Comment by Waterluvian
13 hours ago
> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
As a slight tangent here, it's not just poetry. When you read something like 'The Republic', especially with regards to Plato's views on the cyclical nature of political systems and the end of democracy (and what it turns into), it reads a lot like an edgelord speaking with vaguely disguised metaphor with a rather large helping of hindsight bias. But the fact that it was written some 2400 years ago changes everything and emphasizes that history doesn't just repeat, it plagiarizes itself.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
Welcome to the aesthetic world! In the western philosophical and certainly scientific discourse there has since centuries been this drive for objectivity and universals. This has led to great discoveries and thinking. But it’s not the only world, the aesthetic is all about the senses and your place as a subject. It usually invites relativism, sometimes nihilism if you can’t find your ground as an individual in a larger universe.
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
That’s one good welcome! Even I feel welcomed and I have been hanging out in the music section for ages. Other than the music though I can relate to being a logical/rational person.
The majority of poetry is the equivalent of slop created to get into someone's pants. And then there's Pessoa.