Gods

The main reason why I started this blog is because I thought it might help me put certain ideas into words, and THIS idea in particular. To make this easier on myself and those of you who would be so kind as to offer any comments, I've decided to chop this into nice little blog-sized portions.

Lets start with something from the comments below:


In yon thread, josephknecht said...
All patterns progress towards an entropic state. This is as true of the universe, as of society. The reason that it feels bleak, I think, is that 'enlightened society' as you describe it looks unlikely: all matter tries to resist entropy. It just can't.
Raging against the dying of the light is a natural tendency.


Luckymortal replied to this with something completely garbled. Here is his second attempt:

What you say is true.
And when we build a fire, and it is an open system, we can predict with great certainty the results of entropy.
But when we build a complex social system, I'm not sure that we know what an state of greater entropy would necessarily look like.
Furthermore, I see no clear evidence that social systems are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics....
At least not in the same way as the swirling bits of mater that carry the memes that make up social systems....

For these reasons, I allow myself to be incredibly optomistic about the direction the laws of nature ensure for the human animal. I believe that MLK JR. was tapping some prophetic source of truth when he said that the "arch of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

At some point, if the Universe is destined to that grey soupy future (if the insufficient gravity of the Universe infact renders it an open system) then, of course, our gods die with us...

But our social systems are our gods! Not because I use that word, but because early humans MADE the word GOD to explain the phenomenon of self organizing systems and their emergent properties--that was the true definition of "god" before powerful intrest groups coopted it for social domination. Early humans experienced a certain emergent property in increasingly complex systems, and the symbol that they assigned to this phenomenon was "gods."

This is like what Trungpa said about "magic" or "drahla," and it is how I answer now when people ask me if I believe in magic. He said that if you make your Kitchen sink "sacred," there would never be dirty dishes in it. The native peoples of the SW United States lived in an area extremely inhospitable to agriculture, and yet they were apparently able to produce yields that we fail to recreate with all our modern technology and understanding. How? Because they used "magic." They treated the land, and the corn like it was sacred, and used the greatest care in planting and maintaining their crops.

Now you may say that there is nothing "magic" about this, they just used more water and bred the corn properly and so on, but you would be wrong. Infact, the word "magic" was created to explain how a confluence of factors too complex for humans to understand the full causal relationship. It is a word used to describe an unexpected outcome, achieved by special human emergent properties. You might not see anything "supernatural" about cleaning the dishes more often, but for many people, myself included, having clean dishes is an unexpected and magical outcome!

This same thing is true of the word "god."

And the gods have an ability to animate human action far beyond our comprehension.

I'll write more about this later in the week.