Meaning and Intellectual Beauty

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Humans are just chimpanzees that have learned how to lie and who can lob nuclear bombs around the world.

Humans have evolved very little from their chimpanzee-like ancestors. It is their environment which has evolved. It contains all the information, which, reflected into the chimpanzoid brains of zombie humans, causes them to imagine the delusion that they are conscious and intelligent.

What people can't seem to grasp is that the human mind and consciousness (such as they are) do not come from within us, but reside in the material and social environment which has evolved over thousands of years around us. It is because we have been raised in that complex environment and been socially conditioned by it that we have any consciousness at all. The human mind is entirely a reflection from outside.

It is my view that (at least when their human tools are functioning properly) thoughts, ideas, concepts and language use humans to express themselves and appear with greater clarity in the physical world of time and space. Concepts and language are mere shadows of the Super-Essential, Super-Concrete realm of the Platonic Forms, which are infinitely more real and substantial than the phantasmagoria of mere matter, time and space.

The proper role of humans is to do whatever they can to enable the Platonic forms to continue to emerge into the chaos of the world, and thus to turn chaos into Order, Beauty, Harmony, Goodness, Truth and Unity. All Goodness and Beauty reside in the Platonic forms, they have nothing to do with mere humans-in-themselves. The only way for humans to become Good and Beautiful is to reflect the Platonic Forms, and the sooner and more clearly humans realize this simple truth, the happier they will be.

The vehicles through which the Forms manifest in the world and radiate their consciousness is vast and various---humans, animals, plants, machines, rocks---all have something to contribute to the Harmony of the World.
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tecoyah said:

You shur is awful smart fer a durty lil' Chimp.

Click to expand...

I owe it all to the intelligence of my environment.
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For many years I have been deeply moved by these lines from Macauley's Lays of Ancient Rome:

To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better, than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods.

Taken in its crudest sense (as, no doubt, Macauley intended it to be taken), it is trash, a mere incitement to violence and intolerance; but I choose to take it in a higher sense.

Love for the ashes of my fathers is my love for all of Life, back to the first protoplasmic animacule that began the wonderful, terrifying phantasmagoria of my family history (and yours).

The Temple of my Gods, is Divine Beauty, which suffuses Nature and the Realms of Thought with its astounding radiance, and which any calm intelligence is capable of perceiving, though it be to only the slightest extent by any human being.
(Remember, true to my own injunction, I am speaking metaphorically here)

These are the core of my Homeland, to which I am devoted with heart and soul.

I spurn all lesser conceptions of Homeland as contemptible Jingoism.
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More Mandelbrot Set wonders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JUAojvFpCo
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This is a tiny fragment of the literally infinite structure surrounding the Mandelbrot Set.

Every point on the complex plane is subjected to a very simple recursive algorithm. If the algorithm reaches a finite limit, that point is colored black and is a part of the Mandelbrot Set. If the algorithm runs off to infinity, that point is colored somewhere on the spectrum between red and violet depending on how quickly it exceeds some finite limit.

So the Set itself is absolutely determined and colored black; the surrounding environment may have wildly divergent colorings (though still bound by certain mathematical limits), depending on one's free choice of what limits are set upon the algorithm's race toward infinity. Quite different patterns of color may appear depending upon one's choice.

I see interesting relations here between the Mandelbrot Set and its environment with traditional musings upon determinism and free will.
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