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Understanding Reality as a Survival Tool for Humanity |
Humanity has reached a point where we have become self aware and aware of the universe we live in. We are the product of evolution but humanity is coming into a period where we have the power to determine what we will evolve into, or if we will evolve at all. We have to choose between evolution and extinction, and if we choose to evolve forward, evolve forward into what? How are we going to make those choices?
When a child is born it just plops out into existence. All it knows is to cry when it needs attention and to suck on a nipple. As the child ages and develops language and integrates into society, at some point the child contemplates, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" The child realizes that it has choices to make about its future, to decide what it will become. Those choices determine their life Story and the choices have consequences. Bad choices lead to a miserable life, even perhaps an early death. Good choices tend to lead to a happy productive life that one can look back upon and be proud that they made the right choices early on.
Humanity is faced with this same choice. Now that we are coming of age where we can alter our genetics and add machine technology to who we are, we have to decide as a species what we are going to be when we grow up. What are we going to choose to evolve into? What will humanity look like 100 years from now? What will be be 1000 years from now? What will we be 10,000,000 years from now? Or will we even be here?
We, as humanity, have choices to make. But how do we make those choices? Unlike the example of a child deciding what it will be when it grows up, we don't have parents to guide us or career choices laid out for us to choose from. There is no omnipotent parent to tell us what to do. We are more like a child that was raised in the wild. We not only have to figure out what we want to become, we have to figure out how we are going to figure that out. What are our choices for the future and how do we determine what is a better choice? How do we know when we choose correctly?
One of the things we need to do first is to put value in this reality. If, for example, we focus on a "next world" or some other imaginary reality over the real world then we might find ourselves extinct and with no reality or world at all. This is our reality. It is our home. It might not be what we want but it is the way it is. It is the hand we were dealt. We either play the hand or we fold and leave the game. In the church of Reality we choose to stay in the game, play the hand we're dealt, and do the best we can with it. We may end up extinct anyway, but we're not going down without a fight. We choose to continue to exist in this world, the real world.
In order for humanity to survive and thrive, and to continue to evolve forward, humanity has to choose to have an intimate relationship with reality. We have to continue to understand this world we live in so as to avoid extinction and develop the technology for our continued survival. When that big asteroid comes heading to collide with our planet we are going to need rockets, not prayer, to push it out of the way. Some day before this planet gets wiped out by something we can't control we need to get out of here and spread out to the rest of the galaxy, or perhaps to other galaxies. There is only one way to do that and that's to continue to have an intimate relationship with reality and to evolve forward so that our understanding of reality increases over time.
Thus the pursuit of the understanding of reality is not just a religious hobby for realists. it is the key to the survival of humanity. It is what keeps us in the game.
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