Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

Watts is being polite when say­ing “we’re sim­ple-mind­ed”. Humans are greedy, vicious and reck­less. Not all, but 1% is lead­ing the way for the rest of dimwits. Mis­an­throp­ic com­ment? — yes indeed. Peo­ple are a dis­ease and they don’t even care.

To Naz,

Find­ing this pre­sen­ta­tion as shal­low is a reflec­tion of your own type of think­ing my friend. You have not at all grasped how Watts was using the land­scape as an exam­ple of the ‘wig­gly’ sub­stra­tum of the cos­mos. Think about the con­cave-con­vex motion of a wig­gle, the oppo­site shapes define each oth­er and are not at all sep­a­rate, they are inte­gral parts of a sin­gle move­ment. When he men­tioned the city and the wilder­ness being close to each oth­er and when he spoke about the con­trast in artis­tic ‘styles’ and indeed through­out the whole piece, he was speak­ing about that. All is defined by it’s oppo­site, and two oppo­sites are always ends of a sin­gle move­ment; a wig­gle.

When he spoke about man’s ten­den­cy to try and ‘straight­en-out’ the world, he was say­ing that if we view the uni­verse only in terms of our lin­ear thinking(no mat­ter how rel­a­tive­ly com­plex it is) then that would be com­pa­ra­ble to tak­ing out a ruler and con­clud­ing that the uni­verse is com­prised of inch­es.

Oh I for­got, I could not rec­om­mend more high­ly the late Donel­la Meads book Think­ing In Sys­tems A Primer. Extreme­ly use­ful to any­one pon­der­ing the ques­tions posed here by all. Ps for­give my spelling it remains far from per­fect.

I want to share this with friends who lis­tened to him on the radio when his lec­tures were broad­cast on FM station.q

When I first heard about him years ago, I thought that he was a gib­ber­ish con­man using mys­ti­cism as a way of earn­ing his bread. But years of my auto­di­dac­tism only prove his philo­soph­i­cal holisms or sys­tems think­ing to be more tan­gi­ble, res­onat­ing, and empathiz­ing with the very same prin­ci­ples that I’ve redis­cov­ered dur­ing my free­think­ing inter­dis­ci­pli­nary sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies.

Per­haps, human­i­ty’s pur­pose is to thrive with our inep­ti­tude or the frac­tion of the “frac­tal”, or else, we could’ve at any time become sec­ond-class omnipo­tent, sow­ing dis­tor­tions capa­ble of implant­i­ng faux-order towards the greater order of the entropy-negen­tropy uni­verse — greater order filled with inter­reg­u­lat­ing feed­back loops that allowed and still allow­ing it to cre­ate the var­i­ous amount of greater order imper­son­al to human­i­ty’s ego­tism and spear­head­ed move­ments that are pre­de­ter­mined to thrive yet to be erased by the impend­ing fil­ters that we won’t ever go above.

We may still at any time choose to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly reduce & sys­tem­ize, but at the very end of the day, we won’t ever have the tech­nol­o­gy that would allow us to study & under­stand the sys­tems run­ning out­side of the com­pre­hen­si­ble uni­verse which is con­nect­ed and manip­u­lat­ing the com­pre­hen­si­ble real­i­ty. And even if we under­stand the ebb & flow of the micro­cosm, macro­cosm, and the supra-real­i­ty; the only thing that we will ever have are sys­tem­ized snap­shots that are delayed from the cur­rent & actu­al holisms of the great piece filled with inter­reg­u­lat­ing parts that make up its dynam­i­cal whole. Since if you are the ori­gin of a self-reg­u­lat­ing real­i­ty, then it would be care­less to have your com­plex sim­u­la­tion usurped by the very enti­ties that you direct­ly or indi­rect­ly cre­at­ed, espe­cial­ly when you are unable to cre­ate out­side back-ups, if the sim­u­la­tion is a part of you that could taint you if you are not care­ful with what you toy with, and you are avoid­ing to cor­rupt the whole math­e­mat­i­cal­ly dis­cern­able self-reg­u­lat­ing sim­u­la­tion that will be messed up once a snap­shot of the inter­reg­u­lat­ing pieces of the whole is cher­ry-picked.

The alco­holic his­to­ry that dete­ri­o­rat­ed him is just a com­ple­men­tary piece of the cof­fin since a sys­tem think­ing truth-find­er delv­ing in the anthro­po­mor­phi­cal­ly taint­ed plat­forms is almost def­i­nite to become cor­rupt­ed, full of bur­den and con­flict­ing dualisms since one shall ful­ly immerse itself to its auto­di­dac­tism to ensure the sys­tem­ized grasp­ing of it. With­out the immer­sion, sim­u­la­tion, or what I call as self-sac­ri­fice in the name of the truth, then the truth-find­ing is futile because we can’t ever half‑a$$ly nor asceti­cal­ly dis­cern the tan­gi­ble holisms or the sys­tems sci­ence of this real­i­ty. This is what also makes a truth-find­er a rar­i­ty or else, the vir­tu­oso holis­tics would be as gener­ic & some­what point­less as pieces of mass-pro­duced chick­en nuggets dilut­ing this pos­si­bly cycli­cal human expe­ri­ence.

He could’ve saved him­self with asceti­cism while hav­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to redesign his plat­forms, lifestyle, and envi­ron­ment that would design a bet­ter life for him, but I sup­pose it became more & more dif­fi­cult as he is stuck in the truth-find­ing loop that is full of traps despite the reward­ing real­iza­tions that make up such a dual­is­tic lifestyle. He could’ve also tapped the greater truth but in return, he shall great­ly com­pen­sate or self-sac­ri­fice or else, his real­iza­tions will fur­ther­ly taint the col­lec­tive human expe­ri­ence; impris­oned, con­strained, and immersed in the var­i­ous ten­sion of this real­i­ty until we either give up, give in or con­tin­ue delud­ing our­self that we are capa­ble pro­pri­etors of this real­i­ty. We can’t even ful­ly under­stand the actu­al & cur­rent com­plete dynam­ics of the human body as of this moment just by test­ing the reduced amount of our cells and organs. So how dare we assume that we can out game the supra real­i­ty with this lim­it­ed type of being, even if we inte­grate it with posthu­man­ism and too much engi­neer­ing when it is all but a speck of the “frac­tal”?