

Contemporary physics theory is fascinating, productive, often useful, and sometimes truly mysterious, speculative, and often not applicable to the physical universe. In the face of such mystery and the unknown, we ought of adopt humility and open-mindedness.

 

In this episode we will explore a variety of the limits of physics theory, and propose an open, humble approach to understanding our perspective and our place in the universe. We consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Schrodinger’s cat, and indeterminacy. These principles apply to physics as well as human society. The indeterminacy and uncertainty of fundamental quantum physics is evidence that we should be cautious in making scientific predictions about human agency. We proceed to discuss black holes, event horizons, and singularities, which further demonstrate the mysterious unknown nature of the universe. Then we consider the anthropic principle, which suggests that the universe has a fundamental order and possible evidence of purpose. Strangely, the anthropic principle has given rise to the speculative multiverse, an idea whose anti-human foundation we strongly critique. Finally, we discuss the mass-energy contributions of dark matter, dark energy and visible matter to argue for humility in describing a universe that is 95% dark, unmeasurable, and unknowable.

 

In the end, you are the one who needs to choose. I think physics gives us plenty of evidence that the entire visible universe is shaped by binding, connecting, forming complex structure, and building life — all of the way from quarks and electrons to atoms to stars to planets to bacteria to complex plants and animals to humans in networks of intelligent consciousness. And I think there is space for you to choose to build a meaningful life in that physical universe. There is also ample room for spirit, whatever that may be, and much, much more.

Life is rare, beautiful, and precious. Human conscious life is even more rare, beautiful, and precious.

 

Many humans in our society have adopted a fundamentally misanthropic or antihumanist perspective. They believe people are fundamentally destructive, violent, cruel, and that humans destroy all other life. They believe that humans are tiny, randomly generated creatures without agency or meaning. They believe that the planet would be better off without humans on it, or at lest far fewer of them. They believe that humans are likely to destroy themselves and much of the planet with them.

I disagree. Those viewpoints are wrongheaded, nihilistic, and antihuman. I want to try to help you appreciate how valuable and rare conscious human life is. To do this we will focus on considering the composition of our solar system. We consider the scale of the solar system, the size of the sun and planets, and then consider life on Earth. We show that for every 1,000,000 (one million) kgs in the solar system, about 2kgs is on Earth. For every one billion kg of mass on Earth, about 1kg is alive. For every 10,000kgs of living organisms on Earth, about 1kg is human. For every 10 trillion kgs of mass on Earth, about 1kg is human.

Life is truly rare, precious and beautiful.

 

We examine and rebuttal three anti-human philosophies: 

1. You are tiny and you barely matter.

2. Your life is random and meaningless.

3. You are responsible for destroying all life on Earth.

 

The choice is truly yours. Out of all of the vastness of space and time, out of all of the mass in our solar system alone, you are one in ten trillion. You can conclude that you are a tiny, insignificant speck, randomly generated by chance. That is a depressing, meaningless perspective. Or you can use your conscious mind, your fleeting moment of awareness, to look around, to examine the Earth, and its solar system, and the diversity of life and space and the cosmos, and you can conclude that life is rare, precious, and beautiful. You can comprehend that consciousness and human life is even rarer, more precious, and more beautiful. And you can do your best to live in a manner that appreciates that truth, by valuing your life, the lives of everyone around you, and the lives of every living thing around you.

In this third series of episodes we’re going delve into physics to demonstrate that the architecture of the visible universe and all life is based on bonds and binding energy.

This reality can help us recognize that our bodies, brains, and minds are characterized not by separate bits but by bonds. From elemental particles to fundamental forces and fields, to chemical bonds and organic compounds, to cells and organisms, to complex biological creatures in living ecological webs, to intelligent conscious humans in networks of relations, communities and social fabric — we are bound together in ever more complex structures and networks from our fundamental physical core up to our most elegant philosophical constructions. The universe itself demonstrates that life is not about bits; it is about bonds. We are not isolated and alone; we are bound together in meaningful communion. If we live that way, we will find ourselves in greater harmony with the structure of the visible universe and greater harmony with one another.

We conclude our second set of episodes by considering how we can grow our awareness, our consciousness, and our agency to live more empowered, meaningful, purposeful lives each day.

Surely we can grow our awareness of how things really are, our ability to see and hear and understand what is real, our creativity, and our will to do what is best, highest, and most important.

Too many people treat their philosophy or ideology or religion like a spectator sport. They sit in the benches every once in a while and cheer for their team, but they don’t actively walk the path. They have strong feelings and opinions about how right their team is. But they don’t care enough to work, to develop the core skills, to become good at the game, to truly embody the ideals and principles that their path teaches.

Knowing the path or believing in the path is much less important than walking the path.

Put another way, it doesn’t really matter what you believe about God if you don’t actually know God by following God and living your highest principles.

That is the best any of us can do — Seek the best path we can, then try our best to follow it. 

 

We can increase our meaning by processing the past, by connecting with wisdom traditions, by developing nuanced understandings of our complicated past.

Examine your experiences. Learn from your past, especially your pain.

Examine your relationships. Learn from the examples of your people, your close family and friends. 

Study. Ponder. Pray. The divine can also guide you to meaning.

How do we increasing our purposeful goals?

If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t really matter if you get there.

Aim. And then act. Aim again, and then move forward. Orient yourself and reorient yourself toward higher goals.

When you find ideals and goals that inspire and motivate you to work hard, that fill you to overflowing, that motivate you to connect with and help other people —

Then you are moving the right direction.

When you find that you are stuck, that you are finding darkness, depression, or unhealthiness, it is time to reconsider.

Do you need to work harder or smarter? Do you need to seek support and collaborate with friends and family to pursue your good goals? Or do you need to alter your direction? 

Explore the best communities and principles you can find. Join. Participate. Give back.

 

How do we increase our will, our ability to control our thoughts, feelings, and actions?

Act now. Work.

Choose to reorient ourselves. Aim. Aim again.

 

To all this, let us add the culmination of our view of the origin and nature of consciousness — 

that consciousness is deeply human, 

that it emerged and emerges from networked human minds and souls 

And if this is the origin of consciousness, should we not elevate these things and practice them with all our hearts?

Human consciousness developed over thousands of generations as women and men chose one another, as families made long term marriage bonds and build communities. Our awareness and consciousness is built on the foundation of relational and community bonds and shared knowledge.

Our consciousness was born of fire, the first human tool.

Around hearth fires and communal campfires our ancestors shared meals and stories. And the fires transformed our bodies and our minds.

Our consciousness was born of language creation, from gestures and signs to words and songs and stories, told and retold generation after generation.

Feminine and masculine communication patterns, all combined through intimate knowledge and family caregiving and the training of youth to produce extraordinary complex and diverse languages around the world.

Our consciousness was born of technology, of wood and bone, of stone tools, of pots and bowls, and thread tying our clothing, our shelters, and our tools together.

Our consciousness arose through domestication, first self domestication of human beings or the taming of wild men into friendly communicative, cooperative, competitive families, clans, communities and societies. Then the domestication of dogs, and eventually the domestication of fruits and grasses into wheat, rice, corn, and apples. Finally, the domestication of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and horses. 

And all of this combined in ever-increasing complexity of relationships, communities, and societies until we had states and cities and religions.

Our consciousness arose from our greatest stories and ideals, particularly our ancient wisdom traditions.

We will then turn our attention to two ancient creation myths, the first from Genesis and the second from Hindu Samkhya philosophy. We will explore how to the creation of nature and human beings, the importance of male and female relational bonds, the rise of awareness and agency, and different pathways or ideals that shape our sense of human nature and the purposes of life can be understood from these different traditions.