During our VentureC journey I hope to write about a chapter a week of a book that summarizes and shares to the best of my ability my adaptive experience. Here’s the first installment.
I’m interested in reality: what is it, how does it work, what are humans’ place in it and how can I experience it to the fullest. Interested might be an understatement. Consumed might be a better way to put it. VentureC is my attempt to grow and share my understanding of the universe by going on a journey of pure adaptation. To do this, I’m devoting to trust, honesty and cooperation and allowing the people and experiences I encounter to guide that journey naturally. As a river shapes its bed or thoughts shape a neural network, that’s how I hope to let culture shape VentureC.
That’s because I think I’ve found the seed of something that actually makes sense, a way to understand consciousness that could be a key part of an incredible transformation of human existence. We are at once the result of and the creators of evolution, which is the process by which energy becomes information, the natural balance of entropy. Our very existence consists of an inexplicable process of taking in our external surroundings and projecting out our internal environment at the exact same time. Through this infinite cycling of energy in and out of ourselves, we grow.That, among countless other realizations during thousands of hours of abstraction, has led me to see that we are in fact this process itself on a very deep level. We are each a part of the universe evolving. And we each have the power to shape it, because we each have our own imagination and the ability to bring that into shared reality through our creativity. So cool.
Why do I talk so much about evolution, you might ask? Why do I want things to change? Actually, I don’t. I love things the way they are. I used to want to change things. I wanted to cure the world of injustice and give people in sorrow and pain the chance to experience the peace and joy I’ve been lucky enough to know. Then I realized that was all part of wanting to change myself. Now I really appreciate the way things are. It’s just that the way things are is always changing- and that’s where we come in. We are the agents of that change.
It’s time for us to begin to adapt our unsustainable societal habits to match with the advances in our understanding. We’re now precisely and intentionally adjusting the brain and body through medicine. We’re also designing computer systems that show inklings of consciousness. Oh yeah, and there’s this thing called the Internet giving each and every one of us access to all the information humans have ever known. We’re changing the composition of our environment on every scale, from Earth’s physical atmosphere to the perspective of what is life upon which we’ve based our choices for hundreds of thousands of years.
Here’s the thing: while this may seem scary, it’s also awesome and entirely natural. We already are and always have been responsible for the world we live in; people conceived of cars, computers, tables, even words and symbols to begin with. We’re just entering a time of tremendous evolutionary pressure that’s waking us up to this truth, spurring us to take another jump in awareness like we did when we started using language or first built permanent dwellings. This jump, I think, has to do with bringing the awareness of what culture is to culture itself. That is, we’re becoming open about the fact that people are responsible for creating our own world.
Of course none of this should be taken too seriously… life goes on. The universe is infinitely vast and while we do have that infinity within us, we’re only a part of it and really can’t do anything to damage its balance. I just think we should consider how not to squander the beauty of what it is to be a human during this period of unprecedented acceleration and change. It’s important to me that we accept and create what’s happening rather than fight it, so we can find ways to have the best parts of life like love and joy guide the direction we take culture in.
