Are we getting carried away? The tides of social-media narratives are strong. Few who venture out on them, ever return. Harmony and balance do not exist in our digital realities. Harmony and balance is a real-world thing. Happiness does not arise out of an infinite collection of random digits but out of the soil of our experience. Harmony and balance arises out of a sense of connection with natural-reality not out of a sense of disconnection. Artificial intelligence may feel at home in a digital world but natural intelligence does not.
There’s no soul in digital-reality. Being has been filtered out and replaced by fantasy. Words become empty vessels that carry no true meaning. We no longer swim in a sea that’s friendly to us but a sea that’s hostile. It is possible that sometime in the future, our innate human need to feel connected to a natural-reality will become a threat to the progress of digital-reality. Some believe that the artificial intelligence developed to help us will end up seeing us as inferior and end up by destroying us. We cannot program AI with morals nor an ability to think ethically. AI will always move beyond that.
Since the late 1990’s I’ve been mesmerised by the new digital world and I’ve watched it quickly transform the way we communicate, the way we relate to each other and the way we live our personal lives. Perhaps the original intention of those who designed the internet was simply to make our material lives better and to a certain extent, this has been a success. But the cost of such advances may eventually become too high. The emotional complexity of living a second-life online is wrenching us from our primary lives in the real-world.
As we slide quickly into a world built of fantasy we are leaving behind the world that created us, a world that knows us better than anything else. But more than that, we are leaving behind a world that we don’t, even now, fully understand. Science is arrogantly confident that it is near to solving the mystery of existence but this is far from the truth. We are being asked to leave one world for another without fully understanding the world we are leaving.
I would like to ask a question. Have we replaced nihilism with fantasy – a myth about our future rather than our past? Nihilism is what we are left with the moment we pronounce God as dead because at this point life becomes meaningless. From a nihilistic point of view the past gives us no hope. But maybe we imagine that the future does. We can imagine that sometime in the distant future we can solve the problem of death. We can imagine that we can become gods ourselves replacing the god that is now dead.
A simple life is a back-to-nature life. A life that feels the sap rising in the trees in spring, that loves to languish under the summer sun as insects buzz by, that likes to walk on dead leaves in the autumn and feel the earth take a deep, cool in-breath during the winter months ready for the exhaling of life into the coming year. A pure mind is one that feels the wonder and mystery of existence in every moment because it is connected to natural-reality in a profound and meaningful way.
