Have spent the past 7 years working through a vast array of existential problems that I feel are fundamental to humanity. You know the list, they range from food needs scarcity, to global warming to secularism, to what the heck is all this about and where are we going ? I made that first step in 2005 and sat down with an exercise book and a vague idea of bringing together so many thousand years of human social development under a new socio-political paradigm. Took 2 years to realise that re-inventing some bastard version of socialism was a waste of time. More or less have settled on anarchism without adjectives and justified rule but that’s not really relevant here.
My head was cluttered with 4 decades of dross that had accumulated because I hid my rationalism from all and sundry. Layer upon layer of behaviour that obscured my fundamental beliefs. You wouldn’t believe the lack of clarity and incoherence I had. The closest analogy is a head full of jigsaw puzzle pieces which you stare at confused looking for an edge. The picture is there but nothing seems to work, nothing fits.
Part of the problem is that “atheism” has been defined with respect to theism. As an atheist you are thus defined by a positive disbelief in god. What a waste of time that is – lets cut that shit out and we start from a blank bit of paper.
So that’s why our atheism is to have no belief in god rather than to believe that there is no god. One is a blank paper and the other is a paper filled with 10,000 years of theology, all crossed out. There is no room for our own positive beliefs if it is packed full of the garbage of theology.
Rot set in for a year until I clicked on Information Theoretic death. It should have come to me before that given the topic of physical death is what drives and empowers our social structures be it inheritance, resource use, religion, or war and it is the 800 pound gorilla in the room of existentialism. I’ve posted a number of things related to this especially with respect to the Teleporter/Transporter question. It took hundreds of posts and hundreds hours of thinking on how to resolve this. I have lived this problem for months if not years.
Well that’s existentialism sorted. Now the career philosophers will say , “Oi hold on…” and I will reply that if you can’t explain your ideas to a 12 year old then you are part of the problem and if you can’t anchor your questions in science then you are part of the problem. and if you can’t engineer solutions to your problems then you are part of the problem.
I then worked on how things exist and why they persist. You’ve probably seen hints of this with the idea of power-sets of all that could exist and how a form of evolution is at work on many different parts of this power-set, blindly fine tuning what exists according to some form of natural selection. From the isotopes of the elements through to chemicals through to RNA and then DNA.
The beauty of this process is that this evolution is not yet over by a long way. The greater a system gets stressed then the greater the selection pressure is applied. From a global warming perspective we could end up with things that will chew you up and eat your eyeballs like juju beans. Technically I think this is an exciting idea (well as long as someone else is the dinner).
So that is the post-Big Bang creation sorted that explains why “complex” stuff exists and why the formation of stuff is not yet over. I can’t tell you what these will be because it is from a near infinity of possibilities that far outnumber the energy budget of this universe but it is not pre-determined what this will be. That’s theistic creation wiped off the board but hey we already were sweeping the crumbs of that nonsense away anyway.
Pre-Big bang cosmogony is a lot harder and wasn’t resolved until fairly recently and contemporaneous with Lawrence Krauss’ work over the past 3 years. His, and others, just gels with what I’m thinking though he knows his stuff whereas I just read it to know it. Trying to imagine nothing is as hard as trying to imagine un-caused causes of a memoryless stochastic random source of entropy. The remarkable bit of which is the predictability of the average.
So that is the pre-Big bang sorted and now on to how we live. This has a lot of different pieces, not all of which are tidy, but it was not that hard to identify that we give this universe meaning and we define our own purpose and we set the values. It isn’t predefined, we’re not replaying a canned universe and we’re not playing in a pre-determined universe. We’ve evolved this ability and the universe permits this. We just haven’t admitted that as a whole species but delegate this role to a fictional being and to others. It is not a surprise that we meander along knowing what problems to solve but are uncoordinated in this effort until it becomes such a huge problem that we panic. Well I have my purpose in mind and this is my future I have decided.
Finally I became a real person, synchronising my social network to not be anonymous. That was crossing the Rubicon. I suspect many on the ‘net have gone through this either from faith to non-faith or from non-faith to out-of-the-closet non-faith. It is pretty bloody appalling that we have had to do this but given British society still had blasphemy laws on the books only 4 years ago, history hasn’t been very kind to us non-believers.
It was only 10 months ago in early 2012 that I told the first person about this one little aspect i.e. “atheist” and “secular humanist”. A few months later I mentioned to another person (who was atheist/humanist and was looking into humanist funerals) and another (who was atheist and likes my ideas).
My ideas simply follow on from these thoughts and I’m now seeking funding for some of the first products. They are practical, they will address the human condition, our existentialism, they will make religion as we know it obsolete and they will make society more efficient, more caring, less wasteful and at least give us a chance in the universe.
It has taken me a long time to get to this stage, cost me a lot of money, a lot of grief, it has interfered with friendships and my family. But I now have my purpose, I have my vision, I know how we can add value and meaning and if you are interested you can be part of this too.
Forging ahead because what you do tomorrow starts from the steps you take today.
For more on this please see the following links,
Credodia Project on http://www.credodia.org/ or on
Facebook on http://www.facebook.com/pages/Credodia/241205672639718?ref=hl