/lit/ - Literature

>>11788617
>Unchanging things don’t change, and changing things do change – until they change into things that don’t.

that's a pretty good line.

it always amazes me how in the 2000s we thought we were so jaded and cynical, that nothing could really bother us. all the I Fucking Love Science stuff and all the rest. how much of this was just a mask for a lot of deep-rooted quasi-victorian stuff about how the universe actually works? evolution is fine for everyone else until it's your turn, and then things get real. it's why i think land is so prescient, he's just saying that teleoplexy are the chickens of the industrial revolution coming home to roost, that the revolution is an autotelic capital-process itself. it would be nice to think that out of this we might evolve a sensibility in turn which recognizes how much what we are calling civilization is in a cosmic waltz with this and no longer calling the tune or even leading the dance.

nietzsche is the only philosopher i can think of who is tried something like an ethics of biology, the Great Health and so on. and sloterdijk makes a case for this as general immunology which is completely persuasive. none of this points towards any kind of rosy optimism.

>Of course, once we recognise the existence of two distinct stability kinds, one based on probabilities and energy, the other on exponentially driven self-replication, the reason for the teleological character of all living things becomes obvious. Nature’s most fundamental drive, dictated by logic itself, is toward greater stability. That drive has a thermodynamic manifestation, as expressed through the ubiquitous Second Law, but it also has a kinetic manifestation – the drive toward increasingly persistent replicators. Two mathematics, two material forms. This distinction does not trace the dividing line between living and dead matter precisely – but it does explain it, and many of the other riddles of life into the bargain.

'increasingly persistent replicators.'

but again tho. what is the difference between civilization and barbarism? as we descend into an era quite possibly to be dominated by a permanent state of tribal-ideological warfare maybe it will be the case that we will simply discover that the wholes are greater than the sums of their parts. one can only dream of a post-ironic, post-cynical, post-tribal world today. that party is only getting started. and the robots are going to kick the shit out of us all in equal measure anyways.