I, Watchman
“Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he sees….” The watchman said, “The morning comes, and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire; Return! Come back!” [Isaiah 21]
The morning of information (and misinformation, disinformation) came with writing some 50 centuries ago, and in the flowering and fruit of the fossil fueled Industrial Ones did arise much normative information of highest transformity apart from their genome.
In the twentieth century, within a lifetime, the age of the universe went from maybe 9–20 billion years in the unfolding to about 13.8 billion years (13.787±0.02e9). The number of galaxies went from “more than one” in the 1920s to 50 billion in the observable universe (2.5% of total) as seen by the Hubble and Webb telescopes, or about 2 trillion galaxies out there total.
We now know something of the 2nd and 4th laws of thermodynamics (aka the ‘mind of God’). And on the other end of the telescopes, the story encoded in human DNA can now be read, with archaeogeneticists reading about the past lives of humans contained in present and fossil DNA to tell we who would rather know than believe what we could not otherwise know of.
Get Eric Lee’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Unlike for energy, there is no First Law of the Conservation of Information. All can be rapidly lost (if so, there would not be enough energy on the planet to again acquire it, hence such information is of the highest transformity, the flower and fruit of our profligate dissipation).
But Climax cometh and it won’t be orgasmic, but dissipative on the downslope, The morning comes followed by a likely long dark night of the economy (other than gifting). Fossil fuels were an entropic accelerant. — darkness at noon. Images of a fusion, thorium, geothermal, biomass, wind, hydro, and solar powered modern techno-industrial global monetary culture building a Dyson sphere whose spore ships spread metastatic modernity to the stars of the Milky Way before spewing out into Cosmos may be to die for.
If you will inquire into the modern human condition (context) and come to know thyself as denormalized animal, then further inquire to clarify the non-viable dynamic that entraps you as a fly in a Wittgensteinian fly bottle, the understanding of (insight into), which is the deliverance from it. No deliverance? Then continue to endeavor to inquire, to understand well, such being the only morality of good doing for posterity’s and the biosystem’s sake.
RETURN! to a normative human ecology and ethology norms such as may be viable long term for an evolvable animal as the millennia pass like weeks. It is not wrong to GO BACK! for that which your ancestors long ago forgot, failed to learn from their ancestors.
Could most anyone be a watchperson? You do it by declaring what you seeth — no intermediary telling you what you see, no ideological filter determining what you declare. Doing so bypasses the filter of the linguistic consensus narratives your meme infested brain is possessed by.
To see the what is relationally before you and endeavor to declare it as an afterthought is to dismantle the linguistic simulacrum of reality that culture imposes. Do you exist to seize the day as a modern human serving the economy? To be a taker who may produce (or not) to take? Or are you tasked to see the day as a renormalizing animal?
