Inspired by a photograph by Eve Hall Snr.
We must embrace complexity, and evolve to meet the challenges of our time
A person who understands that all people are members of his body is a sound person to guide them.
Paraphrased from the Tao Te Ching
by Phil Hall
The self emerges from stories. There is no Atman, no Platonic essence, no individual soul, not really. Daniel Dennett called the self the mere “centre of narrative gravity”. Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke and explained that when her brain injury affected the self-generating module, she felt a blissful, boundaryless overlap with the surrounding world. People who take brain-peeling psychedelics often encounter viscerally the unfiltered complexity and enormity of reality.
There is an architectured idea of the self-contained human. But the body itself is not a sealed container, it is more like a conduit for air, water, food, and inheritance. Life and substance flow through our bodies in a shared cycle with all other living beings. The boundary of the self is merely a practical filter, not a rigid, existential separation.
The idea of the self as integer is the temporary, self-deluding lie cultivated at the human apex in mid life when the human being has maximum agency. But you are not an astronaut.
An individual’s lifecycle maps perfectly onto the illusion of being an independent creature, but we arise from a state of visible extreme dependency: the cosmos is our nurturing mother; the “God” that propitiates our existence. We briefly forget our utter and extreme dependence on everyone and everything else during the apex of our agency as individuals. Let us call this the astronaut phase. Then we return to visible dependence as the wave dies back into the sustaining human, social and physical ground.
The idea of the self as integer is the temporary, self-deluding lie. Photograph Phil Hall
The Integer of the self is a the product of systems. Integers, on the whole, are fuzzy components generated out of complexity. In reality, the integer (that clean, discrete, countable unit of mathematics) is not a fundamental feature of our human experience, it is a simplification of the continuous, flowing, and fundamentally ambiguous nature of the real into static, manageable chunks.
The real, in all its fuzzy continuity, must precede the crystalline ideal. The fetish for “rational” numbers and simple geometric shapes, with time, becomes the acceptance that fractal models better describe nature.
Reality is beyond current comprehension, and now we require a new kind of human in order to be able to comprehend and embrace reality. This requires education and human evolution.
What we call chaos is simply an order with a language required to describe that order that we do not yet speak. There is deep, overlapping, syncopated order to reality. In the end chaos is merely a deeper order. What existentialists and entropists dismiss as meaningless or messy is often simply a deeper order of complex reality and we require a language to describe it that most of us still do not speak, unless can do intuitively or in art.
The Integer of the self is a the product of systems. Photograph Phil Hall
The greatest obstacle to the direct perception of reality is the mirror of self-regard which brings us to a standstill, and the irrational vanity of holding on to personal theories in the face of evidence to the contrary. We project ourselves onto reality. The narcissistic celebration of human achievements wastes our time when it puts a break on increasing human understanding.
Nietzsche was right that we need a new kind of human to in order to be able to confront meaninglessness, and create something of value. However, we have no need for confident Victorian heroes like Cecil Rhodes or Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Conquering a country and building a bridge or a railway line is not equivalent in difficulty to being able to cure cancer or manage climate change.
Ultimately, the initial human failure to tackle these intricate problems is the fault of the Principle of Least Effort (PLE). This is the efficiency principle which governs human cognition and the accumulation of knowledge. In actual fact, the PLE goes far beyond that. Every aspect of the material universe is governed by the principle of efficiency.
The tendency then is for the material to simplify and energy to disperse. The PLE is in reality the motor of entropy. But the engine of life that is anti-entropic and that drives us forwards to overcome the immediate PLE is evolution, understood here as the need to learn to adapt, or as the self-generated need to learn. This need is the imperative to model, simulate, and thrive in increasingly complex environments.
Festivals of celebratory consensus redirect attention away from the more complex flow of reality. Photograph Phil Hall
A vital corrective for delusion, and to help overcome lazy assumptions, is the act of intense observation; the method of Thales, Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci. They tried to understand all that they actually perceived, breaking with traditional idealising forms derived from prior ways of thinking, which usually resulted in the imposition of inaccurate abstractions.
But even with education, there is no substitute for the progress that comes with slow human evolution. We and our children and grandchildren need to evolve. We need to decide to equip ourselves fully to engage with the real in all its variegated complexity. The heroism that is required to do this is a heroism of openness and vulnerability, the bravery of diversity and inclusion and human growth. We need to become in order to create. We need to adapt to a wider world.
Everything is welcome that propitiates the transition of modern humans and society to the actual Novii Chelovek and new forms of society; even the negative things.
The Kardashev Type I human is capable of dealing with problems like climate change using art, wissenschaft, and through confronting war and ending war, and through opposition to exploitation and injustice, and by dealing with natural disasters successfully. All of this reality is our school, while everything that does not challenge us to expand our being is drag. Drag is the inertia of the old world, the comfortable small, confined environments, the refusal to break the mirror reinforcing ideas of self.
Heidegger with his concepts of heroism rooted in authenticity and racial purity set us back. He was a recidivist, a philosopher dog returning to his own vomit. The hero is not a recidivist, but an outgoing adventurer. The hero grows and has a transcendent arc of realisation. The hero travels far. The purpose of travel and adventure is becoming. The smaller, the more restricted, the more ‘authentic’ the environment, the smaller the mind and the more limited the capacity for thought and imagination.
Go back to the forests and you return to being a kind of human animal, perhaps a predator, a wolf. Photograph Phil Hall
Sometimes the problems we face are so complex that some people give up on their ability to ever understand it, and, resign themselves for reabsorption into nature, voting to be compost and not human. Climate change is an illustration of this. Solve the problem of climate change and you are the new human. Go back to the forests and you abdicate your humanity, and return to being a kind of human animal, perhaps a predator, a kind of wolf.
A narrow overlap of human with environment produces fragile, half-baked networks of vulnerablity. Rich emergence requires a richly endowed emergent human. To tackle complexity we need people who are emotionally, intellectually, materially capable of dealing with the problems that arise, without being suffocating by their own insular self justifying systems of beliefs.
Biologically, socially and culturally, the foundation of human robustness is universally the same; success comes with mixing and blending! The mixing of peoples and cultures and all living things produces culturally, socially, psychologically robust humans capable of dealing with problems that affect us globally. Purity, whether racial or cultural, is a toxic absurdity, and the road to extreme fragility and destruction.
Reliance on technology harms humans. Technology leads humans by the nose, debilitating them. Combatting this reliance on technology is a precondition for the emergence of organic human evolutionary robustness.
Complete environmental robustness requires the incorporation of all living things. Photograph Phil Hall
In real time. Nikola Tesla, for example, could simulate an entire machine in his mind, running and testing it before a single part was cast. We can do this on machines. A human should also be taught to be able to do things like this if that human is not simply to remain a clever monkey. In order to be able to solve real world problems a robust human has to be more capable of modelling complex reality and acting on it without relying on technology of control.
Complete environmental robustness, however, also requires the incorporation of the total evolving biological intelligence of Earth – all living things. This incorporation must be folded into human understanding and the different points and interests of other forms of life included into the shared body of humane society.
Let us calle this new expanded idea of the human being leviathan because such a human has gravitas. A Kardashev scale of the human leviathan would say that a type I Kardashev human adapts to a whole planet, and its biosphere. We are far from this.
If type I is the planetary leviathan, the biosphere made more self conscious, then Type II is a stellar leviathan, integrating all life systems around a star or set of stars. Type III, then would be the galactic leviathan, the integration of the life systems of a galaxy. Type IV and beyond is the Cosmic Leviathan, or God. Each level of being emerges in a larger environment
The real excitement is in the becoming, and the road is almost infinite.
The human leviathan need not look different from a modern human, or be much bigger. The human leviathan carries connections with the biosphere within itself. It is gene-stuffed, cognisant, syncopated and capable of taking on complex reality. All humans (or their descendants) should eventually become human leviathans, interconnected in an organic, planetary, overlapping network.
Leviathan perceives time differently; experiencing the forward arrow as we do, but also experiencing time “sideways”, as an extended present. Increasingly, with interconnection, the aperture of the present widens out. The syncopated rhythm of the entire system can be felt and now decisions can be made together that benefit the whole organic system.
Adventure is the road to Leviathan. Every encounter is on the road. The real excitement is in the becoming and the road is almost infinite. The excitement, beyond all ennui, comes with movement, exploration, walking and in confronting and overcoming complex problems like war, space travel, prejudice, climate change, cancer and the equal distribution of wealth. People need to confront this head on, not crawl back into some fetid national, or tribal, lair.
All that propitiates this transition to the Kardashev I human leviathan should be embraced. Everything that limits human exposure to reality is literally a drag: the inertia of the small and familiar and the intellectual paralysis in front of the mirror. As Arthur C. Clarke said, humanity is now at childhood’s end. It’s time to grow up.
References
Aristotle (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clarke, A.C. (1953) Childhood’s End. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
da Vinci, L. (2008) Notebooks. Edited by I.A. Richter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
Heidegger, M. (1927) Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kardashev, N. (1964) ‘Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations’, Soviet Astronomy, 8, pp. 217–221.
Lao Tzu (1944) The Way of Life According to Laotzu. Translated by W. Bynner. New York, NY: John Day Company.
Nietzsche, F. (1883–1885) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Classics.
Taylor, J.B. (2008) My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.
Tesla, N. (1919) ‘My Inventions’, Electrical Experimenter. Serialised February–October 1919. Available in collected form as: Tesla, N. (1982) My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Williston, VT: Hart Brothers.
Thales (n.d.) in Barnes, J. (ed.) (1987) Early Greek Philosophy. Translated by J. Barnes. London: Penguin Classics.
Phil Hall was born in South Africa into an ANC family with British, French, Austrian, and German roots. After his parents were exiled, they lived in East Africa and India before returning overland to the UK. In the UK he studied Russian and Spanish literature, politics, and economics. After graduating he specialised in descriptive and applied linguistics. Phil has lived and worked in Spain, the USSR, Mexico and the Gulf. Returning to London during the pandemic, he co-founded the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria (the Art of the Noteworthy) and the micropublisher, AN Editions.
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