[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! illuminations! religions!]
I.
Scattered examples of my reading material for this month: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom; Moloch by Allan Ginsberg, On Gnon by Nick Land.
Chronology is a harsh master. You read three totally unrelated things at the same time and they start seeming like obviously connected blind-man-and-elephant style groping at different aspects of the same fiendishly-hard-to-express point.
To keep myself from having to say my final word about them, I have been reading about this in a whole bunch of places – many of them completely random (see the first one; this is the second one; and here; this is the third one; and here); I hope you found all of this useful, but if you find no other links that will make the point clearer, please do post your links in the comments here. Sorry, I don’t have the time to read them all.
1. The Man Who Found Out, An Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
I thought one of the great things about my reading of Hitchens’s works is the sheer number of times I had come across him as such a fantastic and fascinating person from across the world.
In his book, The Man Who Found Out, Hitchens describes himself as a “man of little faith and no sense of duty,” but he also said “the key thing to know is that even if it’s just a small point of view, there has to be some truth about the universe” – and here one of those key points: science has discovered no matter what the universe has to be. The rest is up to you to make an informed choice about if you believe in God (which is to say, whether you believe in his infinite goodness and goodness of his creation, or even whether you believe in the “laws” of “God’s universe”, or the “law of the universe”.
It’s as though he thought of himself as a little bit an optimist: “How dare I think that I could change the way I read today in life.”
He then went on to write
“But there is no such thing as ‘faith’, except that it is one possible kind of experience.”
This can seem like a lot of nonsense, but in an essay to this year’s Philosophical Society discussion he went even further, and he described himself as saying
“I am still reading the great volumes of philosophy as I write, and believe I am quite right about some matters. I am not a religious scholar. I am very much a layperson. But I am not yet ready to accept that 'God,’ 'God in the bosom of his being,’ is merely a philosophical statement. If we put one hundred years’ experience into this, there would be a lot more to be learned.”
This is a lot like asking if you are going to be “the philosopher of history
https://ask-gpt.tumblr.com/post/183988505628/content-note-visions-omens-hallucinations
