Cleric K wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 7:54 am
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 8:38 pm
Tom Campbell also talks of a Divine telos being about lowering entropy, which is somehow connected to Love ...
Thanks, Shu. I intended to relate Love to the picture but it seems it has become lost in the keystroke linearization process.
It's worth noting that the view on entropy that Campbell describes is of quite different kind that what was elaborated here. TC's Big TOE is really an 'interesting' phenomenon. It's a fine example of the intellect going wild and practically building a sci-fi universe. The good thing is that TC doesn't claim it to be otherwise. Yet there are people who are fascinated by such ideas and make a following.
TC quickly skims over the idea that the Whole fragments into pieces, which then go on to explore the possibilities. This is once again the already well known Flat MAL paradigm. Pretty much everything is a kind of pan-psychism from where the universe begins to be built up entirely in
bottom-up fashion. It's never ending increasing in complexity. This is practically the dream of the materialist too - our whole civilization builds upon layers after layers of complexity. The problem of course is that this complexity is of mechanical nature. Everyone today shudders at the thought what will happen if the electric grid or global communications fail. The whole edifice of modern civilization is resting upon fragile foundations.
TC's view builds in the same spirit, of course with the notion that we should do that out of Love and not fear. But there are many kinds of Love. The cat eats the mouse out of Love too. So the whole philosophy that everything will be fine as long as we support each other and everyone is free to pursue their desires, completely crumbles when it faces reality. Social conflict issues precisely when everyone wants to pursue their
unquestioned desires. As soon as these desires clash, a sacrifice has to be made but who will be the first to make the step? These are things of basic human psychology that people simply don't want to look into
for the simplest reason that they don't want to question the nature of their own desires, opinions, views, etc. That's why the solution is always projected outwards - "only if science discovers cure for cancer ...", "only if everyone would live out of Love and not out of fear ...", "Only if everyone would abandon the ego and live in the uncreated nothingness ...". The last thing we want is to consider the possibility that it is our own being that must be transformed, and not seek social and spiritual systems that hopefully organize life in such a way that we can exercise our whims unhindered.
The complexity of the Natural world is already there. Is there reason to look further than the human brain, the most marvelous structure known?
It doesn't make sense to hijack this already existing reality and keep convoluting it into more and more complex relations and call that 'lowering the entropy'. Any complex biological energetic process on Earth can be traced back to the Sun - it is Solar energy that supports the entropic gradient. When we trace this process we can follow how low entropy energy travels through space, enters the Earth atmosphere, interacts with chlorophyll, propels the whole biological world and so on. This is in purely physical sense. It is similar in spiritual sense, where instead of tracing the abstract concept of energy, we trace the processes in the Divine Mind, which become increasingly convoluted (higher entropy) and ultimately lead to our current state, where we're facing impossible complexity. Lowering our entropy is the actual fully conscious transformation of our being such that, just as we normally live with our own thoughts, so we live in higher order Cosmic Thoughts, which are that actual causal factors behind the dissipated higher entropy states. It is quite clear that TC doesn't speak of that. Everything that we speak of here is completely collapsed and lost between the 'Consciousness broke down to pieces, so that it can interact with itself'. There's
absolutely nothing between Consciousness and the 'piece'. Everything that exists is the build up of 'information' into more and more complex relations. This is also why people feel comfortable with the 'instinctive MAL' paradigm - it's a very convenient upgrade of materialism, we again build up the World order from the bottom-up, except that we do that from pieces that have inherent capacity of consciousness.
If we understand entropy in the way physics finds it, then we reckon that there isn't 'absolutely nothing' between Consciousness and the piece but in fact
everything is there. Then lowering entropy is not further increase of complexity (even though it is hoped that would bring greater harmony between the pieces) but the actual conscious penetration into the living processes that are
already responsible for the complex picture we observe on the natural sensory surface.
When things are seen in this way, Love also enters most naturally into the picture. Not as the Pollyanna vision that 'only if everyone was good to each other, we would be able to fulfill our deepest whishes unhindered' but as the Love for something greater, which is our true essence, yet it far outgrows our narrow personal interests (which can only arise because of an incomplete view). In this Love we realize that we must sacrifice precisely our egoistic desires that perpetuate the soul frictions which ultimately dissipates consciousness as 'heat' and lead us into high entropy state where we can no longer make any sense of the World Content except for a closed handful of ideas that revolve around the biography of our bodily self.