- Unsupervised Learning
- Posts
- 3 Reasons the Future Will Think Us Primitive
3 Reasons the Future Will Think Us Primitive
We love to make fun of the ridiculous beliefs people had in the past. They used to think that demons caused disease? It’s germs, silly! The sun doesn’t orbit us, you cretans! It’s a heliocentric solar system! Sheesh. We’re so smart. They’re so dumb.
Yeah, not really.
In fact, relative to how deluded most people on this planet still are today, the beliefs above aren’t that silly at all. Said differently, the distance we still have to cross to get from our current belief systems to reality, compared to the distance we’ve come so far, is quite large.
Here are 3 reasons we’ll be considered intellectually archaic by our ancestors:
We still believe in free will. The notion makes precisely zero sense when exposed to any degree of scientific scrutiny or objective consideration. We believe it because we feel it and we want to believe it, not because we have any evidence of it. And in fact we have mounting evidence to the contrary. This matters because horrible concepts like deserving hatred, or scorn, or retribution–these all rely on the concept of free will. The sooner we accept reality on this point the sooner we become a better humanity.
We still believe in life after death. This might as well be gods causing rainstorms. It really is that bad. Organized religion and the primitive beliefs that accompany it are vestiges of our primitive past. Don’t believe me? Imagine looking a visiting alien in the face, after he arrived as part of a 76-billion civilization survey project, and tell him some extraordinary percentage of the world’s population believes that Jesus performed the ultimate sacrifice by dying for us…when he’s not even dead. Add in all the slavery and stoning bits and you’ll get a blank look right before he writes something on his clipboard.
We still waste our adult lives in pursuit of money. We start off as children, full of wonder, enchanted by beautiful and interesting things. And then we die at around age 18. We’re told to buck up and become adults, which means spend two thirds of your life either asleep or in the equivalent of a coal mine so that someone can make a dollar. Oh, and the other third is spent consuming content. Crappy content. TV. Movies. Dreck. We’re not creating art, we’re not sharing beautiful things. We’re asleep at the wheel, wasting the one life we get.
So yeah, when you’re being rated by someone 1,000 years from now, and they read a Facebook post you wrote about how stupid it was for people to believe that inanimate objects had souls, the joke will be on you because you still think you have one.
The beliefs above are step 0 toward actual awareness, and virtually nobody has even started.