But it is the function of a universal state to provide repose for a society long distracted by a time of troubles. A universal state inspired by dynamic and revolutionary ideas is a contradiction in terms, a lullaby performed on a trombone.
p. 537
In Arnold Toynbee's 'A Study of History: Volume 1'
Herodotus notes that the Persians, while proclaiming themselves superior to all their neighbors, borrowed their civilian dress from the Medes and a number of outlandish indulgences, including unnatural vice, from the Greeks; and 'the Old Oligarch', in the course of his pungent criticisms of fifth-century Athens, remarks that his fellow-countrymen had been exposed, through their command of the sea, to a more extensive debasement by foreign customs than was to be seen in the cities of less enterprising Greek communities. As for ourselves, our tobacco-smoking commemorates our extermination of the red-skinned aborigines of North America, and coffee-drinking and tea-drinking and polo-playing and pyjama-wearing and Turkish baths commemorate the enthronement of the Frankish man-of-business in the seat of the Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rum and of the Mughal Qaysar-i-Hind, and our jazzing commemorates the enslavement of the African Negro and his transportation across the Atlantic to labour on American soil in plantations which had taken the place of the hunting-grounds of the vanished Red Indians.
p. 521
From Arnold Toynbee's 'A Study of History: Volume 1'
"The theory of God that emerges from a scientific theology need not posit a magician that flouts the laws of physics. These laws do not describe an unconscious reality; they describe the dynamics of conscious agents, finite and infinite, projected into the language and data structures of the spacetime interface of Homo sapiens. The laws of physics do not describe a machine, in which a marginalized ghost of consciousness must perform paranormal tricks to prove its existence. Consciousness need not flout scientific laws that are themselves projected descriptions of the dynamics of consciousness" (p. 200)
From Donald Hoffman's "The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes
"The interface theory of perception contends that there is a screen--an interface--between us and objective reality. Can we hope to pierce that screen and see objective reality? Conscious realism says yes: we have met reality and it is like us. We are conscious agents, and so is objective reality. Beyond the interface lurks no Kantian noumenon, forever alien and impervious to our inquiry. Instead, we find agents like us: conscious agents. Their variety dwarfs the dazzling diversity of creatures that have paraded the earth and bequeathed to its sediments innumerable petrified mementos of their sojourn. We cannot imagine, concretely, even one new color. We cannot hope to imagine but a fraction of the varied experiences enjoyed by this multifarious host of agents. But despite our diversity, we share a unity: we are all agents, conscious agents." (p. 191)
From Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
The upshot of Hoffman's ITP in this realization is just how much it 'jives' with Michael Levin's work on xenobots and similar statements concerning consciousness being a fundamental unit of what we see. Likewise, Wolfram's automata and the ruliad guiding their interactions also finds complexity in simple units operating on simple rule sets. And most importantly, his notion is that even these simple structures can be perceived by us as complex because we are merely as complex as them. We can't rule them by constructing a rule that will determine their outcome many discreet moves into the future. We get the same outcome, everything is looking back at us. What we see in the complexity of the world around us is the work of consciousness--ours to see it, and theirs to be seen as such.
