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[Letter] Chaos vs Order in Finite Consciousness
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DansAdvocate is in Letter
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Dr. Peterson, I was up late last night re-watching your first lecture in your Biblical Series. My sister in-law has recently dived head first into Christianity and I wanted to give her your lecture series as a way to promote a rational and healthy approach to it. In doing so, I found myself putting some connections together that I hadn't been able to before and I hope you and your following find them as compelling as I do.

First, the balance of chaos and order. We talk about it as a constant battle of states of consciousness in an individual throughout their archetypal passion plays they go through for the entirety of their life. When I conceptualize it, I picture a graph where from left to right is birth to death and the line on the graph goes up for chaos and down for order throughout that span of time. At the very beginning and very end, I believe the line is at the center, in a neutral state where your consciousness does not exist. So if you were to map your life in such a fashion and mapped everyoneā€™s life that way, I imagine patterns emerge and one can begin to consider ā€œthe idealā€. In the lecture noted above, you speak about how there are actually many ā€˜spiritsā€™ or streams of consciousness present in your life simultaneously, so really to map out oneā€™s consciousness, there would be many of these graphs overlaying each other and some starting and ending at different points in your life, but one could average those out to still come up with a single-line graph for oneā€™s life similar to story mapping. But back to the ideal, many thinkers in order to decide how to act first must define the problem and to define the problem it is very useful to define the desired outcome first. I used to believe that the desired outcome was neutrality, being the center point between chaos and order, but that line of thinking lead to nihilism. Neutrality is death or the absence of consciousness. Maybe that is what Zen is. And that may be the end-state of life, but the clichĆ© of ā€œits not the destination, but the journeyā€ has a lot of truth to it. So, death or neutrality cannot be the ideal consciousness or the goal because it is in fact the opposite of consciousness. Considering the ideal, we look at what variations are possible. You might picture a very busy graph where there are extreme peaks from chaos to order and back. In thinking of a sound wave, you can have extreme or mellow amplitude and then you also have frequency or how close together the different peaks are in terms of time. So one person may experience extremes every day and another experiencing very spread out and not very extreme levels of both chaos and order. Or some may experience extremes but not transition rapidly and others experience mellow amplitude but transition frequently. So which one is ideal without falling into nihilistic neutrality? One could say that in a paradoxical way, neutrality of chaos and order is its own version of extreme order and transitioning between extremes of chaos and order all of the time is its own version of extreme chaos.

As someone who claims to be rational, I look towards core truths to develop my understanding of the world around me. One line of truths that I have found to be exceptionally comforting are the laws of conservation. Plainly, it describes that in a vacuum there is a total amount of matter and energy that can change form, but not be created nor destroyed. Our consciousness is a vacuum. I donā€™t know if that means consciousness as a whole in existence is a vacuum or if it is at the individual level, but I believe it to be both. Yes, we experience stimulation from other things including the consciousness of others, but our experience is only our own which suggests that it is a vacuum on the individual level. With that in mind, you can deduce that oneā€™s consciousness has a capacity or value that cannot be built upon or degraded. The shifts between chaos and order is energy and because energy is a constant, we should expect these shifts to occur. It makes me wonder that if we are neutral in the beginning and end, perhaps the level of chaos and the level of order experienced throughout a lifetime are evenly matched every time. Of course you should then consider lives cut short and those that experience tremendous levels of suffering compared to those that do not. And coming back to the different possible wave structures of oneā€™s experience, you might argue that those with high extremes/amplitudes and high frequencies and for longer amounts of time have greater capacities or consciousness value than others. But because individual consciousness is to believed to have a beginning and end, it may operate as a vacuum within itself, but is also a piece of a greater vacuum which is needed to explain the possibility of its beginning and end within an existence where the same laws of conservation apply.

Now to consider the vacuum of consciousness as a whole to include all humans and animals across time. For this vacuum to even exist, according to the laws of conservation, consciousness must have always existed. If so, couldnā€™t it be assumed that prior to earthly consciousness, must there have been a different manifestation of consciousness that existed which then was transferred to modern beings. Perhaps that was ā€œGodā€ in an omni-form. If that matter and energy could not be created nor destroyed, it would then imply that the creation of conscious beings would require sacrifice of at least partial or even total consciousness of the omni-God. This may contribute to the argument that ā€œGod is deadā€. On this same line of thinking and the argument made earlier for different valued consciousness across individuals, we must think of consciousness as a finite source. It can be witnessed today across species. When populations increase, consciousness is distributed. We find that as population increases, reproduction rate increases, we also see a mix of shorter lifespans and/or lower cognitive ability among that population. Perhaps consciousness manifested into one being was utter chaos and consciousness diluted by being spread out among a huge population leads to the extreme of order by all conscious beings in a close to neutral state with low conscious value.

I hope you found this to be worthy of conversation.

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