Narrative and Metaverse, Pt. 4 - Carrying the Fire
August 17, 2022·16 comments
The other night I had a dream about my father, who's been dead 26 years now. It wasn't a big dream. It wasn't a Cormac McCarthy dream, full of Meaning and Portent. No, he said something that I don't remember, and then we just sat together for a while. That was it. No story to it at all. Just a connection with someone who is very important to me, someone who was as real and alive in that dream world as I was in that dream world.
Just a connection.
Just a connection that is instantly familiar to anyone who has ever lost a friend or family member, which is to say instantly familiar to every human being who has ever lived. Just a connection that would be even more familiar and commonplace to any non-modern human, as every civilization on Earth once considered the dream world as real as the waking world, and the dead as physically present in their lives as the living.
Just a connection that is profoundly alien to any AI or constructed modern intelligence, as it expresses a social relationship that lives entirely outside of the macroverse and exists solely in the Metaverse - the mental world of symbols and images (unstructured data) that are imbued with meaning by humans through the application of coherent linguistic structures (grammar) to create patterns of communication (language) that can tell a story that will shape our thoughts (narrative), and which finds physical expression in the electric, neurochemical ocean of quadrillions of self-organized neurons across billions of human brains.
Just a connection, but our most human connection. Our uniquely human connection. Our if and only if connection. A connection that is always experienced uniquely and individually and idiosyncratically, but a connection that is also a shared human communion that has occurred tens of billions of times over thousands of years.
It is a Mystery, in the true and original meaning of the word.
And it is dying.
At the core of mass society is a concerted and intentional effort to replace human connections to family and friends with inhuman connections to the Nudging State and the Nudging Oligarchy.
The replacement of human connections to family and friends is not limited to the present, but is even more pronounced in the severing of human connections to the past and the future, creating, in Orwell's words "an endless present in which the Party is always right".
This is the Long Now.
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