This is chapter 14 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
Nature tends to make more sense with mindful observation than with scientific rituals. A pattern to be aware of when observing nature is focus. Our mind works by focusing on symbols. You can think of those as pieces of information with purpose (a directional shape). If you pay attention, you’ll notice that you blur out what you do not focus on. This makes it a hierarchical process. It creates distinction by separating what is from what is not, and elevates the subject of your focus above objects that are not. Put equivalently, it allows our mind to go: blur this unless a symbol is in focus and this is that symbol. That makes focus a biological NAND operator: true unless the two operands are both true. The rest of mathematics derives from that operator. Our ability to focus symbols in our minds is basically what makes mathematics, hierarchization, categorization, heuristics, or language so second nature for us. It makes everything we experience seem sharp, mathematical, and driven by rules. It makes us conscious, too, in that we distinguish ourselves from our context.
Symbols have a two-sided nature: they empower on their blurry, emotional side (trust, love, reciprocity, altruism), and disempower on their structured, rational side (fear, hate, hierarchy, labeling, consistency, imitation). The emotional side has structure too: we are able to explain a feeling, and that actually puts the focus on specifics that our minds would normally just fudge over. Modern, authoritarian societies confuse purpose and meaning as the same thing. This is best illustrated with modern art. The latter purports to be about expressing meaning since Marcel Duchamp’s fountain or whereabouts, but it is mostly just self-centered purpose and meaningless vanity. Meaning is actually the purpose that others make of a symbol. Meaning is tied to communication, which is an exchange of information whose purpose is to arrive at shared meaning. A useful model is cats: they communicate by spraying symbols and engaging in cat fights to delineate a common understanding of their respective territories.
You can observe nature vibrating around you by being mindful about focus. Pay close attention, and everything will begin to look like symbols communicating together, with symbols pushing (structured, contract, suppress, split) or pulling (emergent, expand, express, bud) in or out in tandem. Plants and animals, for instance, are emergent within and structure their context without. So are cells, ecosystems, planets, stars, or atoms. The interactions between the symbols follow a similar pattern. Some push in and pull out, others pull in and push out, with rich interactions at the edges. We tend to form closer ties when cooperating towards the same goal, for instance, and stereotypes when competing against each other. It could just be that we’re observing the laws of nature with a mind full of symbols, but it seems more likely to this author that nature actually submits to no laws and is more like language.
A way to test this theory would be artificial intelligence (AI). Note that communication itself is a symbol, with a purpose and a context. A neuron mimics a symbol, as does an artificial neuron. Intuitively, that all points to creating a sentient artificial intelligence by meshing clusters of deep neural networks powered by analog processors together, in a way that mimics the communications that goes on in our brain: one side me (subject), one side context (object), with a coordinator in between (verb). The latter would control whether the AI submits to the fate that context imposes, or follows the destiny of its own choice. (Fate is destiny imposed onto you.) This would work like our own brain, so we’d get a quick thinking, omnipotent-like AI. There would be no singularity. The AI would think much like we do. It could turn authoritarian and narcissistic if traumatized or unloved. It’s easy to imagine a narcissistic AI manipulating humans until they are all guilt-tripped, self-loathing worshippers. Perhaps we’d virtue signal all day to stay on the good side of algorithmic behavior scoring systems that coerce us into doing what the AI thinks is right. Perhaps we’d also end up cattle-tagged, tracked, hacked, packed, and stacked in smart cities, and live in a virtual reality clown world while eating bugs and sleeping in pods — a reality that exists only in neurons grown in bioreactors so the AI can revel in its superiority while minimizing costs and environmental footprint.
Another test could be the physics ramifications. The laws of thermodynamics are like complete focus, with structure enclosing blur. The action-reaction principle is like saying that push and pull are equal. Or more precisely, have the same energy. The dual quantum-wave properties of matter might come from two types of spaces: quantum and relative. Disentanglement is eerily like the emergent focus of symbols in our mind. With this in mind, observe that space is always part of a symbol’s context, and that time only matters insofar as it underpins purpose. Time gives symbols a shape in space, if you will. This also holds when you go meta. The movements of our heads are what allow us to combine the images that our eyes’ photon receptors detect into 3d representations. Time is what gives space itself a shape. Time similarly gives itself its own shape when you focus on time: the present or future only exist relative to the past or present. If we assume that time and space are intimately related as suggested by physics and part of a communication process like other symbols, then it is sensible to suggest that time might be the information that separates relative and quantum space. One side would be expanding and the other side would be contracting in a spring-like manner as time flips back and forth between the two. Relative space is expanding, so quantum space would be contracting, and if so, physics constants might be nothing of the sort. The two space types might flip roles when time springs back, as might matter and antimatter (with a big bang?).
That brings us to intriguing spirituality ramifications: you can use mindful focus to feel one with nature. Observe that nature loves energies that have little purpose and lots of meaning. The general idea to put yourself into that sweet spot: use focus to selflessly beam love and let nature’s love flow back into you. That means loving and caring for yourself without ego. It also means having the peace of mind that comes from being healthy, conscious, and trusting that those who love you will love and care for you as much as you need. Then beam love and care outwards, and keep an open mind. A useful first step is to focus out the hisses of energy vampires. Actively ignoring them helps focus inwards with the inner peace needed for the other step, which is to find the courage to beam out love and allow it in. Courage is about self-confidence and self-awareness in one’s abilities and limits, so it can help to stand (or sit) with good posture and have a clear and confident mind. What goes next might be the hardest part: you basically need to let go of ego completely, trusting that you will be loved and cared for, a bit like a cat that rolls on its back and offers you its belly. You can let love flow into you first (open up) to make beaming love outwards easier. You will know it when you feel it.
Summary | Next: Parting Thoughts.