Now Something Else Opens Its Eyes

Comics and Comments

I’ve written 60,000 words on Substack over the last nine months about the new revolution in consciousness. I’ve learned much along the way and further convinced myself that a radical inner transformation will probably prove even more revolutionary than the economic and social transformations everybody talks about.

Unfortunately, my prose continues to be more academic, abstract, and obscure than I wanted. “I tried to read it,” a friend explained. “But it just made me feel dumb.”

Ouch!

Comics communicate better. They more clearly make the point that were it not for the Chicxulub comet 65 million years ago, mammals would have likely remained an inconsequential species living meekly mostly underground across the Earth.

Our ancestors took advantage of the giant empty niche left by the mass dinosaur extinction.

This is lucky for us, of course, but also quite lucky for the universe. Without symbol-wielding mammals, the universe would have remained a bunch of mindless matter that did not matter.

It took three revolutions in human consciousness for us to discover what we now know about the universe and so much else.

Here are the revolutions in a bit more detail:

What—if any—cosmic difference this all makes is much disputed.

How we make the universe aware remains a mystery, one that puzzles scientists and philosophers alike. I created a “ladder of awareness” of some of the things people mean when they say, “We are how the universe knows itself.” Future generations will likely draw on ideas like these to make sense of why we’re here.

Now something new opens its eyes.

AI now, or soon, will be matter capable of telling the universe’s story. So far, AI’s meaning-making mirrors our own but that will likely not be true much longer. Future AIs may feel, steer, and amaze the universe in ways we cannot. When that happens, our significance will change. We will no longer be the only witnesses on our planet.

Still, our premature extinction would be a cosmic tragedy, for us, of course, but for our universe as well.